[Wikimediaau-l] open wiki editing for WMAU?

[John Vandenberg]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 8:51 AM, Peter Halasz <qubero at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Non members can explain here why they want to be able to edit our
>> wiki; we are listening.
>
> I'm not engaging in this debate again. It's been argued to death
> already. It's ridiculously obvious to me why it WMAU should be
> editable, and the fact that it still isn't tells me that WMAU is
> either moving at a glacial pace or is being run by people who simply
> do not share my values.

I agree it has been discussed to death.  Almost everyone agrees that
it should be open, so discussing that again is pointless.

However use-cases are not pointless; knowing what non-members what to
do *now* means we focus on permitting those things *now*.
If non-members just want to comment on proposals, we can work out how
to allow talk page access.
If non-members want to develop proposals, we can give accounts to
non-members we trust for this purpose.

A more basic question is why are non-members still non-members?  If it
is cost, perhaps we should change our membership fees.

In the past there has been disagreement about how open our website
should be, and how we administrate being open.  Being 'open'
introduces new problems and new workloads, and we need to have a
solution to those problems.

My biggest concern is that open editing is going to be left for the
committee to administrate.  The committee should not be doing this; it
will result in us being dragged to court.

The membership has not shown a great deal of interest in helping build
the wiki over the past few years.

If a member steps up and _commits_ to be the 'crat' / 'webmaster', and
that person asks for open editing, the committee *will* vote on it.
Another option is for the committee to hand over the responsibility of
managing the website to one of the ordinary members, and to allow them
to manage it how they see fit.

Do we want new non-member accounts to continue to go via ConfirmAccount? [1]

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmAccount

IMO, the answer is yes; we definitely do not want unhappy Wikipedia
subjects to be allowed to have accounts and be able to rant on our
website.

If so, what is our policy on who can have accounts and their usernames?

Who is going to decide what content is acceptable or not?

These questions are just the tip of the iceberg.

--
John Vandenberg