[Wikimediaau-l] open wiki editing for WMAU?

[John Vandenberg]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Peter Halasz <qubero at gmail.com> wrote:
>> A more basic question is why are non-members still non-members?
>
> I have not renewed my membership partly over this issue. (As I said
> previously: it shows WMAU is either moving at a glacial pace or is
> being run by people who simply do not share my values.)

WMAu has moved very slowly in some areas, and this is one of them.

>> My biggest concern is that open editing is going to be left for the
>> committee to administrate.
>
> If the discussion has really moved from "why" but to "how", then can I
> suggest using flagged revisions? Seems to be perfectly suited

Flagged Revs would be a good solution for open editing.
However, most of the other decisions about open editing will be
heavily influenced by who can edit, so any proposal for open editing
needs to also decide how accounts are created.

Are you are advocating unrestricted account creation?
See my previous email for my thoughts about that.  I am not opposed to
allowing anyone to edit, but I think it would mean that the committee
would need to distance themselves from the administration of the
website.  If someone is going to fill that void, I am all ears.

> and
> would save non-members the ridiculous bureaucracy of having to be
> "voted in" as a "webmaster" before fixing a typo, while at the same
> time preserving pages which you don't wish to ever be seen vandalised
> by partner organisations.

My suggestion was that the committee delegates administration of the
website to one person, who can then make decisions as required.  Once
in place, they can decide to enable open editing, taking full
responsibility for ensuring that the problems with open editing are
promptly dealt with.

> Discussion pages should of course be editable by all.

I agree.

> The suggestion for users to "request a change" through some procedure
> on the talk page strikes me as being rather inelegant to say the
> least.

Flagged Revs would be more suitable in most cases, however we may
still want to prevent non-members from editing a subset of the
website, such as the 'Rules' page, and the 'Resolution' namespace.
This isn't a big deal, but someone needs to take responsibility for
all these small issues.

>> Who is going to decide what content is acceptable or not?
>
> I'll come back when you've worked out how to build a community instead
> of a bureaucracy.

We have not yet defined what is acceptable content on our wiki.
Typically wikis are created *after* these basic decisions have been
made on a meta page.

Some of the bureaucracy needs to be decided before open editing, and
some can be left to form itself within the community.

We will work this out in the coming year.  Members and non-members can
put together a proposal to be voted upon by members or, failing that,
the committee will do it and pass it by a resolution.

--
John Vandenberg