[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Sodipodi-list] Wikiclips

Mon Dec 8 19:12:11 UTC 2003

>>>>> "JS" == John Stracke <francis+dated+1086436124.b8e8db at thibault.org> writes:

    Me> Wikis lower the bar for participation considerably.

    JS> But doesn't it also lower the bar for pranks and such--say,
    JS> person A adds a piece of clipart that person B doesn't like,
    JS> so B modifies it surreptitiously? CVS would log things like
    JS> that.

So, a couple of things about this:

    * Yes, it lowers the bar for abuse, too. But experience with Wikis
      like Wikipedia has shown that the good tends to overwhelm the
      bad. If you have a community of people dedicated to the idea of
      the project, they can "self-police" the wiki. After all, A can
      always revert B's changes. Or C can, or D or E or F.

      I think it works because, since it's so easy to change stuff, B
      will get bored with abuse pretty quickly. Also, A, C, D, E, and
      F are more committed usually to the project, than B is to causing
      mayhem.

    * There are a number of features in the MediaWiki software that
      runs most of the Wikimedia projects (and Wikitravel, by the way)
      to track edits and quickly detect abuse. It's hard to do things
      "surreptitiously".

        * Recent changes
        * Page histories
        * User contributions lists
        * New pages lists
        * Upload, delete, protect

    * Most of the features that could cause permanent damage, on
      MediaWiki sites, are reserved for special administrator
      users. So, for example, most people can't delete an image, a
      page, or whatever. They can take out all the content, but they
      can't delete the marker, or the history, or whatever.

There's a few pages that go over how Wikis actually can work for
sharing important data. On Wikipedia, there's the replies to common
objections:

        http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies_to_common_objections

On Meatball Wiki (a Wiki about how Wikis and other online communities
work), there's a page on "Soft Security":

       http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SoftSecurity

...and one on limiting damage:

       http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?LimitDamage

Anyways, lots of blather about Wiki, which is probably off-topic for
both sodipodi-l and wikipedia-l. Sorry to both communities for
excessive cross-posts, but I think this is an interesting topic that
should probly be looked into.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide