[m-dev.] New wiki

[Zoltan Somogyi]

On Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:36:32 +1100, Paul Bone <paul at bone.id.au> wrote:
> The Wiki has version control.  I'm not sure if it's a good idea to expose
> it, or how exactly to expose it.

What I think would be ideal is if every edit on the wiki automatically generated
a diff and a pull request on that diff. We could then approve the ones we like
and ignore the ones that represent vandalism or someone trying add a link
farm in an effort to boost the pagerank of some site selling Cialis. Only once
the diff was approved and merged should the change be visible on the wiki
to anyone but its creator.

> That said it's versioned separately to the
> current implementation.  Therefore some things in compiler/notes/* may be
> better where they are.

Everything in compiler/notes is, or at least supposed to be, information
for developers, not users. I don't think ANY of it belongs on a publicly
editable wiki.
 
> > I also don't see the point of such an id system. It does not prevent
> > vandalism; all it can do is tell us the user-id of the vandal, which we
> > cannot turn into a real-world id, and even if we could, we couldn't do
> > anything useful with that information. The only way to prevent vandalism
> > is to have someone trusted (one of us developers, or someone like Matt Giuca)
> > check all changes before publishing them.
> 
> I think that the goal of OpenID is convenience.  It reduces the number of
> passwords a user needs to remember.  At least I believe that was the
> intention when it started, nowadays and for particular groups (Google) I
> don't know.

You missed my point, which was: Why have any id at all? No id is even more
convenient for users than open id. By the way, have you had a look at the long
list of problems with open id on the open id wikipedia page?

> If spam becomes a problem we can ask users to contact us and we can sign
> them up on their behalf.  One thing about this software that annoyed me is
> that when someone registers it doesn't check if their e-mail address is
> valid by having them retrieve a code or such from their e-mail.  I searched
> online but the only reference I found to this missing feature for the
> ikiwiki software was the author saying that despite the missing feature, he
> has very little spam on his own wikis.

If he said "very little", but did not say "none", that is actually a point AGAINST him.
And has he checked whether the white space on his wikis is actually full of
"Buy Cialis from Bob's internet pharmacy" written in a white font on a white background?

> There's also a RecentChanges button on the website that allows you to see a
> list of recent modifications.

Unless that button's functionality is available to a script, that doesn't help us
very much.

Zoltan.