[oi-dev] Opening the wiki to registrations

[Jeppe Toustrup]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 22:53, Alasdair Lumsden <alasdairrr at gmail.com> wrote:
> To bolster community involvement I wondered if it was worth opening the wiki up to registrations.

Sounds good to me.

> My concern with this right from the beginning was keeping the quality high and preventing spam.

Making corrections to content is always easier than writing new
content. If it means we will have more content of medium quality and
less content of high quality, I would prefer the first. It also makes
it easier for new contributors to make corrections and additions to
existing articles.

> On the quality front, I think as long as people police the thing it should be okay. However preventing spam may be harder - the comment box has a captcha and yet we get quite a bit of comment spam.

Well, comments can currently be created by anonymous users...

All in all I think we should disable comments in the wiki. People seem
to be posting general questions regarding OpenIndiana in the comments,
probably because it's the easiest way for visitors to ask questions.

Having multiple ways getting help is bad, in my opinion. We can see
this with illumos, where the users on the mailing lists usually isn't
aware about what was going on the online forums, and vice versa.
I don't see IRC as being a competing way of communication to mailing
lists, as IRC is instant where as mailing lists aren't.

The people wanting help and having questions should instead use the
mailing lists which after all is just a matter of sending an e-mail
with the question instead of writing it on a homepage. Perhaps we
could promote the mailing lists more in general?

> Perhaps someone would be interested in investigating better captchas for confluence?

To begin with we could just open up for public signup, and see how it
goes. If we get spam it would perhaps be an idea to see if we can find
a plugin which enables us to review the first page change or two a
user makes, and then mark them as "trusted" in the sense that they
properly aren't bots if they actually make real, usable changes to
begin with.
I don't know if such a system exists, but I could help investigate it
in case it gets necessary.

--
Venlig hilsen / Kind regards
Jeppe Toustrup (aka. Tenzer)