[Bf-docboard] 4th November Meeting Summary

[bsod at hiddenworlds.org]

We discussed this as a method of trying to eliminate the structural issues
we are having with the wiki.  It's probably not the best way to go,
however somehow the issue of the degrading structure needs to be
addressed.

The problem I constantly see in the wiki is that things are all over the
place.  As the wiki admin for the scripting guys, it's been a constant
struggle to keep up with fixing the errors of people putting pages in the
wrong places and editting issues where older versions have had to be
recovered.

At some level this issue needs to be resolved.  We can't continue to go
around moving/deleting pages because the wiki doesnt actually move or
delete anything, it just puts in redirects.  That doesn't seem problematic
now, but long term, the wiki will begin to slow down and get sluggish as
the database structure grows with more garbage pages then real docs.

On further reflection, restricting the wiki further is probably not a
desirable way to approach the issue, but at the least, I don't believe we
should open it up more so that new writers can at least be directed to
read a page on the structure of the wiki, and where to put their work.

timmeh

>> 3. Wiki writers
>> The current way of granting writing rights won't work in longer term. It
>> was
>> decided that granting of writing rights should be changed towards merit
>> based system similar to CVS commit rights in Blender source. This means
>> that
>> the new users provide "patches" as in additions to the wiki that will be
>> reviewed by the wiki team.
>
> This seems a really bad idea to me.  Have there been a lot of really
> poor quality edits to warrant such an idea?
>
> Personally I think that the wiki is far too restrictive currently
> since we can't capture the full  power of casual edits (ie fixing
> typos as you go).
>
> Also the previous manual had a very tiny base of contributors since
> the technical hurdles were high.  Adding technical and social hurdles
> seems of very questionable merit unless there are strong and clearly
> defined benefits.
>
> Right now we still have far fewer contributors than are needed in my
> opinion (especially if we take into account the needs of the non
> english versions of the wiki) - thus until we have a critical mass of
> contributors that the documentation comes close to keeping up with
> development or unless there are major problems with bad edits, I don't
> think that such a policy is reasonable or desirable.
>
> LetterRip
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