Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Design proposal -> Wiki

[Jimmy Wales]

> 1.  Switch to TWiki.
> 
> Presently, wikipedia appears to be running the original Wiki, which is
> fine, but is deficient of some rather handy features that we'll want,
> such as accounts, revision control, allowing of formats other than
> WikiText (e.g., XML or HTML), automatic indexes, etc.  See www.twiki.org
> for more info.

Actually, we are running usemod's wiki code, which has accounts (but? do they
work properly?  not in my opinion), revision control (which seems to work just
fine), and I'm not sure about automatic indexes, etc.

I'm happy to change to any codebase that looks better, and I am also thinking
that there are so many different wiki codebases that we might just make our own
variant.  (But, I'm loathe to fork for no good reason. :-))

> 4.  Consider adding a "delete" function
> 
> Neither this Wiki nor TWiki has any ability to remove a topic once its
> page has been created.  (You can, however, delete all the text on the
> page, but the info will be present in the revision history.)  There are
> good sides and bad sides to having a web-accessable topic delete
> capability, of course...

The nice thing about having revision history and no true delete function is
that it creates some resistance to maliciousness, without having to get all
"permission-y".  But yeah, if somehow restricted so that casual jerkoffs can't
just delete everything, it could be a good thing.

I have had a lot of ideas (vapor-ware alert!) of creating a "karma points" 
system
to enable frequent contributors to somehow "spend points" to protect their own
articles from random edits by random strangers.  This only becomes necessary, I
think, after you grow large and popular enough to lose a positive sense of 
wiki-community.

I think it is very impressive how many wikis do so well, without a lot
of spamming or maliciousness.  But surely there is a scalability
limit.  I don't think CNN.com should convert to a wiki.  :-)

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