On 09/30/10 13:39, TJ Frazier wrote:
Why Protecting Wiki Pages is (IMHO) a Bad Idea:
I agree... the point of a Wiki is ease of editing, and locking defeats that purpose.
The problem is, finding a manageable way to deal with the multiple edit streams vs. ease of use and information accessibility (eg is it easy to search?) for the user. If the Wiki is not your leading document source (which it is for the developer docs, but is *not* for the User docs), then from a writer/editor standpoint it becomes very difficult to manage. If you edit the ODT as your source, then you have to comb the Wiki (bot, manually, whatever) for user contributions and edits, and merge them into the ODT text. Then you have to go the other way after the ODT is complete and merge the new edits back into the Wiki version. It's currently a lot of work... and no one has the time to deal with this.
We should not expect casual users to jump through all the hoops necessary to file an issue, or fix an OOA ODT doc. But, fix the wiki? That they can do. And they do.
Agreed, but on the other side of that is... the fact that there really are not that many edits.. there are some, but very few overall.
A bot or script to check all the pages in a wiki chapter for edits, new talk pages, &c., would be very helpful for collecting these contributions. This would work in conjunction with whatever version-marking method we decide on, to give only subsequent edits.
There are ways to do this, but there is no out-of-the-box solution ready to use.
"Pictures" is what I'm working on. I can (I think) automate everything but the picture upload. If I generate a folder full of files like "010433_001.png", "010433_002.png", &c., the editor will still have to type all those unlovely names into the upload window, even though I can generate a list of them. The "multiple file upload" wiki feature is helpful, but not helpful enough. Can a bot do uploads?
A bot can do uploads... there are some scripts that already do image management, but none that I can see for the purposes we want. I use pywikipediabot for most maintenance that I've done: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pywikipediabot/Scripts
C -- Clayton Cornell [email protected] OpenOffice.org Documentation Project co-lead --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
