> People can do the same with patches on mailing list; and seem less likely > to abuse that. Perhaps the simple validation (and display) of a valid > email address may do the trick.
You are concerned about abuse. I don't disagree, but the mailing lists are also capable of being abused. I would not complain if in order to edit the Wiki, a user had to subscribe similarly to how they subscribe to mailing lists. I've already raised the notion of SubWiki adding access controls, and that could be part of the model. But right now I am not seeing abuse (glancing around for some wood to knock on), and the benefits are real. IMO, restricting the publishing medium to either a mailing list or the Committer published web site creates a tremendous more amount of work for Committers to apply patches, removes the self-empowerment element from the users, and thus a psychological incentive for them to help, and delays the availability of the content. An e-mail message is static. Once published, it lives as-is. It cannot be edited. It cannot be refined. It cannot be corrected if it is in error, or if the situation changes. It exists in an unstructured archive. A Wiki page is a malleable part of structurable content. The Wiki enables users who have worked out solutions to a problem to post those solutions in a user helping user mode. Publishing the solution once to the mailing list means that users have to search the archives, rather than have a more structured organization to helpful content. We're more likely to harvest e-mail content and refine it on the Wiki. Even for committers with CVS access, the Wiki is much, *much* faster for collaborative editing of documents that are works in progress before committing them, again through the whole process. It isn't even close to being only one order of magnitude easier. I can edit a page in seconds without having to edit the xdoc, commit the xdoc change, build the web site, commit the web site changes, log into daedalus and update the site. I can't get away with less than 5 minutes per change. The web site build takes that long, by itself. I am absolutely convinced that we have a lot more collaboration on documents because of the Wiki. I do agree that the Wiki isn't a discussion medium. Our Wiki area has the following notation: "Please use the James mailing lists to discuss the content of these pages. The purpose of the Wiki is to record and edit plans/proposals/notions that are discussed on the mailing lists." And periodically, we could harvest suitable Wiki content, and move it into the xdocs->HTML publishing process. Right now I am taking a check list of changes that was maintained quickly on the Wiki, and moving it into xdocs for the next Release. --- Noel