On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Michelle Gallaway <mgalla...@gmail.com> wrote: > I was more interested in seeing if this could be enforced by technology, > maybe so that unconfirmed users simply didn't get an "edit" button on other > name spaces.
This would be my preference as well, at least for the time being. It can be enforced by technology as it is a standard part of the software. There are quite a few aspects that have not been adequately discussed yet. Everyone on the Wiki is currently a member, so the wiki falls under the Rules of the organisation, including how disputes should be resolved, and every edit is by a member whose name can be obtained from the register, which means JoePublic can see who said something and take them to court. If we are going to allow non-members to edit, we need : a) different admins Currently the sysops are Sarah and myself. Until someone puts up their hand to be an admin, open editing proposals will likely be rejected by the committee. The committee already put many hours into WMF projects and WMAU committee work, and I don't think any committee member wants to manage the wiki as a 'project'. OTOH, we would love for members to run the wiki as a project, provided they manage it as an _official_ website, which does require more professional behaviour of participants and admins. b) to consider what happens when non-members and members have a dispute. We don't need to be a strict policy that covers all situations, but we do need to have thought about it, and have an appropriate way of escalating it. I think the simplest approach is for one member (again, not a committee member) to be appointed as a 'bureaucrat' (crat), and they make the final decision on any dispute involving a non-member that doesn't resolve itself. c) identify, assess and prepare for legal risks We do not have the ISP immunity that is available to the WMF, so someone needs to look at the Australian laws that are applicable to us. We would need to enable revision deletion in order to swiftly deal with any libelous content and privacy complaints. d) decide on a username policy We run a separate wiki from WMF, and our non-member participation is most likely to be from WMF contributors. How do we confirm that wmau user JoeBloggs is wmf user JoeBloggs, in order to prevent silliness? I think the 'crat should be responsible for confirming the identity of new non-members accounts. This confirmation could be _before_ the account is confirmed in the 'ConfirmAccount' extension which we currently use. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmAccount Or the account could have a permission set afterwards. The permission would have no actual effect, other than recording that the given identity has been verified. On this point, new user accounts are often privacy violations and libel. It is not uncommon for a libelous username to go unnoticed for years because it is written in a script we don't understand and because it slips under the radar. Somewhat related, heaven forbid, how would we deal with a member who creates a second account which is assumed to be operated by a non-member, and therefore operating free of the organisations Rules? ---- Are there any other potential problems we should discuss before we start open editing? Another option is for us to host our official wiki on the WMF servers, as a 'project' which I assume means the stewards can step in and perform oversight & checkuser when required. -- John Vandenberg _______________________________________________ Wikimediaau-l mailing list Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l
