Thomas Dalton wrote: > 2010/1/9 Chris McKenna <cmcke...@sucs.org>: > >> On Sat, 9 Jan 2010, Charles Matthews wrote: >> >>> The point (for the guide that Brian and I are apparently writing) is >>> that "empowerment" is a good buzzword, but there is a small, treacherous >>> area to explore from a teachers' point of view: accounts for minors >>> should not give personal details, so a "role account" for say, >>> Tynecastle High School, looks more appropriate. But there are >>> administrative reefs also, namely the deprecation of role accounts and >>> shared passwords in general. Something can be done in practical terms by >>> stating that the project has a fixed term, will be retired, and will >>> have its password changed by a school staff member. >>> >> Would not it be perhaps better for the individual students to have >> accounts, but under teh control of the school. Perhaps based on their >> school pupil number (e.g. Tynecastle-091 Tynecastle-122) which means that >> attribution for good and bad edits could be given to the individual rather >> than the school. >> > > Yes, that's the usual recommendation. I'm not sure what you mean by > the school having control of them, though. > > In the scenario of the school in Edinburgh, a group is told to execute a certain project on WP. The attraction of a single account is clear from the point of view of monitoring: a single edit history tells you everything. If you have a group editing one page - and I have met just this on WP, American college students assigned a task of upgrading a nominated page - a bunch of people all trying to edit from different accounts can lead to edit conflicts, if no worse.
Any account where the email address supplied went to a computer in the school's administration would be "controlled" by the school, from the point of view of resetting the password. This discussion seems like fine tuning to me, actually; but, yes, I can see it might be worth going into the issues a little in a guide. (I do want to be concise, though ... all experience suggests verbose is easier to write and less likely to be read.) Charles _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
