2004-12-20

PierreGaston's first comments: I like it.

Creating a new wiki is too hard: a simple form (using the form extension) would be easier than editing the page and adding a Url thing.

Creating a wiki is too simple: As it is now I think I can create a robot that will spawn a hundred of wikis with porn, spam and whatever you don't like and the only people that will notice it are the administrators of the wiki hive, farm of whatever because I check and feel responsible only for my own wiki. Also the creation process being almost totally anonymous and without notice, terms and conditions, I'm not sure who will be held responsible should the content of one of the wiki offends some people.

I think this creates too much burden on the people running the hive. I am aware that setting up a more complicated registration process will probably defeat the goal of this experience but if you intend to provide this as a web service to the world (as opposed to a restricted area, intranet, personal pc etc..) you'll probably need something more complicated (with email, activation etc…).

If one of the goal is to provide a place of total freedom, then you perhaps needs to first hire a lawyer to learn how to protect yourself in order to try to avoid fines, jails and requests to shut down the whole thing. (Yes, the fact that I am currently reading stephenson's cryptonomicon might stimulate my paranoia ;-))

the only people that will notice it are the administrators

Not really. Because I am interested in 3 of the local wiki here, rather than checking the "RecentChanges" for each of them one at a time, sometimes I hit the "All Changes" button to see the activity on all of them.

Perhaps others are interested in more than one wiki here (not necessarily the same wiki I am interested in). As long as there are far more people watching All Changes than human spammers, each one can revert a few bits of spam faster than human spammers can put spam in.

Robot spammers may be a problem here, but how is that worse than any other wiki? Completely blocking robot posters would be nice, but we haven't figured out how to do that yet. However, we have developed automatic methods to slow down robot spammers (see http://CommunityWiki.org/WikiSpam for details, and to post new ideas). If we can slow down robots (and human spammers) enough, then we can manually delete the occasional bit of spam that slips through.

– DavidCary

who will be held responsible should the content of one of the wiki offends some people.

Why?

Why do we need to find this "responsible person" ?

I understand why we need to find this "responsible person" on a normal web page. There's typically one person who makes changes to that page. If someone finds the content is offensive, that someone needs to find the "responsible person" in order to get him to change it.

With a wiki, that's not necessary. If someone finds the content is offensive, that someone can fix the problem immediately. (If you were offended, would you rather delete the offensive text immediately, or have a long email-conversation with the "responsible person", and have the offensive text deleted after a few weeks ?)

Also the creation process being … without notice, terms and conditions

Perhaps you're right – do you have any suggestions for what the Startup page should say ? (Do we need a StartupDiscussion? page ?)