On Tuesday 04 October 2005 14:31, Alan Pope wrote:
I'm generally against enforced passwords for wikis. It detracts from the community spirity of a wiki. I prefer that anyone can do a "drive by wiking" without having to remember yet another username/password combination.
I agree on the general principle here, although I'm not personally averse to the wiki being a list affair..
There are less restrictive methods. Apart from anything else, if a specific referrer/cookie combination were required to edit the wiki (ie you have to go through an unindexed second page which is NOT linked to on the site, URL only on-list) it would be interesting to find out whether in fact somebody was reading through the list before spamming the wiki.
Anyway, that's just the sort of tangential silliness that always gets me in trouble, sorry.. :)
I am also against systems which involve a mashed up sequence of letters and numbers which need to be entered to change the wiki. These are often difficult to see for sighted people, let alone people with visual difficulties. Is it appropriate to make it more difficult for a poor sighted person to update the wiki than someone with 20/20 vision? I believe not.
Wait, we could put teh letters and numbers in alt tags! Heh, seriously though, I've got to concur here - there are more disabled web/internet users in Europe than there are British web/internet users in Europe, and if there's part of the world that should have the scruples to respect a platform neutral medium that's there for everyone, and make it accessible, it's the FOSS-using part of it.
There's more than one way to fill a bot with cream, though...
Anyway, bots aside, I'm beginning to see the advantages of manual despamming, myself. If we want an intelligent and usable wiki, with the freely editable goodness that entails, maybe some of us could pitch in a little bit and make it happen.
I could turn my hand to this occasionally(although admittedly not in any really structured or committed way because I have my head in an awful lot of books lately) if needed, and hey, maybe if a couple more people would, the wiki could stay editable.
Which would be nice...
Either way, there sure is some editing to be done, and forgive me if I'm speaking out of turn, but editing a wiki via email just doesn't feel 'right' to me.
Cheers, Ten