[WikiCaretakers] Conclusions? [was: Wiki - not open to external volunteers?]

[Paul Hänsch]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 08:16:53PM +0200, Johannes Zarl-Zierl wrote:
> To summarize the thread up to now:

Thank you very much, for doing this. I'll reply to the points in altered
order.

> (3a) Jonas and Albert were against indroducing special cases, and implied that 
> wiki-only accounts would still require manual intervention, thus having the 
> same workload for less benefit.

To point out the history behind this: switching off local authentication in
the Wiki was one of the major reasons, why we introduced the volunteer
accounts in the first place. Until then we were running custom patches in the
Wiki software to enable local accounts alongside accounts from the fellowship
LDAP. With insufficient spam protection in Moin manual filtering of account
requests was required and tedious, and neglected as a result.

The very same account creation process is now simply relayed to our main
account management for volunteers.

Writing custom patches for the new Wiki setup again, would be a horrible
regression, not to mention a bad precedent for other services, and I frown at
the very contemplation to do such a thing.

> (1) Jonas observed that it's also possible to make pages world writable.

I would encourage people to do this for pages which ought to be edited
casually by a number of people. I imagine local fellowship groups, with
subpages for their particular activities, to be the main but not the only
beneficiaries here.

> (2) Hugo mentioned that this is not a solution, as it does not allow people to 
> subscribe to wiki changes.

Looking for a technical solution, I notice that Moins RSS feeds are not really
clickable in the web interface.

An RSS feed for every page can be obtained by appending ?action=rss_rc to the
page url. No form of account is required for this.

> He said the current process deters people from 
> getting an account, and that he feels that validation by a coordinator should 
> not be required.

I agree with this point, but I believe this ought to be a discussion in the
context of how we handle volunteer accounts, not in the context of the wiki.

> Hugo then suggested that we could make wiki accounts a special case, i.e. 
> allow wiki-only accounts in addition to full accounts (if I understood that 
> correct)

If our policies regarding volunteer accounts are insufficient for the Wiki
then other services will be affected too, as we introduce volunteer run
services and extend our infrastructure.
What I could rather imagine making the Wiki a special case for, is as an
indicator for our requirements to enable external contribution.

> (3b) I suggested to make the process less complicated. In particular to 
> require fewer communication round-trips for the new volunteer. Suggested 
> wording: [1]
> Any position on that?

I feel, that so far we are handling the volunteer signup as a kind of insiders
tip for special cases. I for one would be in favour of making the volunteer
signup more open, but I suppose this decision will involve the core team and
fellowship coordinators much more than the WikiCareTakers.
From the AMS-Hackers perspective I expect this to be a non-issue.

In the light of a respective decision we would link to the volunteer signup
where a Wiki account creation page would otherwise be.

-- 
Paul Hänsch                     █▉            Webmaster, System-Hacker
                              █▉█▉█▉                                  
Jabber: paul at jabber.fsfe.org    ▉▉     Free Software Foundation Europe
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/wikicaretakers/attachments/20161006/f4ef2580/attachment.pgp>