Adding anonymous editing to the wiki

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

A topic came up in the upstream to our MediaWiki theme. I'm wondering if
anyone is interested in implementing this in our OpenShift instance,
particularly any of the apprentice-Infra folk looking to do more work?

(This could even be implemented in a complete clone of our wiki using
your own OpenShift account, so if you are a new person looking to get
involved, you can do this task without having to get special
permissions; we'll just check and pull in your work.)

https://fedorahosted.org/ovirt/ticket/33

The reporter was requesting we remove the step in the documentation that
specifies turning off anonymous editing, or at least make it optional
(which it now is.)

https://github.com/OSAS/strapping-mediawiki/issues/1

We explained that we had two design goals for the website that caused us
to turn off anonymous editing:

1. Not having it look like "yet another wiki" with annoying [edit] links
everywhere.
2. Raise an effective barrier against creation of spam pages when we
don't have a hugely active wiki-watching crew.

This of course conflicted with a primary design goal for any free/open
source project, "lower the barriers to entry"[0].

For goal 1, one suggestion was to change the link to something more
subtle, such as a partially-gray "suggest changes". (I might like to see
just one of those per page, rather than one per section.)

For goal 2, we discussed implementing an extension that puts anonymous
changes in a queue for moderators to review and approve, called
FlaggedRevs (flagged revisions.) This lets us put even new author
accounts in FlaggedRevs, and any Bureaucrat can change the person to not
have flagged revisions, if we wish. (If we want to keep things the way
they are, we can have any approved user account granted autoreview
privileges.)

Adding this extension, we could allow for anonymous edits with the
revision flagged for review, while still taking new user accounts via
the existing account approval extension. Those new users (and any
created by an existing user as per the usual steps[1]) could have the
autoreview flag so they can write without being queued for moderation.

[1] http://wiki.ovirt.org/How_to_create_a_user_account

What do you think of this idea? Any objections?

Anyone interested in working on the implementation?

- Karsten

[0]
https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/Stuff_everyone_knows_and_forgets_anyway#Strive_to_drive_barriers_as_low_as_possible


-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Analyst - Community Growth
http://TheOpenSourceWay.org  .^\  http://community.redhat.com
@quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC)  \v'  gpg: AD0E0C41

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