Re: [edlug] Edlug wiki - it has been tried before -

[Greg Lewin <greg.lewin@xxx.xxx.xxx>]

paul@xxx.xxx.xxx wrote:
> Just out of interest would the group be interested in having their own
> domain and wiki for the group. E.g. edlugwiki.org.uk. 
>
>   
<snip>

sorry for the late join of this discussion, but just thought I'd remind 
people that this has been tried twice before.

Someone (I forget who, sorry) started one a few years ago, and it was 
hardly used, and was eventually closed.

Then I started one on a Freezope account about 3 years ago iirc, just as 
a trial to see if anyone might find it useful, and because I was trying 
out Zope at the time. It saw a little interest and some usage, but never 
quite took off as a medium, perhaps partly because it never achieved 
enough visibility to be current in peoples' minds as a regular item, for 
routine use - people were often surprised when I mentioned that there 
was already a wiki for Edlug.

It was on a public free site and so could not be relied on - it's fair 
to say that that site often seemed to be down - but it seemed ok as a 
pilot project, with a later move to a better site possible if it flew.

I did suggest to Faye that it might be linked to from the static EdLUG 
web page, but she declined on the grounds that the wiki was not password 
protected and there was some legal technicality to do with that. 
Although I could have added password protection, there were two reasons 
why I did not : firstly, that I take the view that wikis are (or should 
be) by spirit an open sort of phenomenon (*), no need to go through that 
registration process that makes so many people just give up and hit the 
back button (you know the feeling?), and secondly because that wiki and 
2 others I'd started for other organizations were all not being used 
much - I just saw no point in doing so, as I'd reached the conclusion 
that most people - even computer people - just did not "get" wikis : a 
real puzzle to me at the time - and I thought passwords would put them 
off even more.

I suspect that that visibility, being linked to from elsewhere (like the 
static page), might make the difference though, for an outfit like 
EdLUG. Third time might be lucky.

Should such a wiki be password protected throughout? Or should there be 
an 'open' area not requiring registration? How do people really feel 
about having to register? One of the very earliest and largest of all 
wikis, at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki , remains open to all comers without 
registration to this day. No doubt there are many others like it.


Greg


(*) Rollback of previous versions is always available in case of 
sabotage, and in practice such mischief seems to be unlikely, for small 
limited-visibility wikis at least. There has been some discussion about 
this on the wiki mentioned above.

see:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyNobodyDeletesWiki

and maybe even

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorksNot






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