Re: Template protection, template CSS and anonymous edits

The other issue Tomato raised was that of anonymous edits. Are there
implications for content imported from elsewhere under CC-By-SA? What about
under the CC-By license for the site generally?

Frankly, I don't think anonymous editing serves to improve collaboration or
the quality of the documentation. As a curator and contributor, I'd like to
be able to correspond with other editors. I also think that responsibility
is the best policy, period.

+Scott



On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 8:33 AM, Alex Komoroske <komoroske@google.com>wrote:

> We temporarily protected the templates during the launch because they were
> a high-impact place to spam. I think ultimately they should be open for
> editing. My only worry is that we rely pretty heavily on templates and
> someone mucking around in them could inadvertently break some stuff.
>
> One way to handle that might be to have a warning at the top of template
> pages encouraging folks to ask on IRC or the mailing list before
> making substantive changes to important templates.
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 2:33 AM, Chris Mills <cmills@w3.org> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the comments Taylor. I can definitely see why you'd want this
>> stuff to be opened up; it would be nice to be able to trust everyone to
>> just make updates to pretty much anything. It would sure make our job
>> easier too ;-)
>>
>> But I think we do need to exercise a bit of caution in these situations;
>> yes, we can roll back changes, but we would rather limit the amount of
>> changes that we have to keep rolling back. It cna get confusing, mistakes
>> can be made.
>>
>> A better solution (for the short term anyway), which we are looking into
>> already, is putting everything on github, so people can make changes and
>> send us pull requests. This could be applied to pretty much everything,
>> even template pages and stuff.
>>
>> It certainly sounds worth checking out the Abuse Filter, and considering
>> anonymous edits, to normal pages at least. Templates and stuff I wouldn't
>> be so sure of.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> On 15 Oct 2012, at 18:43, Taylor Costello <nottaylorcostello@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi everyone!
>> >
>> > I am hoping to ask to stop protecting templates now that the traffic
>> has calmed down a little. I think anyone should have the ability to edit or
>> see them. I also think the template CSS should be moved to the Common.css
>> for admins to edit, here:
>> http://docs.webplatform.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.css
>> >
>> > If anyone has any objections as to why the templates should remain
>> protected, please tell me! I'm curious to hear your opinions of course, I
>> would just like this project to be open to everyone and it's very hard for
>> anyone to understand the wiki when they can't see the templates.
>> >
>> > I have also heard several ideas on how the CSS should be handled,
>> please note for this topic, I'm only talking about template CSS because it
>> should be something that can be accessed easily.
>> >
>> > Last topic, I want to open up anonymous edits on the wiki. Our Q&A has
>> anonymous posting, but not our wiki! Let me just throw out there that
>> anonymous editing is very easy to watch, any user can revert a bad edit. We
>> also have AbuseFilters that will protect from obvious spam and tag edits
>> for admins to look at. Any admin can add more AbuseFilters in the situation
>> where we need to adjust to new spam methods. There are a ton of benefits to
>> allowing anonymous wiki editing, and most of the negative argument being
>> "to prevent spam".
>> >
>> > You can check out the AbuseFilter here:
>> http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter
>>
>>
>>
>