Re: Report on testing of the link relations registry

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 6:03 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
> But the 'we' in that sense is anyone who can edit the Wiki...which is anyone, as far as I can tell.  It seems there is no sanity check.

If this were a problem in practice, or if it weren't a problem in
practice but people were worried in theory, you could add sanity
checks without nullifying any of the positive aspects of the wiki
approach.  For instance, you could just use a system where anyone can
edit the page, but there's a separate "stable" page that approved
people can sync to the unstable page after review.  In the case of
MediaWiki, you could use the FlaggedRevs extension, which is enabled
on several Wikipedia languages:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs

In practice, with a handful of approved people to check the unstable
version for sanity, you could have the stable version lag by a matter
of hours or less on average.  If it lagged by too much, people would
still be free to use the unstable version if they preferred a more
comprehensive list at greater risk of error.

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 9:28 AM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
> I agree that some registries are not complete. I disagree that it's
> necessarily the IANA's fault. The SVG issue is a nice example for that.

Whose fault it is is entirely irrelevant for our purposes.  If the
IANA registry were hard to use because its servers went down on a
monthly basis due to being struck by meteors because a former IANA
executive was the subject of a gypsy curse, it would still be hard to
use, and we would want to look for alternatives.  That it's not their
fault is no compensation for the fact that it doesn't work.

Received on Thursday, 2 September 2010 20:14:42 UTC