Re: Template protection, template CSS and anonymous edits

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
>
>
>