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        Arimaa >> Site Discussion >> open up the wiki to the public?
        
(Message started by: mattj256 on Apr 6^th, 2013, 6:55pm)

Title: open up the wiki to the public?
Post by mattj256 on Apr 6^th, 2013, 6:55pm

Hi all. I'm pretty new to this game. I've been working on the Wikibook (http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?limit=50&tagfilter=&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=Mattj2&namespace=&tagfilter=&year=2013&month=3) quietly behind the scenes and now I'm looking to participate more openly in the community.

I see that anyone can create an account to play the game or post in the forum, but there's an additional hoop to jump through to contribute to the wiki. Is this because it used to be open to the public in the past but there were too many problems with vandalism? I think it is important that the website be as open as possible while still addressing Omar's very real concerns about ownership and the integrity of the game.

Opening the wiki to the public means some people will abuse the privilege, and wikis have some tools to manage that but it doesn't work without volunteers who give of their time to maintain the wiki. So. I'm curious to hear people's thoughts about this.
Matthew

Title: Re: open up the wiki to the public?
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 7^th, 2013, 8:49am

on 04/06/13 at 18:55:31, mattj256 wrote:

Is this because it used to be open to the public in the past but there were too many problems with vandalism?

Yes, unfortunately. It wasn't anti-Arimaa vandalism; it was just automated advertising vandalism. I don't know how Wikipedia or larger wikis solve this problem; it seems quite pernicious to me.

Title: Re: open up the wiki to the public?
Post by mattj256 on Apr 8^th, 2013, 12:26am

I wrote: "Is this because [the wiki] used to be open to the public in the past but there were too many problems with vandalism?"

on 04/07/13 at 08:49:00, Fritzlein wrote:

Yes, unfortunately. It wasn't anti-Arimaa vandalism; it was just automated advertising vandalism. I don't know how Wikipedia or larger wikis solve this problem; it seems quite pernicious to me.

Yeah, that's a pretty serious problem.
I could offer you a technology solution.
(The manual (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam) on combating wiki spam.)

Or I could suggest the wiki be moved to wikia.com (http://www.wikia.com), which is a for-profit website that is free to use and makes its money from advertising. (Wikia makes money off of the ad revenue from its wikis but it does not share the revenue with the people who create the wikis.)

Are either of those interesting?

Title: Re: open up the wiki to the public?
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 8^th, 2013, 3:17pm

Those both sound interesting to me, although there are drawbacks to either ads or anything that requires sysadmin effort. I believe any change in this (as in most areas) must flow through Omar. If he doesn't respond here in the next week or so, I suggest contacting him through this page:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/contact/

Title: Re: open up the wiki to the public?
Post by mattj256 on Apr 9^th, 2013, 7:00pm

Ok thanks. I had a feeling you would say something like that.
Omar? What are your feelings about this?
Thread.sleep(604800000); // wait 1 week

Title: Re: open up the wiki to the public?
Post by omar on Apr 27^th, 2013, 7:48am

The content in our wiki here is intended to be highly specialized for this site and the processes we have here. For example "The beginners guide to the Arimaa gameroom" or "Event Roles". I don't think it would be good to move all of this over to wikia or make it open for anyone to edit. There is some stuff though that could be moved to a more open wiki system. Feel free to start a section on Wikia and copy over content from our wiki.

I would prefer that anyone making a contribution to our wiki be someone who is interested enough that getting a one time approval to contribute is not too much of a burden for them.

Title: Re: open up the wiki to the public?
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 27^th, 2013, 12:49pm

on 04/27/13 at 07:48:08, omar wrote:

I would prefer that anyone making a contribution to our wiki be someone who is interested enough that getting a one time approval to contribute is not too much of a burden for them.

When you put it that way, it would seem silly to have an open Wiki. Just make sure the route to getting approval is obvious, simple, and quick.

Title: Re: open up the wiki to the public?
Post by mattj256 on Apr 29^th, 2013, 9:53pm

Thanks for your thoughts Omar!

on 04/27/13 at 12:49:30, Fritzlein wrote:

When you put it that way, it would seem silly to have an open Wiki.

Yes, it would be silly for the arimaa.com wiki to have a fully automated account creation process. Are you saying it would be silly to have a second, open wiki on wikia.com? (I'm not sure if I think this is a good idea myself.)

Title: Re: open up the wiki to the public?
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 30^th, 2013, 8:30am

on 04/29/13 at 21:53:56, mattj256 wrote:

Are you saying it would be silly to have a second, open wiki on wikia.com? (I'm not sure if I think this is a good idea myself.)

Are you suggesting forking the material and letting it evolve independently? Are there enough Arimaa editors to maintain two pools of Arimaa information?

Title: Re: open up the wiki to the public?
Post by mattj256 on Apr 30^th, 2013, 10:18pm

on 04/30/13 at 08:30:21, Fritzlein wrote:

Are there enough Arimaa editors to maintain two pools of Arimaa information?

No.
(If I were being optimistic I would say: probably not.)
I'm contemplating uploading only static information (like event results) onto wikia.com, but even that seems like a bad idea.

There are already discussions here (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=siteIssues;action=display;num=1361466743) and here (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=siteIssues;action=display;num=1361739164) asking for more contributions and user involvement to the existing wiki stuff. (I'm just reading some of this now. I totally agree with your point that it's better to have no information than low-quality information.) The local wiki has 17 edits (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/mwiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&days=30&from=&limit=500) in the past 30 days, almost all from two people and almost all related to updating stats for the World Championship. (This is statistics, not commentary.)

"It would be nice" if all the hard work that the commentators did made its way onto the local wiki, and then onto YouTube. But I'm wasting time on the message boards instead of doing the actual work. (I don't see any value in uploading an audio file to YouTube, and combining the audio commentary with appropriate video takes time and effort.)