Dear Clojurians, I found out, what the problem with the wiki is.
On 15th of November there was a new "feature" installed on Wikibooks: "Flagged Revs"[1]. Its sublime aims are to improve the quality of the presented material by freezing known good revisions. In between, changes can be made, but are not shown to anonymous users. Special users so-called "editors" resp. "reviewers" can review a page and then release a new version. This should be familiar to any software developer. However such status must be assigned by some administrator. That means, that we are now basically locked out. We can change the wiki, but it is not shown to the public. The whole system also includes some kind of ranking system for grammar, style, content and correctness. This ranking is intended to provide a quality measure for readers to judge how much trust they should put into the content, or which quality they should expect from the writing. However, as with all these KPI systems: you get what you measure. - For grammar and spelling: we have a lot of contributors from around the world - Asia, India, Europe, North and South America, Australia. A lot of these people (including myself) are non-native english speakers. There will always be mistakes in spelling or grammar. - For style: with so many contributors it is hard to keep a consistent style across sections written by different people. Let alone writing in a "compelling" style... Concerning coverage and correctness, I fully go with the mentioned points (see link below). The content must be correct and should cover all important aspects + x. And if that is not the case one has to fix it. Still I don't like this new system. First of all we have to install some group, which is assigned "Editor" status. Otherwise we cannot release our own contributions. Some John Doe from Wikibooks is certainly not qualified to judge coverage or correctness unless he is a Clojure programmer himself. Nevertheless, the situation is as it is. We have to cope with it and should discuss how to handle the wiki. I see the following possible ways: - Abandon the wiki completely. People don't read it anyway, and if they do their comment is "atrocious". - Move to another hosting platform and continue with the "self-organising wiki" approach. - Stick with wikibooks and install some editor group, which reviews contributions. Fixes spelling and grammar. Checks correctness. Takes care for a consistent style. etc. I strongly oppose the first point. I put it here only for completeness sake. How do we proceed? Any thoughts? Sincerely Meikel [1]: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Help:Article_validation
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