On Wed, 24 Feb 2021 at 18:54, Kevin Kofler via devel <devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Matthew Miller wrote:
> I don't think "documentation is harder to keep up to date there" is right,
Well, I guess it does not apply that much to the pages which were already in
an ACL-locked namespace, in particular, the packaging guidelines that can
only be edited by FPC. I cannot speak for the FPC whether it is easier,
harder, or the same difficulty to do the edits now vs. on the wiki.
But as far as I can tell, the move also affects wiki contents that were not
previously ACL-locked, and for those, it makes a big difference whether
anyone with a FAS account can just edit them on the wiki or whether one has
to dig up the source code in some Git repository and send a pull request
(and not get any instant feedback whether the changes even compile without
also installing some documentation processing toolchain). I guess most
people can only try to get someone else to do the editing work, or will just
shrug it off as "it's wrong and I cannot edit it".
Actually the wiki is ACL locked where you need more than a FAS account to edit it (and has been for several years). That is because we spent too much time cleaning up neo-nazi scribbles, various pill scams, and get-rich ads from continual organized groups who look for low barrier of entry wikis to use for this. We have several tens of thousand fas accounts all opened by these groups continually even after we stopped allowing the wiki edits to anyone with a FAS account. The groups are still there, still opening accounts and every now and then find some group to get added to where they start up again.
[Some of the groups are robots doing this, but a large number are people paid to do the 'pose as a real person' so our robot can take over and spam edit. Most of them are very intelligent people who see it as more of a continual puzzle to solve with the sites as the puzzle-master.]
Using the 'needs to be viewed before accepted' causes problems because the malware that all these things use can just look at the edit tag and display the crap on people's screens and websites anyway. And the general website goes down regularly because millions of browsers from other websites are tricked into getting stuff from our servers.
The second problem that 'needs to be accepted before published' plugins is that it requires active people to check their sections. Almost no one is doing that for the wiki and that has been the case for over a decade. A well structured wiki requires active work from people wanting to do this in and out. The people who did this initially in Fedora left years ago, and no one has ever stepped up to replace them. Most people seem to assume that instead someone else will do that work for them later. New people who have been interested usually look at the mess and say 'I would say nuke it and start over' or 'you know moving this to a newer technology is better'. Then they deal with the community for a while and realize that as much as people complain about how horrible it is, they will fight any change because it would mean learning something new.
The wiki has been a 'trashcan' since before we moved from moin to mediawiki. This is in part because many groups expected the wiki to be 'their' wiki and they got to do whatever was inside their section. It then became an afterthought where you stick some things up so you can checkmark 'documentation done' in whatever checklist.
In the end, the wiki is most useful when people care for it and you have people who are either paid (even in the mediawiki) or volunteer to be 'librarians' and curate and clean up things. No one has done that in Fedora since at least 2010, and without an empowered community to clean things up and keep litter down.. the wiki turns into what it is. [This isn't the only wiki like this.. most ones end up this way because people think they magically take care of themselves without realizing the army of people that sit at the Mediawiki wikipedias to do that work.]
--
Stephen J Smoogen.
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