--On Sunday, June 03, 2012 14:58 -0800 Melinda Shore <melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 6/3/12 2:46 PM, John C Klensin wrote: >> Also, perhaps because I have a more vivid (or paranoid) >> imagination than you do, I can think of a lot more than four >> individuals who would be inclined to wreck the party. > > This, I think, is the show-stopper. Back when the internet > started > to become popular a well-known open access advocate put his > system, > which had a passwordless root account, online, and it was > basically > vandalized immediately, then vandalized again, and again, and > again, > until he finally surrendered. I really prefer to keep things > as > open as possible and I would love it if the Tao were a wiki > article, > but transitioning to that model would essentially mean making a > commitment for the life of the page to keeping a very close > eye on > it with a quick response to vandalism. Indeed. > I also think that enough of our process is actually disputed > to make > a living document hard to handle. At least with an RFC we can > say > "this is what we thought it was on a given date, with > considerable review prior to publication." Well, as long as the document is informational and an overview, I think that can be accomplished as easily with a web page, an editor who can be trusted to exercise a certain amount of good sense (and whose intentions are trusted) and a process for forcing a review if needed. The thing that bothers me about trying to do this by RFC is that the entire community then wastes a huge amount of time debating the choice and style of words and relatively minor details, after which everyone runs out of energy to make further changes for years (other than posting I-Ds on which there are no real controls, even an appeal process (not that I'd expect Paul to ignore input)). If we go the web page and editor route, expect revisions only when real problems are identified and otherwise do a review every year or so, I think we can get a pretty good balance between the slowness of the RFC-and-community-consensus process and the difficulties of the Wiki one. best, john