I don't know about the 'respectability' of SF, but I'm more concerned with the content and who gets to change it. There are folks that may decide to enter incorrect or even bogus information. I would like it if all added information that is not already present in the Wine API be vetted. That means one person enters it and another disassociated person verifies before it goes live. Code already in the API should be considered automatically vetted.
I think the speed and freedom provided by wiki is more important than vetting. Most problems would be due to vandalism (easily reverted), people will keep an eye on Recent Changes. If the problem is overwhelming, we will make editing privileges require a grant by an admin on a shall issue basis. Bogus information is a non-issue, people with sufficient knowledge to enter convincing information are not going to be the sort to enter bogus information. Wikipedia has a high level of accuracy despite its openness.
Peter
On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Peter Davies ultratwo@gmail.com wrote:
I think the speed and freedom provided by wiki is more important than vetting. Most problems would be due to vandalism (easily reverted), people will keep an eye on Recent Changes. If the problem is overwhelming, we will make editing privileges require a grant by an admin on a shall issue basis. Bogus information is a non-issue, people with sufficient knowledge to enter convincing information are not going to be the sort to enter bogus information. Wikipedia has a high level of accuracy despite its openness.
Maybe our concern should not be bogus information but ill-gotten information. My concern would be that information acquired from reverse engineering would be "tainted" for Wine development purposes (which is what concerns me about the soared.org site mentioned on wine-devel). I suppose that it technically would fall under the traditional Compaq "clean room reverse engineering" - provided that whomever posted API details on the site was not also the person posting patches to implement those details in Wine.
I'm not sure how we could best handle this, but it is my understanding that most of the modern wiki software has an option to require editor approval. I am hesitant to want to turn on such an option, at least in the beginning, since I think it would discourage contribution - but it is an option. Does anyone have a particularly preferred wiki software that they are familiar with that they think will work well for what we're doing? I don't really keep track of the different wiki packages, but last time I setup a mediawiki site I was a bit disappointed by the lack of built-in macros.
While SF specifically mentions a couple wiki packages it looks like they are pretty flexible with what you can load up, since they will let you create your own databases - so I think we could setup anything we like. Does anyone have any reasons we would want to go with somewhere other than SF? It seems to me like it would provide us with anything we need with the added bonus of being free.
Erich Hoover ehoover@mines.edu
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Erich Hoover -
Peter Davies