[wplug] wiki?

[Patrick Wagstrom]

On Sun, 2007-01-14 at 17:47 -0500, Zach wrote:
> Ok thanks Patrick. I wonder why does wikipedia allow anonymous comments?

Wikipedia has the advantage of economies of scale when it comes to the
system.  There are many, many dedicated individuals who monitor the most
recent changes to the site and look for vandalism.  In addition,
wikipedia has a variety of bots that patrol it to undo vandalism.  They
have significant problems with vandalism and false data being input by
anonymous individuals (google for "siegenthaler wikipedia" and "congress
wikipedia entries").

Unfortunately, the people administering the WPLUG wiki do not have
enough time to continually monitor the wiki and patrol it for vandalism.
As an example, last night I found and corrected some vandalism that had
been there for some weeks.  This was on a "user" page of wikipedia,
which normally is not monitored by people or visited often.
Unfortunately, Google finds these pages and will find the link spam and
tends to lead pages to be deleted (see Javalobby's story at
http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t87997.html ),

So really, it's a man power issue.  Wikipedia has it, WPLUG does not.
In Wikipedia the product is the Wiki.  For WPLUG we use the Wiki as a
communication mechanism, so people have a tendency to not monitor it as
carefully.  In the view of the people who set up the Wiki and pushed for
the Wiki (Bill and myself), the risk outweighed the benefit of anonymous
comments.

--Patrick