[maemo-community] No more anonymous edits

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 09:09, Thomas Perl <th.perl at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/2/10 Simon Pickering <S.G.Pickering at bath.ac.uk>:
>>
>> Didn't we have a rule of no anonymous creates/edits in the past?

Probably. But if it's something wikipedia can support, why can't we?

>> I've got to say that I can't really see why it's unfriendly to make people
>> log in before they make edits. It's useful to be able to track who's made a
>> change, and I can't see why the person making the change will be unhappy to
>> announce who they are by being logged in.

The argument had before (which ISTR persuaded me) was making small
trivial changes without an account is a gateway into becoming more
involved.

> +1 from me. It shouldn't be that much of a problem. And as we have SSO
> throughout Maemo.org, many people will either already have an account,
> and if not, creating one is a good idea, and they will gain access to
> the rest of Maemo.org with the same account (as opposed to having to
> create a separate wiki account).

Indeed, though the "S" of "SSO" stands for "Shared". And then it's
only partial, because Bugzilla & Talk *STILL* (grrr) have separate
account databases. The promised SSO seems to have just fallen away.

> As for the spam problem: Isn't there a reCAPTCHA plugin for Mediawiki
> or something? If that's annoying for regular contributors, make it so
> that the reCAPTCHA is required for users below a certain Wiki karma
> boundary, and above that, just let the user edit without having to
> fill in a captcha (some spambots have no problem registering an
> account and posting spam there, so just requiring registration
> probably doesn't help).

There must be plugins which can prompt someone to do something if they
haven't got an account. Didn't we used to have to do a simple
arithmetic sum if anonymous? Was that with the old Midgard wiki?

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
Maemo Community Council member