[Cabal] FAQ and support.pidgin.im

[Luke Schierer]

On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 02:35:16AM -0500, Mark Doliner wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:29:22 -0500, Luke Schierer wrote
> > I have started using faqomatic at
> > http://support.pidgin.im/cgi-bin/pidginfaq.pl?
> > ...
> > Naturally it needs work to make it Look nice.  Sean goesso far as to
> > place it in his top 3 or 4 worst looking sites ever.
> > 
> > Let me know what you all think.  Is there something better I should 
> > be looking at?  Does the lack of good auth prove to be an 
> > unacceptable flaw?
> 
> Yeah, that's pretty grotesque.  As a user, I'm not sure I would ever bother to
> try to find an answer to my question in a FAQ that looks like that.  My
> preference is for the FAQ to be in a world-writable wiki that allows edits by
> anonymous users.  It doesn't matter to me whether we put it in the developer
> trac or some other wiki.
> 
> It's supposed to be an open source COMMUNITY, not an open source oligarchy.  I
> think we should encourage the community to contribute at every opportunity
> (and reduce the workload on all of us).  And I think people are more willing
> to edit a wiki than they are to figure out how to change a faqomatic-managed FAQ.
> 
> -Mark

the idea of fully anonymous users always scares me.  Community is all
and good, but any real community would have some sense of
accountablility and reputation.  If a substantial part of the
"community" is posting as "Anonymous" then we get Slashdot.  A
community in a sense I suppose, but not a very healthy one.

I do not mind making wiki pages editable by registered users, but making
it editably by anonymous users sounds like a receipe for serious time
spent moderating.

luke