[pmwiki-users] Process support for editors, reviewing pages?
christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com
christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com
Sat Jan 19 04:47:06 CST 2008
Hi,
I just had a thought I wanted to share for the future. Initial inspiration
come from previous discussions of spam, but my post today was actually
triggered by serious edits.
On the LyX wiki (wiki.lyx.org), the list of pages that have been changed
recentely are emailed to a special documentation list. Some developers
follow this list and check what changes people make to the wiki pages. In
essence, they act as editors, and in practice they fix issues before I
(administrator) even get to see them.
However, what's inefficient in the current setup is that several of them
probably go and check the same page. So, I'd like to suggest some ideas
for how this process can be improved. First let me describe how it works
today as a formal process (although on a completely voluntary and evloved
basis):
1. Authors make changes to wiki pages
2. Editors look at the list of changed pages
3. Editors look at the changed pages and correct "bad" changes,
typically spam.
One problem I see with the above is the lack of coordination/inefficiency
between editors, since many editors might go and check the same page.
Another problem is that cooperation between editors are not encouraged,
perhaps an editor is not sure if a change is good and would like someone
else to look at the page. Yet another problem is lack of efficiency, it'd
be good to for instance see a list of the changed pages together with the
actual changes...
So now I wonder, what better practices/processes can be used here?
Here is one idea I'd like to discuss.
* Introduce the role of an 'editor'. Authutentification might be needed in
order to act as an editor. Perhaps even introduce a 'chief editor',
that can allow others to become editors.
* Introduce an attribute for the status of a page. When a page is
changed, the attribute is automatically set to 'modified'.
An editor can then set the attribute to e.g. 'ok' to signal
that he found the changes ok. This attribute could perhaps also be
used to signal that a page needs changes, perhaps urgently.
* Introduce a kind of 'status page' that lists pages and their status
attribute. This would help with avoiding duplicate work for editors.
* Or perhaps, introduce a separate page, 'modified pages' that lists
modified pages (optionally with their changes), and where an editor is
allowd to set the attribute of the corresponding page to e.g. 'ok'.
Note that I'm not saying the above is the best process, but I think it
would at least be an improvement. With some discussion, maybe we can come
up with a process that is worth implementing[*].
Best regards,
Christian
PS. I don't think implementation will be very difficult, but IMHO it's
thinking through the process that is more important now. So I'm forcing
myself to not suggest ways to implement the above... :-)
--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
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