Open Stack

Sean Dague wrote:
> On 05/09/2016 06:53 PM, Monty Taylor wrote:
>> On 05/09/2016 05:45 PM, Robert Collins wrote:
>>> IIRC mediawiki provides RSS of changes... maybe just using the wiki
>>> more would be a good start, and have zero infra costs?
>>
>> We'd actually like to start using the wiki less, per the most recent
>> summit. Also, the wiki currently has new accounts turned off (thanks
>> spammers) so if you don't have a wiki account now, you're not getting
>> one soon.
>
> Hmm... that's unfortunate, as we were trying to get some of our less
> ephemeral items out of random etherpads and into the wiki (which has the
> value of being google indexed).

The Google indexing is also what makes the wiki so painful... After 6 
years most of the content there is inaccurate or outdated. It's a 
massive effort to clean it up without breaking the Google juice, and 
nobody has the universal knowledge to determine if pages are still 
accurate or not. We are bitten every day by newcomers finding wrong 
information on the wiki and acting using it. It's getting worse every 
day we keep on using it.

Also the Google juice is what made our wiki a target for spammers / 
defacers. We don't have an army of maintainers like wikipedia ready to 
jump at any defacement, so the fully open nature of the wiki which makes 
it so convenient (anyone can create or modify a page), is also it's 
major flaw (anyone can create or modify a page).

We moved most of the reference information out of the wiki to proper 
documentation and peer-reviewed websites (security.o.o, governance.o.o, 
releases.o.o...) but we still need somewhere to easily publish random 
pages -- something between etherpad (too transient) and proper 
documentation (too formal). Ideally the new tool would make it clear 
that the page is not canonical information, so that we avoid the wiki 
effect. Three options:

* Keep the current wiki to achieve that (valid option if we have a whole 
team of wiki gardeners to weed out outdated pages and watch for 
spam/defacement -- and history proved that we don't)

* Drop the current wiki and replace it by another lightweight 
publication solution (if there is anything convenient)

* Deprecate the current wiki and start over with another wiki (with 
stronger ACL support ?)

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)