[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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