[Nix-dev] wiki and utf-8 characters

[phreedom at yandex.ru]

On Понедельник 25 марта 2013 18:17:46 Eelco Dolstra wrote:
> > Speaking of nix wiki... there's quite a steady in-flow of **spam**
> > articles (e.g. today I see certainly more than fifty new pages in its
> > feed). It would be good to add some captcha for user creation and then
> > clean up registered spammers and spam posts.
> 
> I've just deleted a few thousand spam user accounts and pages automatically.
> (Basically I deleted all orphan pages, then all user accounts that never
> made any edits.) Hopefully no actual content got caught :-)
> 
> I also disabled account creation until we have captcha or whatever.
> 
> With respect to switching to another wiki: I'm not necessarily opposed, but
> the main problem with the current wiki is (IMHO) that it's a rather
> disorganized mess of often poorly spelled/formatted articles.  Switching to
> another wiki is not going to help anything there.

If someone were to decide to fix lots of small things on many pages, not having 
to deal with html interface could actually encourage the person to go ahead.

Of course, just switching to git isn't going to guarantee that but it does 
simplify minor edits by users who know what's going on. Imagine a case like 
someone asks a trivial question on #nixos and the person who responds also 
makes a quick fix/clarification/adds a small stub page which at least makes the 
thing googleable. These small improvements could add up over time.

I'd say that the html-based wiki also discourages people from documenting stuff 
unless it's absolutely required to make the thing they've just implemented 
discoverable.