Re: Drafting content guidelines for the wiki
I haven't contributed much to Debian beyond editing some pages on the existing
wiki, but I'm very interested in a MediaWiki solution, so I hope you don't mind
me butting in :)
The draft suggests displaying editors' copyright information at the bottom
of each page, with a specific layout. That has a couple of issues...
The first issue might be obvious, but is worth saying out loud -
in MediaWiki, it should be a template. For example:
{{{Copyright|Alice, Bob, Carol|license=<optional with sane default>}}}
Everyone will have opinions about the look of such a block - that it should be
red like the Debian logo, should be `float: right`, should be zebra-striped,
and so on. Centralising that logic in a template means every instance looks
the same, and changes can be implemented site-wide by editing a single page.
The second issue is more subtle - it entrenches editors' bad habit of creating
new pages to avoid treading on other peoples' toes. The wiki is already full
of duplicate content, often giving multiple answers that are inconsistent with
each other and all wrong in different ways. Adding a block to the bottom of
any page I've touched saying "Copyright Andrew Sayers" would just give people
another excuse not to review my work.
I've read the "Content licensing" thread, but my only strong opinion is that
a new wiki should have a single license for all contributions. Among other
things, that would mean we don't need per-page attribution blocks at all.
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