Community Knowledge (was Re: [TriLUG] Fwd: [Centos] in CentOS 3.4, mod_auth_ldap ?)

[Rick DeNatale]

Overall, I find that a good wiki implementation overcomes any problems
with folks overwriting.

The wiki movement is much like the open source movement, or Tom
Sawyer's method for whitewashing a fence for that matter.

I'd spent quite a lot of time in bars at computer conferences with
Ward Cunningham who invented the wiki concept, and I've been wiki'ing
almost since the beginning.  Ward's (the) original wiki is still there
at c2.com and the article there about "why wiki works" at
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks is still good reading.

I've actually been running wikis for the past six months or so.  I
started out with twiki, but switched to mediawiki when I needed to do
things with more intensive use of images.  My specialized wiki deals
with manned spaceflight history and in particular the Mercury program
(and building scale models of the Mercury spacecraft) . The entry page
is at http://www.denhaven2.homeip.net/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

I haven't had too much problem with changes I didn't want. I did have
some sicko vandalize a few pages, but I found that it was:

  1) Easy to find using the recent changes special page

and
  
  2) Easy to fix

and 

  3) Easy to ban the offender

A good wiki does version control on the articles. Mediawiki is
particularly good at letting you detect and fix unwanted changes. One
reason is that it has to be since it's used for the wikipedia which is
perhaps the best known, and therefore most vulnerable to vandalism
wiki in the world.