No, that's wrong. Look at the MediaWiki user base - mostly at Wikipedia. These people do group management very very badly and freezing their bad ideas about it into code will make it worse. For years they have very serious governance problems, there are always big troll fights and "regime change" debates and flame wars, and "pogroms" and "witchhunts" and "purges". Comments on "what's really wrong" get censored by a group that doesn't want to hear it.
They just believe the plurality of contributors will keep the project alive well. the groups they have being:
- Anonymous
- User
- Sysop
- Developer
They just don't know what they're doing, and on MeatballWiki and such you can find people complaining about how stupid the Wikipedia people are about how to do real world group management. They're always the worst example, e.g. of GodKing or just being a libel pit where anyone can lie about anyone else without any consequences. They'll collapse the day some guy with lawyers notices what they have allowed to be said about him. Like go look at the Page History of the article on Mel Gibson!!! And Mel sues, for real... he even sues CHURCHES...
People who organize their own favourite project so stupidly can't be trusted to figure out what "requirements" exist for serious social software! This is a very good reason to get away from MediaWiki and not to trust the people working on it. They are just not politically mature or even legally responsible. A project like Consumerium which is even more of a target can't possibly rely on software created by people who have such a poor idea of group support.
- It's a fresh thing that we have started this discussion on Wiki management with a phrase like "No that's wrong", which is addmitedly my fault cause I copied this from MediaWiki modifications where this discussion clearly didn't belong. Anyways put the stuff in a correctly named article and please don't start I hate MediaWiki developers and Wikipedia
At the time of writing this this talk page has more page views then the actual page which makes sense. Now it's about time we just figure out some rules and guidelines to manage the wikis and then we can work the trivial details out and get on with this. Juxo 15:57, 20 Dec 2003 (EET)