How about an article subpage for comments by unregistered visitors ?

[Milton Beychok]

This may be a wild idea. But how about each CZ article having a subpage in which unregistered visitors can offer comments or criticisms without using their real names? This might help us get good comments from people who are loath to become registered authors or editors. The subpage could be named "Visitor comments".

It must be very frustrating for some really knowlegeable visitor wanting to offer a comment on an article but being unable to do so.

Yes, the subpage will undoubtedly be subject to much vandalism and many unknowledgeable comments. It would be up to workgroup editors to periodically purge that subpage of comments they consider worthless ... and to archive the good comments whenever  the subpage becomes too long.

Any comments??

Milt Beychok

[Peter Schmitt]

Yes, guests should have a possibility to comment.

But a subpage to every page is probably too difficult to handle, and these comments should not clutter main space.
I think that a dedicated forum thread or an email account (or something similar) would be better,
where the comments are in chronological order (with links to the corresponding page).
Then the new arrivals can be easily checked and (hopefully) dealt with.

[Brian P Long]

This may be a wild idea. But how about each CZ article having a subpage in which unregistered visitors can offer comments or criticisms without using their real names? This might help us get good comments from people who are loath to become registered authors or editors. The subpage could be named "Visitor comments".

It must be very frustrating for some really knowlegeable visitor wanting to offer a comment on an article but being unable to do so.

Yes, the subpage will undoubtedly be subject to much vandalism and many unknowledgeable comments. It would be up to workgroup editors to periodically purge that subpage of comments they consider worthless ... and to archive the good comments whenever  the subpage becomes too long.

Any comments??

Milt Beychok

I think this is a really good idea, Milt. I assume it's reasonably easy to set up MediaWiki to allow anonymous people to edit a subpage (though I may be wrong about this); aside from that, we already have the subpage system in place, so it would be pretty simple to implement, and it would give readers a straightforward way to leave their comments.

As far as vandalism is concerned, I can't believe there'd be much incentive to vandalize a page that very few visitors to the site will ever see. Then again, I'm pretty surprised that people bother to post spam on these forums.

Brian

[Paul Wormer]

I also agree strongly with Milt's idea. As I wrote before, I received also useful   comments on my WP articles, they weren't all crap.  I would say let's give it a try and start  a "visitor comment page" for, say,  half a year or a year. When it gets completely out of hand, we can always stop it sooner.

[Milton Beychok]

Meg, in my original posting that started this thread, I suggested that workgroup editors would be the ones to periodically purge the visitor comment subpages of vandalism, spam and worthless comments.

Milt Beychok

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

Meg, in my original posting that started this thread, I suggested that workgroup editors would be the ones to periodically purge the visitor comment subpages of vandalism, spam and worthless comments.

Milt Beychok

In the long term, that might indeed make sense, but where there is one or no editor? Recently, I've been doing work on Israel-Palestine and Iran, not that it doesn't need coverage, but it's a controversial subject that I thought might get some outside interest. Thinking of the huge edit wars at WP, I really don't want to be the only cleaner of the Augean stables.

[Dan Nessett]

I assume it's reasonably easy to set up MediaWiki to allow anonymous people to edit a subpage (though I may be wrong about this)

Brian

Well, actually it isn't. CZ's software is set up to require people to login before they can edit a page. (Try it. Log out and then go to some CZ page. You will notice the 'edit' tab is gone and in its place is a 'view source' tab). So, if you want truly anonymous users (i.e., those that don't login) to edit any page (including a special subpage for anonymous comments), then it is not possible. If you mean you want to allow people to use pseudonyms to login to CZ, then you will have to register people with pseudonyms. But, once you do that, they can edit any page they want.

So, from a technical perspective, this idea has significant problems.

[Milton Beychok]

Dan Nessett, is there any way to just "unlock" only those visitor comment subpages (one for each article) so that comments may be entered on them without any login? All other pages would remain available only to logged in citizens.

If there is no way to do that, then you are correct in saying that this idea is no good.

 Milt Beychok

[Dan Nessett]

Dan Nessett, is there any way to just "unlock" only those visitor comment subpages (one for each article) so that comments may be entered on them without any login? All other pages would remain available only to logged in citizens.

If there is no way to do that, then you are correct in saying that this idea is no good.

 Milt Beychok

Milt. As far as I know, there is no way to selectively open up certain pages or classes of pages to modification by those who are not logged in. Preventing such modifications was, I believe, one of the key design decisions of the original CZ software development team. Sorry.

[Drew R. Smith]

Actually, there may be two different ways to do it.

1) (the hard way, but is sure to work) semi protect all articles, CZ pages, talk pages, basically everything but the visitor's comments pages. Then allow IP editing.

Or,

2) (the easy way, but might not work) Create a new namespace, and set that namespace only as editable by IP's. I'm not %100 sure that's possible, but I think I saw an option for that when I was messing around with mediawiki.

Drew


Edited later - My apologies, I didn't realize this was the charter drafting area only. Though my comment is less on the charter itself than how to implement an idea...

[Hayford Peirce]

Edited later - My apologies, I didn't realize this was the charter drafting area only. Though my comment is less on the charter itself than how to implement an idea...

No, it isn't -- this thread is open to everyone.  Although there seems to be a semi-bug somewhere about telling us *consistently* which threads are open and which aren't.

[Dan Nessett]

Actually, there may be two different ways to do it.

1) (the hard way, but is sure to work) semi protect all articles, CZ pages, talk pages, basically everything but the visitor's comments pages. Then allow IP editing.

Or,

2) (the easy way, but might not work) Create a new namespace, and set that namespace only as editable by IP's. I'm not %100 sure that's possible, but I think I saw an option for that when I was messing around with mediawiki.

Drew


Edited later - My apologies, I didn't realize this was the charter drafting area only. Though my comment is less on the charter itself than how to implement an idea...

Drew,

I'm not sure I understand your proposals. I think you made them under the assumption we are using vanilla MW, but that isn't true. We are using MW with CZ specific modifications. One of these modifications is users must login to edit. As far as I know (I am still learning about the CZ specific modifications) there is no way to relax this with a configuration option. It would take a change to CZ specific code.

Update: Actually, there is probably a way to allow non-logged-in 'visitors' to edit pages using configuration. However, I believe that will allow them to edit any page. In vanilla MW (remembering that we are running a modified version of 1.13.2) how would you limit vistor's rights to a particular namespace? Also, could you be more explicit what you mean by "semi protect"?

[Dan Nessett]

Actually, there may be two different ways to do it.

1) (the hard way, but is sure to work) semi protect all articles, CZ pages, talk pages, basically everything but the visitor's comments pages. Then allow IP editing.

Or,

2) (the easy way, but might not work) Create a new namespace, and set that namespace only as editable by IP's. I'm not %100 sure that's possible, but I think I saw an option for that when I was messing around with mediawiki.

Drew


Edited later - My apologies, I didn't realize this was the charter drafting area only. Though my comment is less on the charter itself than how to implement an idea...

Perhaps I shot from the hip in my last message. There does seem to be a way to configure namespaces so different groups have different access rights (see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgNamespaceProtection). I think this would work with CZ's modifications, but I am not certain.

[Matt Innis]

I have been watching that thread to see if anyone came up with anything new (not being a copmputer guru myself), but so far I think that Dan is right from a technically difficult perspective.  From a community perspective, I would get behind something like that if we could get those users to use a real name.  I think we are much less likely to get nasty remarks when they use their real names. 

I would also consider having a link for them to send their concern along with their name and email address to someone(constables?) and let that person decide whether to send it on to the appropriate editors.  Maybe a contact form?

[Milton Beychok]

Matt, Dan's last post here says the there may be a way to implement this idea. As for people saying nasty things, as I said above, Editors could easily purge those visitor subpages periodically.

Milt Beychok