Gregory Szorc's blog

Remove Edit Restrictions on the Case Wiki

I've been thinking a bit lately about removing some of the restrictions that are currently in place on the Case Wiki, mainly limiting user accounts to users with a Case ID and password and disallowing anonymous edits. Although I can make an argument either way about these issues, I will try to outline by basic thoughts below.

Why should we be selfish and limit principal authorship of content to the Case community? Case plays an important role in Cleveland, Ohio, and the international research scene. Why should we prevent those affected by us from posting information? The purpose of a wiki is to share information. Limiting membership limits the knowledge base of potentially shared information. However, people who have membership probably have 80-95% of the knowledge of Case that exists.

We are limiting membership because we want to trace edits back to people. There have been a few cases already when one or two people have posted questionable content. We knew who they were. They can be contacted easily. Opening up editing rights potentially opens the floodgates. There will be a constant battle with spam bots. People will need to moderate individual posts and posting users. Information might not be as trusted because it isn't tied to a name. Is this situation desirable? Can the community at-large contribute that much more to the wiki? Will the Case community decide to contribute anonymously?

There are many paths we can take in opening up the Case Wiki. If we were to open it up completely, I would personally recommend against a flag day where all restrictions are removed. Instead, I would opt for a gradual lifting of restrictions. Then, it might be possible to see what effect each has on its usage.

Currently, the Case Wiki requires you to log in (requires Case network id) to edit normal pages. All talk/discussion pages can be edited anonymously. How should we proceed? I came up with the following potential steps:

• Allow recognized users from other universities to log in via Shibboleth. They will get usernames like joe.smith@mit.edu or emily.jones@cmu.edu
• Allow external users to register accounts. These could be in any format except the user@domain and firstname.lastname format. We should require these users to verify their e-mail address to prevent spam bot attacks.
• Allow all pages to be edited anonymously. This could cause issues.

You can ping this entry by using http://blog.case.edu/gps10/mt-tb.cgi/4097 .

We could stick it behind Shibboleth and a faux-federation and use http://openidp.org, an open Shibboleth Identity Provider, as a place to register for accounts.

It gets dicey, though.

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