[EM] Re: James: Definition, electowiki

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 05:37 PM 6/22/2005, Araucaria Araucana wrote:
>A wiki is for discussion and consensus, not for Pronouncements from On
>High Written For All Eternity Upon Stone.

However, there is nothing that says that a wiki page can't refer to another 
page located somewhere else which is secure from beiing edited. Of course, 
anyone can remove the reference.

Generally, the ability to lock a page is an administrative privilege. So 
any user who thinks a page should be locked can request that from the 
administrator. Pages which have become a settled general consensus but 
which start to see more bad edits than good ones may be candidates for locking.

I'd recommend that anyone who wants to personally keep a copy of a page put 
up on a wiki keep a copy themselves, offline. Indeed, it can be easier to 
write a page off line and then copy and paste it into the wiki page editor. 
Beside, things can happen. My first wiki, a phpwiki installation was 
promptly spammed, the home page was replaced by lists of links to drug web 
sites. And the wiki history functions were dead, since the PHP pages had 
been replaced by HTML. There was, I'm sure, a way that I could have 
recovered the files, but I did something in shutting the wiki down that 
caused the loss of everything.

(But I did get some satisfaction when the registrar for the majority of the 
drug sites accepted my calling of his attention to the obviously phony 
information in the domain registrations, and the domains were shut down. I 
also recovered the access information from my domain logs and complained to 
the ISP which had given access to the miscreant. I did get a response from 
the ISP requesting more information, which I provided, but I don't know the 
outcome of that, and, unlike the drug domains, there was no way for me to 
check.)