[documentation] Proposal for handbook maintenance automation

[Angela Byron]

On 8-Aug-07, at 4:22 PM, Steven Peck wrote:


> The handbooks are a wiki for people with appropriate rights.  There
> are 98 of these people currently.  http://drupal.org/node/109372
>
> current from: http://drupal.org/handbook/new-contributions
> "In the past week, a total of 25 handbook pages were created. Of
> those, 18 were spam. Of the 7 added, 5 were created by people not on
> the documentation team:"
>
> Before moderation was taken out, I did in fact open the handbook up to
> editing to a wider role.  The moderation behavior was very annoying
> but the simple fact is page vandalism was worse then the above
> statistic.
>

The other problem is, "who is actually looking at these pages to see  
whether or not they've been vandalised?"

The reason Wikipedia works so well is because documentation is ALL  
that they do. There are literally thousands of people eyeballing the  
equivalent of http://drupal.org/handbook/updates per hour. drupal.org  
has 98 people *in total* on the docs team (out of 160,000+ users),  
and maybe... what? 2 of them following that page with any degree of  
consistency?

Captchas are a barrier to people contributing, and I would argue  
moreso than a simple "I'd like to be on the docs team" post, which is  
all we currently ask. I no longer contribute content to  
groups.drupal.org because the captchas are such a frigging pain.

Finally, docs team members also gain extra privileges, such as the  
ability to post images and upload files, so it makes sense to put  
*some* barrier to entry in front of them. Making "documentation  
maintainer" and "authenticated user" synonymous means that instead of  
posting links about viagra, spammers can now illustrate its effects  
with pictures. Sounds like fun.

-Angie