Re: GNUstep SoftWare Index - new project home and sources of the tool

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Am 07.01.2011 um 20:18 schrieb Banlu Kemiyatorn:

> On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 1:54 AM, Riccardo Mottola <multix@ngi.it> wrote:
> 
>> I don't think a wiki access was every refused to any of the developers of
>> GNUstep, Etoile, GAP or any gnustep related project.
> 
> Yeh, I only meant for the users or anyone who want to express their
> drop-by thought about the system since I just don't like anyone to be
> verified by a party or person not because they are bad but because
> that makes a paranoid feeling of separating us from us and us from the
> community, and the other goal is that to have us doing less job
> maintaining the wiki and extensions and focus on more important
> stuffs, if that being open will actually change something.

Well, there is one thing to consider. "Drop-By" thoughts from an author who
isn't even trying to get write access may have very low quality. If someone
doesn't care about registration and invests some minutes to write an e-mail to
the maintainers, I would assume that he/she also doesn't care
for studying what is already in the Wiki, how it is structured, how
the new content is formulated and formatted best and what all this is about.

So one could also see this policy (being intended or not) as a "quality gate"
which I wouldn't consider a bad idea (besides that it also stops some potential
spam which is in this view just zero-quality contributions).

All successful long time and large scale open source projects have
such a separation of "them from us". It is based on trust that new members
of the "us" group have similar goals, quality etc.

If you don't believe, please try to submit a beginner's patch to Linux or 
Debian...
You will immediately learn that you are welcome but a member of the "them" 
group.
You will have to work hard to become one of the "us".

So after thinking about that from a quality perspective, it is not at all
paranoid to ban new users, but a necessary consequence of a high-quality
attitude. And the anti-spam aspect is a windfall profit.

So we still have to find more contributors to the Wiki...