Chromatic On The Wiki Plugin For Slash

lisam writes: "The Wiki plugin integrates nicely with Slash and has a lot of cool features, says Chromatic who introduces Wikis and gives a detailed explanation of how and why the Wiki plugin works in this OnLamp article. (chromatic is coauthor of O'Reilly's upcoming Running Weblogs with Slash.)" A lot of people just think of Slashdot style sites when thinking of the Slash codebase, but this article goes on about how to extend slash in cool ways. If you are interested in plugins, the repository is a good place to start.

Comments

Re:I wonder....

[Afrosheen]

I'd like to see a list of my posts, along with who moderated them to what level. Moderators should be given more responsibility to do what's right, i.e. mod up interesting/insightful posts rather than mod down trolls. Trolls and redundant/flame posts are not hard to mod down but an AC that posts something good is difficult to mod up at times.

Consider balancing the karma system..if you give someone moderator rights, and 5 points, make 2 of those negative points and the remaining 3 positive.

Re:I wonder....

[IIOIOOIOO]

I disagree.... Honestly, I worry that seeing who axed your last post might encourage retributive axing of their later post. Although, you increase the number of available points, make them positive-only, and introduce a time-based rating decay. That way, posts in which no one saw redeeming value would fairly quickly degrade off of the average users page-view.

Chromatic's book

[Zico]

I've always thought chromatic had some interesting things to say here as a poster, and am curious about how much detail he goes into in his book about Slashcode. Also, not just the code itself, but the ethics involved in running such a site.

For example, does he (or do you, if you happen to be reading this, chromatic) go into things like the admins using "bitchslaps" on their users, and when they should/shouldn't. Or from a somewhat disturbing example from the past week (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26315&cid=285 0660), does he discuss things like scripts which flood the stories with "Offtopic" moderations, basically using (abusing?) the admin power to instantly try to squelch both user and moderator opinions? Any philosophical discussions about whether there is any point in giving users moderation power for any reason to shut them up for a while, seeing as there isn't really much point in moderation when some admin with a chip on his shoulder is going to come by and stomp on everyone's opinions by using his unlimited mod points to make sure that something stays marked "Offtopic" (over 250 so far)?

Good luck with the book, chromatic, like I was saying, you're one of the better posters here!

Re:Chromatic's book

[mwalker]

I think your comment really belongs in the hidden Slash META discussion started by CmdrTaco. CmdrTaco is currently answering questions there from all comers, so now's your chance. You can even ask him what he thinks of chromatic and Wikis, which are a move towards more community trust rather than less.

And no I am not Offtopic; I'm trying to transfer the Offtopic people into their own discussion.

Re:Chromatic's book

[chromatic]

Thank you for the kind words.

Chapter 8 of the book is all about the mechanics and philosophy of building a community out of the random visitors who stumble on your website. Most of it isn't limited to running a Slash site, and a lot of it is common sense stuff if you have a background in journalism or publishing.

We tried to come up with a good mixture of ethical and practical ideas, like how to keep readers informed of things, writing author guidelines, and handling mistakes and errata. There's also a discussion on the moderation system (in chapters 6 and 8), including some of the ways in which it can fail. Krow has a nice bit in there about the point at which user moderation is useful (for small sites, it generally isn't).

You're probably more interested in the sections about "Anti-Abuse" features. Comment filters are described, along with their failings, and the example of how to modify Slash code itself involves making the filters less strict to posters with karma above an administrator defined level. It also describes things like IP and Network blacklists.

The approach we take in the book is that these features (moderation, filters, blacklists) are merely tools that administrators can use to keep their site running and their quality of discussion and service high. If you have to use them, make the rules plain and simple and stick by them, but don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off.

For what it's worth, I put forth the idea that having a recurring story about the site itself, where the administrators and editors participate in the comments, is one of the best things a site can do.

I'm not privy to a lot of details specific to the operations of Slashdot itself, so my opinion on those is merely wild speculation... though I have read the code and do know what's possible. :)

Wiki as a submission queue?

[ocelotbob]

I was reading the article when this sentance jumped out at me:

It would also be nice to be able to promote a page to a Story, but that's probably further down the road.

Why not use a wiki to handle the submission queue? Let users create articles in the wiki, and have the slashdot editors and other users suggest changes for making an article better before posting it on the main site. That way, marginal articles will be improved, the chance of factual errors is diminished, and story quality is increased. Once the story's good enough, just migrate it to the front page. Story rejection can be handled in a similar way as it currently is, witht the possible addition of having a story expire if there are no additions/changes after a given time frame.

Questions, comments?

Wikis and Weblogs, A Match Made in Heaven

[Eloquence]

You may be interested in reading this proposal I have made for Scoop, which is the engine that runs K5. Both Scoop and Slashcode are written in Perl, so it may be possible to develop a shared Wiki plugin.

The idea to combine wikis and weblogs is very promising. The sequential nature of weblogs is great for news, but not for acting on these news in a sustained fashion. If Slashdot writes about some political issue, if actions are taken they are usually short-lived, or move to other mailing lists. Similarly, wikis can combine sites which host both a lot of persistent knowledge (e.g. papers, essays) with the dynamic, community-creating nature of a weblog. I plan to eventually run violence.de as a wiki-weblog, with the wiki (access-restricted) storing the papers, film pages etc., and the weblog reporting about current issues (sexual repression, censorship, new studies etc.) -- mail me if you want to help.

Wikis, when properly deployed, are the missing component to make weblogs truly useful. With properly deployed, I mean that typical wiki idiosyncrasies need to be avoided: Nobody really wants to use WikiStyleLinks, they make text harder to read and are difficult to get rid of once you have decided to use them. Choose E2 or Wikipedia style links instead. Also, access restrictions are necessary in many contexts. See the article for some further design details.