Swiki pollution...

Gary Fisher gafisher at sprynet.com
Fri Aug 23 13:01:23 UTC 2002


> The people using the Swiki for other things than "Squeak" must surely
> have seen the first page and are aware of the fact that this swiki is
> for Squeak.

Not at all necessarily, Göran.  One can easily jump (and link) to an
individual Swiki page and completely bypass the top of the Swiki.  It is
entirely possible some, perhaps even most, of those misusing the Squeak
Swiki are not aware of the actual purpose.

> But still, if they need to get onto the mailinglist (or something) to
> get a password this will not really be needed either.

True, but as discussed here previously (several times now) linking Swiki
access to list membership would effectively close the Squeak Swiki to many
of the people for whom it should be most accessible.

> True. But that would have to be a question for the people hosting Minnow
> since their own laws apply over there.

The most likely response if that question were raised by government, press
or law enforcement would be to shut it down until and unless far stricter
standards than any we've discussed here were in place.  Even without that,
if Swiki pages were used to promote, for example, failed 1930s political
philosophies, access could become illegal in entire countries outside of
that in which Minnow happens to live today.

Göran, I noticed that most of the material on the pages connected with the
one you posted at the top of this thread had last been edited almost two
months ago.  One one hand we could argue that the problem can't be very
serious if it took two months for someone to notice it, but on the other we
must recognize that there is apparently no system currently in place even to
*find*, much less to deal with, any sort of improper use of the Squeak
Swiki.  Whatever the method chosen, I agree strongly with you that
*something* must be done.

Gary




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list