We have our Wiki! Now how should we use it? | Project management | Forum

We now have a Wiki hosted at cstart.org and linked to from the main navigation bar.  Big thanks to Zvan for all his web related work!

While we're waiting for the contents of brmj's temporary Wiki to be migrated over, let's figure out how we're going to use the Wiki, from the point of view of who has permission to edit what, and what goes where when.   My thoughts have been something like this, and I welcome feedback:

Most of the central pages in the Wiki (i.e. the main pages for CSTART, CLLARE, Selene, each of the workgroups, etc) should be locked so that they may only be edited by administrators.  Actual design decisions etc. will made by the crowd in the forums, which will be a free-for-all, in the sense that anybody can post anywhere.  Part of the role of workgroup representative (who will have admin priveleges on the Wiki) will be to make regular updates to the relevant parts of the Wiki when consensus is reached in the relevant parts of the forum.  Basically, the forums will be a frothing mass where ideas and plans are in some kind of turbulent mixing; as small patches of this sea of ideas crystalise and become fixed, they will be copied over to the Wiki by an admin.

There will need to be some sort of procedure to prevent admins are Wiking stuff too quickly and effetively making decisions themselves: perhaps workgroup reps will have the power to post polls to the forum when they feel like a consensus is close to being reached, and then they may only Wiki the ramifications of that consenus across if the poll shows greater than 75% support from a sample of at least 10 people (actual numbers may vary).  This introduces the problem of reps refusing to post a poll if they feel a decision is going to go against their preference – for now we can probably guard against this well enough by having more than one rep per workgroup.

Under the above view I imagine anybody being able to create Wiki pages – this way factions within the forum have a place to sketch out their ideas, post data, etc.  Since they can't edit main pages of the Wiki, there will be no prominent links to these temporary parts of the Wiki – they will only really be seen by people active in the appropriate parts of the forum.  As decisions are made, Wiki admins can link to temporary parts of the Wiki when and if they become canonised.

Does anybody have any thoughts on this approach?

I take your point about heavy restrictions being somewhat antithetical to the whole open collaboration ethos.  I suppose I am erring on the side of caution with regards to things like vandalism or hijacking of decisions (as an aside, please don't think I'm trying to single out your naming posts the other day as some kind of example of a problem!) – I don't really have any experience with large collaborative projects like this some I don't have any intution as to how much structure is required to keep things together.  Idealistically, I'd like things to be as close to anarchy as they can be without it impacting the quality or reliability of our work.  Perhaps we should start with a completely open Wiki (except no anonymous edits) and only move to a stricter admin-based system if it appears to be necessary.