A quick shout-out to Andy Rush for sharing his work on theming and connecting together the UMW New Media Center site using a common theme deployed in WordPress and MediaWiki.
It’s very elegant design, and as you navigate back and forth, perhaps the distinction of “this is a wiki” and “this is a blog” blur as one focuses more on the content. I’m anxious to watch and see how this plays out, but a tip of the dog paw to Andy for some great work.
Speaking of MediaWiki, we’ve had a slight increase in the incidents of wiki vandalism on some of the NMC wikis I created. On all of them,w e do not allow anonymous edits; one must create accounts to do so, But there is no oversight on account creation, so any wiki vandal can do that and start mucking up content. In some cases it was the sort of pirate flag hoisting just to warn that it could be done; in another case, the edits went to take a description of a person and change it to some phrases one would not like used to describe their mother. I can band the accounts, but its not too hard to come back with another IP and account name.
So while I try to look for some other solutions foe accounts in MediaWiki (and begging for suggestions), one one site, I have taken away the ability for anonymous users to create accounts, and instead putting a link in to email for an account to be set up by the wiki admin (moi). On another, I’m going to monitor the Recent Changes for RSS and try to squash it.
A popular wiki can be a good thing (for the content) and a bad thing (for dealing with scumbags who mess it up). You cannot have one without the other, it seems.
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