Re: wiki "abuse"

From: david@lang.hm <david@lang.hm>
Date: Aug 8, 2010, 01:03 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.1008071753400.23481@asgard.lang.hm>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinxNJ3aVUT1_i3-XL2dq8oobsgfUp14btZZjEUD@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, 7 Aug 2010, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> 2010/8/7 Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com>:
>> On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 12:56, Amir E. Aharoni
>> <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>>> I opened an account on https://git.wiki.kernel.org/ , created a user
>>> page and put there a link to my blog. That's always the first thing i
>>> do on wikis to which i plan to contribute, because that's the easiest
>>> way to tell the world who i am before i start changing pages that
>>> other people wrote.
>>
>> I say this without malice: Nobody really cares who you are.
>
> And you are quite right, but from several years of experience with
> wikis i saw much more misunderstanding coming from editing without
> creating a user page than from creating a user page without editing,
> so what happened to me today was quite shocking.
>
> And all the more: if you don't care about user pages, just lock them
> for editing.

the git developers (and the portion of the community that they represent) tend to care far more about the content of the contribution (either in documentation or in code) than who the author is.

I agree that if user pages aren't wanted on the wiki they should just be disabled, but for whatever reason they are not.

there is a lot of spamming happening nowdays in wikis and other web forums, so it's not too surprising to me that a page that is just 'this is who I am and here is a link to my blog' would be considered spam. There are companies who are out there trying to get improved google ratings by having lots of pages with links to their page. many of them do this by buying lots of domains and hosting them in different places, but there are a lot that are unethical enough to put pages very similar to what you describe as having posted on any site they can manage to get into.

so, what Michael posted really is true (or at least very close to true), the git community really doesn't care who you are, feel free to contibute, ask questions, etc. As you contribute you will build a reputation within git, but you will never be grilled about your outside expericance, and unless you have something directly related to what you are submitting (i.e. I did this before, <here> and it worked really well) nobody will care about it.

Remember that when Linus started coding linux, he was a nobody, and the established experts were telling him that what he was doing was the wrong way to do anything. With that sort of background, the community cares about what you do, not who you are.

David Lang