[lolinder]

For me the key element of a wiki is that anyone can modify it and the changes show up instantly without pre-emptive gatekeeping. In this case it looks like contributing requires getting a PR approved by the maintainer on GitHub.

If GitHub were just the UI for submitting changes I think that could actually be quite effective as a lightweight wiki solution, so long as people's changes are deployed right away and don't require a maintainer to merge them. But it's likely very difficult to do that in a secure way with a standard static site generator.

[orev]

For many years now, spammers have made the “anyone can edit” approach completely unworkable for all but the most popular wiki sites.

[lolinder]

That is as may be (though I'm not sure it's quite as dire as all that), but I'd argue that if it isn't true that anyone can edit and see their changes instantly then it isn't really a wiki.

That doesn't mean wikis can't have bans, require captchas, or lock pages that are frequently abused to tenured registered users, but the tooling needs to support instant updates and freedom to edit needs to be the default. Otherwise you're looking at a static site or a CMS, not a wiki.

[orev]

Yes, I agree with your point that a realtime edit/publish cycle is a key part of the “wiki” aspect, instead of needing to do a build. I hadn’t considered that part of it.

[threatofrain]

The most popular wiki sites just means that the community has to police the problem. Someone has to police the problem or else, even without spammers, you have people fighting grammar and typography wars over the math subreddits. You wake up one day and realize someone added their favorite kind of commas to every sentence across every major math article.

There needs to be gatekeeping.

[frde_me]

Having no kind of gatekeeping or moderation whatsoever before changes are published seems like a fantasy of another age. Nowadays, the wiki would be co-opted by some type of spam or malicious activity basically instantly.

[api]

It wasn't a fantasy, but it does belong to another age. The Internet was small back then and a much higher trust society. Today it's a war zone and everything must be locked down.

"Speak friend, and enter."

[lolinder]

I didn't suggest no gatekeeping or moderation whatsoever. I explicitly qualified 'gatekeeping' with the word 'pre-emptive'.

A wiki allows anyone to edit by default and their changes are deployed without verification by another user. Moderation takes the form of locking specific pages on a case-by-case basis to users with tenure (who can still edit instantly) and rolling back misguided changes.

There's nothing wrong with having a site that isn't a wiki, but this is just a static site maintained by one person, so calling it a wiki is odd.

[kybernetikos]

I suspect that when they call it a 'wiki', what they really mean is a 'hypertext'.

[janmarsal]

I'm gonna call hypertext 'microwiki' from now on