Why is the unity wiki so aggressively hostile?

http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Main_Page

For a start, anonymous editing is disabled. Who does that?

But fair enough, i went to make an account. And instead of the automated account creation like most websites have, you have to Request An Account.

The site makes you fill in a goddamn job appplication. It even requests your CV, and references. and requires you to write a 50 word biography What the F*** man.

I never asked for this, i just want to update one of the sample scripts on there. It's no wonder there are so few of them, and so outdated. Everyone is locked out.

I get that spammers are a problem, but this as a solution is pretty absurd. Spammers are dealt with just fine by using a bot, and a vigilant community that undoes their vandalism. in any case this is a specialist wiki for a niche game development community, we're not exactly a massive priority target.

Fix this please, this is absurd

 

My understanding was the Wiki was not owned by Unity Technologies? I may be wrong here.

 

Are you volunteering to manually remove all the spam?

With the word (optional) next to it.

Hardly niche, and you have no idea. Before this, at least 95% of the edits were spam.

I think a lot of the activity moved to the asset store. There's quite a lot of stuff there, though, but yes some of it is outdated.

They own the domain now (it used to be unifycommunity.com) but I don't think they have much if anything to do with running it. Although it is linked to at unity3d.com/community.

--Eric

 

better captchas can cut down a lot of it, a bot that scans new uploads and moderates them as appropriate can do most of the rest. it works very well for wikipedia

the domain is under unity3d.com, that means it's publicly linked. itts existence, and state, reflects on unioty technologies and it is their responsibility as long as its under the same roof.

 

Simple solution. hook it into the rest of the unity community. Require a certain small number of reputation points in order to make edits. make it use the same system of accounts

 

The issue is that UT is using third party web applications for forums, answer hub etc. Like Eric said UT doesn't run wiki page (as far as I understand).
In other words, implement in such system into premade applications would be a quite tedious work.

 

Have you seen the epic spam attacks lately?

 

Fixing a problem isn't the responsibility of the person who reports it.

I hope this isn't the case. People entering information are under the assumption that the information is being stored by Unity. If that is not the case then this needs better disclosure.

 

I wonder where all my entered information is going (to aid in 'identity confirmation'). I'll just check the privacy policy...



Might be time for a cleanup and some clearer disclosure about what the wiki is (not what it 'was').

 

Indeed, I suspect Eric's point was more that someone has to get it done, and other solutions require significantly more manual labor, which someone would have to volunteer to do (or pay to have done).

I get the impression that the wiki is a bit of a legacy layover in the dreary, grey, no-man's-land between "lets get it up and running" and "it's time to close it down". As a contributor the licensing/privacy policy issue is one that would keep me away from it. As a curator it's also an issue that would make me groan and look for something more urgent/important to do, because it's a mess I'd never feel like dealing with.

 

Yep. Saying "the community can take care of it" doesn't really cut it I'm afraid. In real life, the spam was a big problem and the only reasonable solution in that situation was a higher-than-usual barrier of entry. Some of it is over-the-top, like asking for a CV, but it is optional, so you can just ignore it instead of choosing to be offended.

--Eric

 

Perhaps this can be alleviated a little by adding a little more about it being optional. Personally, if I saw someone was asking for a CV but saying it's not strictly required I'd still suspect that there's some level of competitiveness and that those who don't bother won't get a look in.

If you hilight that the whole thing is about sorting people from bots, rather than experts from newbies, people would feel better about not providing one? (Especially if they're regular community contributors.)

Also, for the sake of clarity...

...is this the case or not?

 

I wouldn't be surprised if it was closed down given Unity's current focus on 5. But perhaps they should just freeze it. Remove the ability to sign up and edit and leave it as a historical record until something proper can be implemented that Unity are actually willing to take responsibility for.

. The identity confirmation is apparently not optional. Providing a CV to help with the identification is. But this silly pedantry is ignoring the spirit of the complaint.

 

how does unity answers prevent spam?

 

Moderators manually review each question to see if there is any sign of spam.

 

Lets not get hasty and close it down!

The place is still full of great scripts. I quite frequently find myself needing a standard solution for a generic problem I have no interest in, or need for customisation. Things like triangulation or creating scriptable objects. Generally there is something on the wiki I can use.

As an alternate suggestion, lets require CVs before users can post on the forums or answers. I'm not so much concerned about spam, through this would help eric and his ilk. It would just cut down the masses of users who have no interest in doing work to get their game running.

 

Off topic but if you need holes in your polygons take a look at LibTesDotNet. Now back to the regular programming.

 

i'll bet you a hundred bucks there's waaay more new questiojns on UA, than new wiki pages. (and maybe even more than edits)

just hook up the same systems, with the same reward mechanisms. Add in a reasonably intelligent bot to moderate things and delete obvious spam. you can just buy bots off the shelf, or even grab source code from many popualar free ones, and integrate that.

 

Maybe UT has something else in mind right now. :/

 

Isn't that what the volunteer moderators are for?

 

It's a completely different site; there's no "just" about it. Of course there are various solutions, but they're all way more work than writing 50 words, which anyone who's remotely serious about contributing could dash off in a minute or two. Basically it's a third-party site that Unity bought the domain for, since there's a bunch of useful stuff there and it would be a shame if it vanished. But don't expect it to have any official support like the forums and UA have.

--Eric