Hi,

Lately I have seen several new wikipages being created that cover subjects that IMO bare no meaning on Programming (in FreePascal / Lazarus).

E.g. Pages explaining what a network is.

I don't think such pages belong in our wiki.
But then again I could be wrong.

Opinions?

Bart

I agree with your opinion.

Michael.

Also agreed.

There are more than enough references for people to find out general IT concepts/technologies.
IMO it only is appropriate on the wiki if application of such a technology using Lazarus/FreePascal is discussed.

If you explain a Pascal library about networks, then you can explain networks with pov of the library. General explanations without any relation to a Pascal library should be replaced with links to web pages about that topic.

Mattias

Mattias Gaertner wrote

If you explain a Pascal library about networks, then you can explain networks with pov of the library. General explanations without any relation to a Pascal library should be replaced with links to web pages about that topic.

My thoughts exactly.
But, who takes action (as in: ask the author to remove the page (and explain why), and eventually remove it if the author does not respond)?
(I don't even know how to remove a page on the wiki...)

Bart

There's always a risk that the author has created the page as the first step to putting in something relevant, but if he doesn't make that clear with e.g. a "work in progress" introduction or at least an explanation in the talk page then it's at his own risk.

I'm a bit suspicious that if the author's completely unknown then it could be some sort of scam. People who go by more than one handle should make sure that they're cross-referenced somewhere, e.g. in the wiki's user page.

In some of the pages I wrote in "discussion" tab: "Why is this page in this wiki? It has no bearing or programming" or something similar. The original author has not responded to that.

Bart

looking at (which I found by looking for recent talk) http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/vpn/de

This page has NEITHER
- pascal relevance
- nor any significant amount of work that went into it.

Any such "dummy articles, written in 5 minutes or less", I would suggest to delete with short, or no notice.

If the author can't be identified as a known user and won't explain his rationale then he and his contributions should be treated as suspect- particularly if the contribution is cut-and-paste from elsewhere.

If he's not keeping an eye on the article and its talk page then I'd suspect that he's sounding out the wiki as a potential home for link spam or similar. I'm having to do quite a lot of manual spam filtering at the moment, and I'm seeing quite a lot of subject lines that look like they've come from Google Books. So a certain species of vermin is, regrettably, getting smarter.

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

If the author can't be identified as a known user and won't explain his rationale then he and his contributions should be treated as suspect- particularly if the contribution is cut-and-paste from elsewhere.

The author is a known user in the sense that he has contributed a lot of documentation on FPC keywords and has responded on posts I and others made on his talk apge before.
Have you actually looked at those wiki pages?

I suspect he's trying to document things but going too far (in our eyes).

Seems highly unlikely given the above.

The link Martin put up is in German and in view of its brevity I assumed it was a deletion message :-)

I suspect he's trying to document things but going too far (in our eyes).

Or is writing a VPN manager in Pascal.

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

> I suspect he's trying to document things but going too far (in our eyes). Or is writing a VPN manager in Pascal.

I doubt it.
He's written similar pages on WAN and LAN.
It's not spam, or otherwise written with malicious intent. He's just not responding to the "Discussion page", and I don't know how to get his attention.

Bart

Sometimes legitimate-looking but offtopic Wiki pages can be used as command scripts for botnet control.
E.g. botnet components periodically poll known wiki page. Whilst some keywords appeared there - party begins.

regards,
Anton

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Perhaps search for him in the German Lazarus forum?

http://www.lazarusforum.de/search.php?keywords=olaf&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sr=posts&sk=t&sd=d&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Suche