emilypi:
I don’t think wikis serve a purpose beyond aggregating immutable data […]
A curious comment considering the manifestly-mutable nature of wikis - wouldn’t a more static format then be more appropriate?
tomjaguarpaw:
[…] search engines often send confused new users to outdated and confusing wiki pages […]
Such is the nature of wikis and similar online forums - they’re a semi-organised collection of individual web-pages edited by a variety of people with varying levels of knowledge and experience. Some are well-written or edited; as for the rest…not so much. Of course, this is irrelevant to the average search engine: if the search term matches them, such pages will be in the results no matter how outdated and confusing they are.
(Just imagine using a wiki to learn how to drive - aren’t you glad you had access to a much-more organised source of information?)
As for making the current wiki read-only, that happened to the previous wiki and its content - from the few pages I’ve seen and transferred over recently, their content being:
little more than an uncut conversation between anonymous participants, in addition to being obsolete
…isn’t exactly rare (quote from here).
The results of a second freeze (on the current wiki) probably wouldn’t be much different. As for the more general problem of content: well, there’s a reason why academic texts are usually written by people with a degree or three to spare…
(…as for the suggestion the wiki not be used for documentation: it only solves that problem - the difficulties of stale or garbled content aren’t limited to documentation.)