Talk:OCSP

Vote for deletion

Rather than creating a dedicated article for the definition it could have been added to http://kb.mozillazine.org/General_concepts or whatever article used that terminology could have linked to the corresponding Wikipedia article.

I notice that http://kb.mozillazine.org/OCSP_error_when_accessing_secure_sites has OCSP link to its definition on wikipedia. Every other article that contains "OSCP" seems to have it only in a link to the "OSCP error when accessing secure sites article", except for About:config_entries which contains several settings that contain that string. I nominate this article for deletion. Tanstaafl 09:54, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Response

I created OCSP because I found security.OCSP.enabled and security.OCSP.require in my config. The article About:config entries describes these but doesn't say what "OCSP" is! Since more than one article covers OCSP, it made sense to me to briefly describe it in one place instead of restating it over and over.

The other benefit of making an article for a concept is you can find all the articles covering the term by going to the OCSP article and clicking What links here; this is important functionality when MediaWiki has a relatively poor search feature, and it's lost if you just link to Wikipedia.

On the other hand, it's overkill to have an article just to define an acronym and point to Wikipedia for more details, and in the case of OCSP, "over and over" is just two articles :-) .

That General concepts page is an interesting idea but I notice the KB doesn't link to it, e.g. MIME types doesn't redirect there. Are you thinking that if people don't understand a term they'll search for it and you hope they'll read General concepts first??

Ideally MediaWiki would have a Terms namespace where you could put simple definitions and they would display as regular text with a tooltip and not as a heavyweight hyperlink. That way knowledgeable users wouldn't be distracted by so many hyperlinks, but beginners could get the basic idea of a term just by hovering over it. That's unlikely to happen; the next best thing might be a template, e.g. {{term|OCSP}}, that inserts a consistent OCSP ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Certificate_Status_Protocol Online Certificate Status Protocol]) string wherever a term is (first?) used.

Anyway, sorry to ramble. I'm fine with deletion of this page; good luck ensuring consistency.

-- Spage 11:50, 8 October 2009 (UTC)