UPDATE: we have now had a few meetings. Notes and results here: Forum & Wiki Discussion - Google Docs
One of the things from the last curators meeting was for:
Rufus/Simon: organise a dialogue around forum/wiki strategy (and create proposal for strategy in this area)
I’m booting this thread as way to kick this off and invite others who are interested to attend and share their thoughts. We can also create a shared google doc for drafting of ideas and a proposal.
/cc @Asimong
Thanks for kicking this off @rufuspollock great to see momentum building around the forum/wiki strategy.
Just to share a quick update: the Forum tent will be launching next Tuesday during the Oasis Community call. I’d love to share the senses collected during that session and would really appreciate being looped into the strategy discussions as they evolve.
It would also be fantastic if you and/or @Asimong could join the session… it’s a great opportunity to gather insights and align on direction.
I’m very interested in the complex of issues are around content, content management, education, outreach, and onboarding. To me, that all generally hangs together (or it should). To put a bit of sequence on all that:
Generally speaking, the wiki is the foundation for all the other channels, but all the other channels are more interactive and participatory. It’s just that having a structured reference up and widely available will generally enable content-centric discussions to go further, faster.
I take one of the questions here is whether we want to stick with the existing Wiki (currently linked in the sidebar) or integrate the Wiki with the forum.
I’ve looked into Wiki integration in discourse- the way it works is that some posts can be tagged as ‘Wiki’ posts, meaning they can be edited on an ongoing basis by anyone with basic permisions. This system can be used to replicate much of the functionality of a Wiki - we could have a Wiki homepage, say, a bit like the current Wiki homepage.
Not especially recommending this right now, but I think it’s important to establish what functionality is possible as a starting point.
On balance, I prefer keeping the wiki on the sidebar and referring to the wiki in forum posts. To me, having the wiki as one forum thread among many confuses site navigation. However, allowing the wiki to updated directly from a forum thread would not pose any problem. It’s just, if looking for something in the wiki, it’s easier to got straight to the wiki.
Example: Here are some Theories of Change currently featured in 2R discussions.
We have had good conversations in the past about the different functionality and use of different forms of media. My own way of expressing this depends on ephemerality or duration of relevance:
These aren’t hard and fast divisions, of course, but I’m happy to explain my take on this and why it makes great sense to me. The different functionality is adapted to the different contexts. And there are so many examples where you can either see the functionality working well, or see it misused.
Reaction emojis can serve as a useful bridge as well, which weren’t in common use until a few years ago. A reaction to a forum contribution is naturally ephemeral, but if expressed as an emoji it doesn’t clutter up the main thread. So…
I agree that it doesn’t make sense to have “the wiki” as a forum thread, but I don’t think this is the intention. Talking about the wiki makes sense to me as a forum thread.
On the other hand, updating the wiki directly from the forum makes no sense to me, as it would confuse the different timespans of relevance and ephemerality.
A wiki, as I see it, exists long-term partly to enable progressive cross-linking, as more relationality becomes apparent. Ideally we would be able to functionally cross-link different wikis, but no one to my knowledge has implemented that functionality.
What could indeed be useful, and what I see as the value in the position expressed by @rufuspollock , is to be able to take forum material and easily cut and paste onto the wiki. Here on Discourse I really like the simple functionality that allowed me to cut and past the above two sentences along with the source metadata, allowing future readers to go straight back to the source to see it in context. I wish it were that easy in a wiki, and indeed between a forum and a wiki.
So, one practical project I would love to see funded and implemented is a suite of software that recognise the functionality that is appropriate at different timescales for different purposes: both for encouraging collective conversation and the related sense of community, and for the creation and maintenance of a knowledge commons that both serves the hosting community and acts as a learning resource for others with an interest — potentially drawing them in.
One extra point added later … … one of the key factors in usability is the ability for people to understand and predict what will happen when they take some action through the interface; and another obvious one is to provide affordances for actions that are most likely to be wanted. Confusion puts people off in many ways. To be avoided wherever possible!
I should add that I haven’t actually yet investigated the “wiki” functionality of Discourse. If anyone has, and has compared and contrasted functionality on Discourse with functionality on other wikis, I would be glad to hear of it. At present, it looks like the Wiki link on the sidebar just redirects to the main wiki.
Just as an experiment, I’ve turned this entry into a Discourse “wiki”. All it seems to do is to make the entry editable by anyone, which is fine, but not really a wiki … and, very confusing!
(Editing just to see what happens). Can you figure out who I am?
Yes I could Robert by looking at the history. But now is it possible to see the layered history? It does appear so, on the left you can go through the history.
This checks one feature of wikis. The other essential feature, of course, is easy linking by page title. Is that possible? Normally in most wikis it is done with [[double square brackets]].
Apparently not, then. I conclude that in Discourse, what they call a wiki post is just a post that is open to editing by other people. Cool enough, but no cigar.
So, if I say [[Wiki Homepage]], does that get picked up? No … I need to do it through the link menu… Wiki Homepage
To demonstrate how this could work in practice, I’ve created a Wiki post in the way we might actually want to use it here: Wiki Homepage
I’ve included in that posts some notes about how the functionality could work.
You can implement this apparently with a plugin: Discourse Wikilinks Plugin - Plugin - Discourse Meta
For me the major benefit of integration in one place is that i can just type ctrl+k and start searching for posts or wiki entries to link to and can easily filter for wiki by starting with wiki. This compares to having to go to another site and look for the entry. This and the overall UX fluidity is the attraction of separate but integrated. This is why i think LessWrong does it this way.