I run a discourse site for another community and we make a lot of use of Discourse wikis to better organize our site. A Discourse wiki is simply a post that anyone can edit it. An entire category can be dedicated to a wiki or there can be one post in each category. @PaulWalters suggested Using Tags for your Forum Topics. I think this could also add more structure, but you need moderator status to add them to some else’s post.
Of course, the problem with a wiki is that it needs to be manually updated for it to be effective. However, this strikes me as a helpful community.
The basic idea is a few of us can start compiling helpful posts. Here are three potential wiki topics:
No rush-- just a suggestion from a grateful forum user. My motivation: this community has been so helpful to me for so many years I want to give back.
The simplest thing would be to change the min trust to edit or create a wiki. I have mine set to basic user, but maybe you would set this community to “member.” These are people that have been around for a bit in reading and creating posts. Any trusted user would be able to create a new post and turn it into a wiki.
The more involved approach would be to create a new category called wiki and check the box "Make new topics wikis by default. Anytime someone posts in this category the first post would be a wiki.
Measure twice, cut once: rather than simply open up existing categories and thus a lot of threads, perhaps we might add some new categories intended as wikis from the outset. Does this make sense?
I don’t know of a public wiki. . . normally you can’t join a forum and start editing posts. You typically need to build up trust.
The change is subtle. People who have the correct permissions will see an edit button like this. . . the user experience is just like you are editing your own post.
You can see who is editing things and roll back to any prior version. Here is a sample from my forum.
FWIW, I’m not a moderator, and I can add tags to threads. The tags are added by clicking the pencil at the top of the thread next to the thread’s title. They are not added to individual posts, but to the thread.
I had made the “let’s use tags” suggestion earlier, and it’s turned out to be a useless idea since it’s an added burden, hard to moderate, and probably never paid attention to by 99% of readers. So, if I could, I would retract my suggestion.
I’m a lowly “member” of this community Your trust level is “regular” so you might be able to do this at your access level. As a member, I can only tag my posts with existing tags. I can’t tag the posts of other users.
The default way Discourse is designed out of the box is that you gain more privileges the more you use it.
This is not how I experience it on my site or on this site.
Just like our individual tinderbox files this discourse site benefits from gardening.
I would be very happy to contribute, help moderate, a wiki. There was a Tinderbox wiki a lifetime ago, and it was very good until it wasn’t. It takes repeated intention to keep a good wiki working.
IMO, the gold standard user-maintained wiki is the DocuWiki-based KeyboardMaestro wiki. That wiki is almost entirely dependent on Uber-user JMichaelTX – who also keeps the KM forum ticking and tightly organized. If Mark B wants to share that task with a few readers here, I think that would great, and not put the thing on @mwra to make successful in the long run – the v e r y long run.
Yes that is a great wiki. DocuWiki is great. Right now I’m simply suggesting adding a little more structure to Discourse instead of starting a new project.
This is beyond the scope of my original message, but there is a very good plug-in for discourse called Knowledge Explorer. You can see how it works here.
Yes, I totally agree. There are many willing and helpful people that I think would pitch in.
Your trust level is “regular” so you might be able to do this at your access level. As a member, I can only tag my posts with existing tags. I can’t tag the posts of other users.