A Final Solution to the Wiki Question

[Null]

TL;DR: We need a system to consolidate big threads into an encyclopedic entry.

As we head into the new decade I feel pressed to finalize a plan for something that's been bothering me for years. Our largest threads are too large, their history gets buried, and the topics become inaccessible to new people. A solution we had prior was the Lolcow Wiki, which has since been abandoned. The largest issue with it was expecting people to work for free but also obey certain writing standards. It was a job to write a good entry and very few people were up for the task.

Ultimately, all solutions I have for consolidating our knowledge and archives into something digestible for a casual viewer require work. A lot of work. Community work and my own personal labor in developing frameworks.

There are three main considerations I have.

1. Ease of Use
The harder something is, the fewer people will do it for free. Wikis are a midway point between just making a casual forum post and doing something like fleshing out a custom webpage. When you add in rules for how something should be made, most people won't bother.

2. Ease of Construction and Maintenance
This one falls entirely on me, but some things are just harder to keep running than others. The Lolcow Wiki was constantly plagued with maintenance issues which only compounded people not even wanting to try writing articles, but as it's just a WikiMedia installation, the cost of setting it up was effectively zero. Homebrew solutions require more of each, and some drastic ideas would require significant development time.

3. Domains
Some ideas involve custom extensions for this website. This centralizes our community on one domain, for better and for worse. A single domain is easier to shut down and is consolidated in search results, making things harder to find and easier to censor. This includes with government DNS blocks. The upside is, people don't need to make second accounts or ever leave the site. I've tried branching out with things like the https://jonathanyaniv.org sites, and could conceivably do that for all big lolcows.


I have a couple ideas of how I want to do this. None of them satisfy me. They're either a ton of work I can't really mentally justify because I'd be doing it 4free when I could be putting that towards paid gigs, or they're a half-measure that probably create as many problems as they solve.

I want to hear some suggestions from fresh minds before I tell anyone my ideas, so submit forward any you have.

 

[Franjevina]

I demand wiki page about me .

 

[Gustav Schuchardt]

Here's an idea. Have a tag which you put into posts, let's call it #wikiworthy. You'd have a bot that would scan the thread for #wikiworthy posts and add links to them to the Wiki article.

To make it work properly you'd perhaps need more than a simple tag. E.g. a date and a summary of the post would be good. That way the Wiki would have [Date] [Summary] and a link back to the original post.

It's almost like a reverse hyperlink. A normal hyperlink is <a href="url">summary</a> and the syntax means you can easily add in more attributes. A #wikiworthy tag needs at least a date and a summary and probably more things would be handy. So the syntax needs to allow for extensibility.

On the upside, if you invented the reverse hyperlink and it caught on you'd be able to look Tim Berners Lee in the eye and call him a faggot and, worse, a Limey faggot.

 

[wrangled tard]

Maybe have a separate board called wiki or something with posts that can be edited by anyone that links off to the discussion threads instead of visitors being overwhelmed by seeing so many pages/replies.

 

[byuu]

Have some easy way for jannys/OP to mark posts in a thread as important updates.
And provide a page that lists all marked posts in a thread for easy viewing which also link back to the respective position in the thread.

This would be very easy to use and make huge threads much easier to navigate but I don't know how easy it is to hack this into xenforo.

 

[Dear Leader Pol Pot]

Im down to write articles and no life the wiki. Just give me a list of shit you want done first and i wont go to bed for the next couple days.

 

[Kulee Baba]

Have some easy way for jannys/OP to mark posts in a thread as important updates.
And provide a page that lists all marked posts in a thread for easy viewing which also link back to the respective position in the thread.

This would be very easy to use and make huge threads much easier to navigate but I don't know how easy it is to hack this into xenforo.

It'd be very nice if important news worthy posts (that make the Habbenings Feed) were highlighted in a color that signified their importance. That'd make skimming thru a long lolcow thread much easier.

 

[Warecton565]

what about just "pinning" actually important posts in a thread, and having a separate view letting people browse only the important pins. basically no work

 

[Pizza Time]

A cow wiki directly linked with KF could be called a Kiwiki.

I personally enjoy the idea of a dedicated wiki a la Encyclopedia Dramatica or Lolcow Wiki, but I understand how much work would have to go into that. I'd be willing to help any way I can.

 

[Dear Leader Pol Pot]

A cow wiki directly linked with KF could be called a Kiwiki.

I personally enjoy the idea of a dedicated wiki a la Encyclopedia Dramatica or Lolcow Wiki, but I understand how much work would have to go into that. I'd be willing to help any way I can.

A kiwiki would be what Encyclopedia Dramatica was back before 2008.

 

[Varg Did Nothing Wrong]

Any thread about a specific person or group that's over 20 pages is likely Wiki-worthy.

I like the idea because a LOT of info about people is revealed in threads like that, but good fucking luck reading through a thread with 573 pages and trying to glean any real information from it. Very rarely does the OP ever update the first post with relevant information that comes out, sometimes the OP is banned or inactive if the thread is 2+ years old.

All in all a good idea, the question is who will do it.

 

[meinhausinneuberlin]

1. I suggest trying an assortment of threads both big and small. People will line up to make something about Yaniv but few people would edit about Jacob Wohl and its good to do a test run rather than try everything at once and dial in effort required in editing for specific sizes of threads.

2. We need a honest to god template too not just a suggestion to look at other wiki pages and see how to make yours. This might make the wiki a bit more stale especially for smaller articles but things being a bit stale is way better then things being an unreadable mess. This will also make moderation/editing much simpler for everyone.
I also suggest having articles devoted the funny stuff the cow produces and letting people get a rundown with short summaries rather than trying to make the summaries funny and in depth like with ED. There are articles not about cows that are funny on ED because they have talented people writing them. If you can get people who write really well then all the better but its probably a good idea not to aim for that.

I know you have mixed feelings about trying the lolcow wiki again but there is a demand and if it is successful it could also make Mad at the Internet streams easier because preparing streams will be easier and it might be easier to find threads to do streams on if they are arranged in wiki format.

 

[Yotsubaaa]

Have some easy way for jannys/OP to mark posts in a thread as important updates.
And provide a page that lists all marked posts in a thread for easy viewing which also link back to the respective position in the thread.

This would be very easy to use and make huge threads much easier to navigate but I don't know how easy it is to hack this into xenforo.

what about just "pinning" actually important posts in a thread, and having a separate view letting people browse only the important pins. basically no work

I think I've been manually doing something similar to this in the Trump Impeachment Megathread (e.g. here and here). Is this sort of what you guys were getting at with your idea (but make it more sophisticated/forum-integrated I guess)?

 

[A Logging Company]

I don't know how much coding this would require, but imagine how great it would be if you could sort threads by reactions, so you could sort by the post with the most "Informative" reaction. This would help people update OPs, write potential articles, and give new comers to a thread a way to find all the most informative post over all the throw away zingers of the moment posts.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

I stand by my ancient feedback suggestion: Add a ‘newsworthy’ sticker that counts as a neutral reaction and give a thread option to display only posts that have a certain number of them. This wouldn’t be a perfect solution but I don’t think it would be hard to implement unless xenforo’s queries for individual posts are super heavy on the backend.

Make 2020 the year of the readable Onision thread.

ETA : A way to collect all the posted media in a thread into one gallery would be really nice too. A lot of the time you can learn a lot about what makes a cow interesting just by skimming through their media even without commentary.

 

[Mister Qwerty]

How about making a timeline to the wiki. When a significant event happens to a lolcow or community add it to the timeline with a short description and a link to the thread.

The problem with something like the Weeb Wars thread is that more and more new characters got added to it and got hard to follow who’s who and why they got involved in that soap opera.

 

[Jack Awful]

I suggested this a while ago, but what about an expandable "IMPORTANT INFO" box at the top of long threads?

It would have bullet points and links to important posts, like "PAGE 12: Joe Autism leaks his own butthole selfies" that can be added to/edited by users approved to maintain it.

A wiki would probably be better, but I thought I might as well pitch it again.

 

[Disc]

How about making a timeline to the wiki. When a significant event happens to a lolcow or community add it to the timeline with a short description and a link to the thread.

The problem with something like the Weeb Wars thread is that more and more new characters got added to it and got hard to follow who’s who and why they got involved in that soap opera.

That's just a consequence of a stupidity snowball, and having a thread meant to cover the general actions of groups with their own lolcow threads.

Can permissions be given down to the thread level? If so, it'd be plausible to make certain already invested people (like GeneralFriendliness in the Star Wars thread) arbitrators of some sort.

As a slight change from Gustav's idea, rather than just letting the bot send through anything tagged newsworthy, maybe have the bot bring these interesting notes to some meatbag who can take a list, say 'yes' or 'no' to each one, then let the bot add the yes'd posts?

For most threads, you'd only need, say, a monthly check-in. For the fastest threads, maybe weekly.

The problem with using reactions as a basis is that it's a fairly drilled in behaviour to use negative reactions because of a cow's actions, regardless of the quality of the post itself. Trying to get this herd of cats to reliably use a certain reaction in a certain way is unlikely unless you, at the very least, add in a new one SPECIFICALLY for that purpose.

 

[Knojkamarangasan_#4]

Hm... That's a tricky question, while I am aware that the wiki overall was a bit of a mess, the well written stuff such as the Wu stuff was amazing and I've always desired an ed-style thing seeing how much more easily it is to be able to be used. Idk maybe start up a separate board or something were people can start writing articles and summarize stuff and then eventually the good ones can be compiled into a bigger article?
(for example, a very basic ones could be bex hairstyle story or op)

Just some thoughts I have. Obviously starting with the bigger ones would probably be better but then people can read through the articles, get input and finalize them. For how it would be organized, I'm not sure.

 

[No Exit]

A cow wiki directly linked with KF could be called a Kiwiki.

Or we could call the cow wiki the cwiki and maybe even have a separate forum for it, the cwiki forums if you will.