A Final Solution to the Wiki Question

[Pepito The Cat]

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.

That's just piling work for the mods and if you leave it up to the users, they'll end up tagging retarded shit.

The wiki project was fine but I personally found it boring. Part of the reason we like to know about lolcows is the humor of the comments, not just the people themselves. That´s why the Mad at the Internet streams and ED are so popular. If you make boring-ass dossiers people will lose interest fast.

 

[Double Dee]

Add the ability to sort posts by reaction, for those of us who don't want to dig through a hundred-plus pages of God-knows what for content. Certain posts (mainly those rated Informative/Winner) could be used to fill out a Wiki, if we want to bring that project back.

I would love to contribute to the Wiki myself, but I agree it's hard when you've got dumbassery largely mixed with actual posts.

 

[Iwasamwillbe]

Adding on to what others have said, the bot needs to collect information in a "concentric" manner, centered around the OP, then gradually filling up with posts that make important updates on the activities of the lolcow, which would be tagged "important", "wiki-worthy", "big update", "extremely informative", etc. The criteria for the tags may be found in the ratings system, as an example.

Of course, some effort would still be needed to manually verify information from posts, but a lot less than it otherwise would. Don't want to plague the wiki with inaccurate information.

 

[Dear Leader Pol Pot]

I know it will be boring but the best way we are going to have to do this with a wiki is to actually go through everything by hand. That is the best thing about wikis though, you can get a good outline of the article and allow others to come in and fill it out.

 

[Solomon Goldsmith]

You already use Xenforo so why not raise the money for a copy of ThemeHouse's MediaWiki bridge? You get something that people already know how to use right here on the Kiwi Farms with the ability to associate specific threads with specific wiki pages.

 

[Trigger Me Timbers]

Ok so on the data entry side. Could we leverage existing threads by having a bot that when triggered. Will crawl a thread and identify areas of frequent posting (so it can estimate a saga) and pick out posts that have a lot of (informative) reactions and lots of attachments/archive.is and mix all that to produce a semi legible list to be the ground work for a wiki?
I know this would be too much work as you said you would rather put energy into paid Gigs but I love the idea of having our existing treasure trove leveraged easily without solely relying on top autists.

On the data display / wiki side I have no idea. All I want to say they are good if you have a lot of content but a bunch of scare pages makes any wiki a drag to read.

 

[xX_rAcE_wAr_420_Xx]

Add the ability to sort posts by reaction, for those of us who don't want to dig through a hundred-plus pages of God-knows what for content. Certain posts (mainly those rated Informative/Winner) could be used to fill out a Wiki, if we want to bring that project back.

I would love to contribute to the Wiki myself, but I agree it's hard when you've got dumbassery largely mixed with actual posts.

Adding on to what others have said, the bot needs to collect information in a "concentric" manner, centered around the OP, then gradually filling up with posts that make important updates on the activities of the lolcow, which would be tagged "important", "wiki-worthy", "big update", "extremely informative", etc. The criteria for the tags may be found in the ratings system, as an example.

Of course, some effort would still be needed to manually verify information from posts, but a lot less than it otherwise would. Don't want to plague the wiki with inaccurate information.

Ok so on the data entry side. Could we leverage existing threads by having a bot that when triggered. Will crawl a thread and identify areas of frequent posting (so it can estimate a saga) and pick out posts that have a lot of (informative) reactions and lots of attachments/archive.li and mix all that to produce a semi legible list to be the ground work for a wiki?
I know this would be too much work as you said you would rather put energy into paid Gigs but I love the idea of having our existing treasure trove leveraged easily without solely relying on top autists.

On the data display / wiki side I have no idea. All I want to say they are good if you have a lot of content but a bunch of scare pages makes any wiki a drag to read.

These take care of the single biggest point of effort, which is crawling an enormous thread for relevant posts. Unfortunately, not much can be done about the second - writing the articles - aside from just having people chip away at it. Having the wiki page start with a gallery of links at the bottom (to high-rating posts) would provide information even if the article itself is sparse to begin with.

 

[Chicken Lo Mein]

From what I can gather, the idea is that there will be a bot that will group together tagged posts into a psuedo-article, and tagged posts are important to the topic, right? I think really funny, yet related posts should be tagged too (it adds to the articles aesthetic)

Btw I'm down for this idea, it honestly sounds very useful and fun

 

[vertexwindi]

I saw a lot of ideas involving pinning/tagging/whatever posts. Honestly why can't you just filter by stickers? At the very least having the ability to filter out any post that's got less than, say, 5 informative ratings would be a good starting point and wouldn't involve having to go through large threads to retroactively pin shit. Finally make those things useful.

 

[???]

The ability to add tags to specific posts within a thread can, when used with the in-thread search function, act like a half-assed wiki. It doesn't require any new tech, just a few rules and formatting arguments to hash out. Moving decision making down from staff and distributing it gives users a sense of ownership, which increases engagement.

Example: #update tag in a post is used to add new info about a subject, Users can type #update into the thread search bar to filter out the fluff and see a sequence of updates on the subject, thereby gaining an understanding of the subject as in a narrative.

Example: #connection tag can be used to document connections with known cows.

Example: #priority tag can be used to document time-sensitive information which new users can investigate and archive for brownie points, or to add new leads on possible lols to be milked (new usernames/accounts uncovered, new events,...)

 

[cheese shaped mouse]

+1 for sorting by reactions in lieu of an actual wiki - when reading a new thread the OP is interesting, but it's a struggle to go through the posts of the early thread that don't contain much content. I can't imagine having a wiki page would be any more appealing.

Sorting by reactions (most reactions/types of reactions) keeps the humor of the thread itself intact, while getting quick into a subject by seeing what events caused the most reaction from farmers.

 

[Questionable Ceviche]

Taking another crack at a wiki or wiki-style community effort website would be a ton of work up front but would be not too bad to maintain from a user standpoint after the giant backlog is uploaded. Having a way for mods to tag good posts in threads would make it a ton easier for us to get articles up to a specific quality threshold initially as well as make threads more readable. It's impossible for new people to come in and deal with shit like PurpleKecleon/Glip's thread. It's over 1000 pages, and frankly most of those posts are just filler. It gets especially bad with empty thirst posting when cows go dormant.

Also +1 for reaction sorting. If people want to see just the most informative posts, they can. If they just want to look at all the deviant, horrifying, and islamic content, they can.

 

[Mandaark]

I can take on writing up shit in wiki format*
honestly that'll be the quickest way, getting some folks together and attacking it in some sort of semi-organized fashion. with editors of sorts, maybe a review by those who are regulars within the respective thread to ensure nothing is missed.

It's a good opportunity to archive anyhing that's still up and got missed.

edit: to save time and manpower, you could make a dual approach - new wikiworthy posts get tagged/marked/picked up
old wiki worthy stuff would then be combed through and assembled, and gets the focus it needs

 

[HOMO FOR LIFE]

OMG THIS WAS MY IDEA.

I WANT MY CUT IN THIS @Null

 

[Jack Awful]

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

Wiki is an anagram of Kiwi and WikiFarms.net is for sale...

 

[niggers]

well i think the MATI videos do a good job of breaking down weirdos, and the zoomers of today prefer video to text anyway. but i get that you're busy and cant make a podcast on every cow.

i tossed around the idea of a KF video/podcast compilation site in my head and it might work. have people send in their edu-tainment and pick the funniest and most well researched to put on this secondary site. give the people who make the best content some kinda forum gold sticker and let them shill their channel/twitter whatever as incentive.

 

[KillThemCrackasBabies]

Truth be told unless you're concerned about another multi-month shutdown like over the summer, getting a lot of people from here and just becoming Encyclopedia Dramatica editors would be the bets thing. It wouldn't be under KF control but the structure is already set up, the domain is recognizable, it's big enough where with fairly minor traffic the article will dominate the search results, and little to no "quality control" means anyone from here would have near unlimited freedom to edit anything as they pleased provided it wasn't a complete garbage fire (click the 'Good New Articles' and tell me how good most of them actually are...).

Unless there are behind the scenes problems between KF and whoever the hell runs ED atm that make that really unappealing, I would say that's the best option.

 

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

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.

So you want Reddit basically? That style of shit is what causes karma/sticker superwhores and ruins most discussion. And while I have much more respect for the users here then over there that kind of shit can wreck a community.

Just picture every threads top post being "fat and would not sex" & whatever other meme springs up, and that's what we'd be looking at imho.

 

[StrawberryDouche]

As far as writing goes, we could do this Fahrenheit 451 style. There are a billion cows here with massive threads I know nothing about, but if you assign me 100 pages to read I can do a thorough synopsis of it. You'll run into stylistic inconsistencies that way, but I think editors can clean that up fairly easily.

 

[Mandaark]

As far as writing goes, we could do this Fahrenheit 451 style. There are a billion cows here with massive threads I know nothing about, but if you assign me 100 pages to read I can do a thorough synopsis of it. You'll run into stylistic inconsistencies that way, but I think editors can clean that up fairly easily.

There can always be a rough outline to follow; criteria to look for, things to avoid, etc. Then writers will be more consistent and editors know what their ultimate finished product should resemble. It'll feel more cohesive.
We can always give leeway in the format for special cases/cows since they're so diverse (and we don't want to take that air of originality away from them. It's one of my favorite parts about KF)