A Final Solution to the Wiki Question

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CIA Nigger said:
That's also perhaps the number one criticism of this website that I've seen outside of drama related to trannies or the staff. The PurpleKecleon thread for example is 1,500+ pages long over the span of 5+ years and only recently did the OP get updated. That documents years and years of drama, with the thread starting out as "hey look at this Pokemon fan artist who I heard is a prick" before more and more people signed up to post stories of and document PK's behavior. Before the new OP was made, it was extremely out of date and very hard for someone just reading up on this person to know what made them infamous. To add to this, in between big posts and before the great big log leak were posts involving everything from critiques of her comic to deconstructing her art style.
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As one of the main people who compiled the new Glitchedpuppet OP I feel like I have something to add to this conversation.

Finding everything for that op was really difficult. People here have mentioned the idea of having certain important posts within a thread be pined and I think a system like that would have helped immensely. I don't think reactions are the way to go because of their chaotic nature, but perhaps a reverse of the report system where a user could flag a post for a mod to pin if it contains something big. There where a lot of posts I recall seeing in the Glip thread that would have helped with the OP but I just couldn't find them or it took me a long time to do so.

I think having a seperate domain is also probably not the best idea because of how a cow would have an easier time taking them down.
 
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sorting by reaction would work better on some subforums than on others. i've noticed that the "informative" rating is really underused in some areas, with people preferring instead to just use winner or SF. but if you sort by winner or SF you obviously will get posts that aren't necessarily informative or helpful. Oh and also, sometimes people post things that are informative in a general sense, but not informative in a way that is relevant to the cow. So sorting by informative might be problematic there, too.

also i'm going to just take this opportunity to nag @Strine to finish the chantal OP uwu
 
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Collapse every post that doesn't have either media archive or an original post from the subject into a thing like [click for user discussion].
That should grab most of the content and whiners will tell you what should be added.
Once the heavy sorting is done you can either leave it that way or use it to form the basis for the structure of an actual wiki article.




Also fuck being banned for threadshitting because a sperg had to powerlevel.
 
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Our pool of autism is wide but shallow, so I think it's important to find a way to split the labor cost of both writing and maintaining articles. Any solutions needs to tackle the following issues:
  • Threads are too long for newcomers to get into and each cow has different users familiar with their history.
  • Simply linking to noteworthy posts without summarizing still makes it tedious to read through all of them.
  • Long articles are stale, get outdated easily, and most people aren't willing to write them.
A tag system would be useful both to keep track of important stuff and to maintain the OP or article. Something like #update for stuff that needs to be added, #reference for stuff that's already been added, and #tardcum for funny stuff that's doesn't need to be in the summary. This way someone who knows a lot about a lolcow can still contribute without having to do all the work. Filtering posts by reaction would be great but insufficient since there are a lot of well-received replies that don't necessarily contribute to the thread.

The articles themselves are better off in the OP than off-site. There could be different people assigned to each or it could be open to anyone above a certain threshold. Rather than being an in-depth wall of text, they should probably be limited to introducing the lolcow plus any other person of interest and having different sections inside spoilers. Being able to wrap text around images, resize them and align them to the side is also going to do wonders to readability.
 
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What happened to that "anyone can edit OPs" idea from a while back?

I think the laziest way to do it is to give the creator of a thread a nudge to update the OP every 50 pages or so.
 
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mindlessobserver said:
The best way to manage a community wiki is to just let the monkeys at the keyboard type away. Unless something is blatantly wrong it's best to just let be. Eventually someone will come along, rage at bad prose and spelling errors and fix it themselves. Other people may find it boring and stick a few pictures in. Someone else will think its disorganized and move things around.

The biggest mistake is to force an OP to be comprehensive and perfect right out the gate. If an article needs significant work the jannies can just flag it on the front page and let autism run its course.
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Great point. A wiki is by definition an incremental, eternal work-in-progress.
 
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Coincidentally, I was going to PM you to ask you a bit on this vision since you've mentioned it a few times on your streams. I guess this is actually better as I can hear from the community too.

Mainly, I was wondering what kind of OPs/Wiki entries we're talking about. Some discussion has already touched on this in the thread but to simply save myself trouble and recycle my thoughts I was thinking of how there's an approach that can simply overwhelm with our autistic research, a more editorial format and then the kind of thing Wikipedia tries to be encyclopedic but not definitive or extensive and reduce editorializing. (For the record I don't mean reduce editorializing in "language" used like Wikipedia does, I have no problem with referring to people as faggots or assholes or whatever in entries.)

To use an example I'm familiar with, the SecretGamerGrrl/Jake Alley thread. This thread has a bit of a technical error quirk from some time ago where a new OP was appended first but some problem eventually broke this. So now the OP is the original one from 2016 with a link to a new one from 2018. There's also an extensive timeline written by one user and I recently tried to do a bit more of a "why this faggot has such a long thread" type "VOXSPLAINER" sort of post that also updated some details. All four have their value, but none alone is exactly ideal. (The Lolcow Wiki also had extensive, but again outdated, stuff in it.)

Now, the old Lolcow Wiki's Brianna Wu stuff was pretty good, it had the main page, then tons of subpages for when you wanted to dig into each individual stupid thing. I think something like that, with some proper editorializing, can help a new user learn the main Six Questions including "Why do people care about this fag?" Then if they want to read more about an event or a saga or whatever you can pop down further into that. Be it a subpage or simply a linked thread post.

The main thing about OPs as already noted a number of times already is the editing thing, especially the need to bug staff; can multiple users be assigned editorial power in some way over a post? Or perhaps a thread? I'm not familiar with Xenforo but I know past popular forum software allowed you to create "pages" tied to threads that could often serve as the OP and a standalone page that many could edit ala a Wiki. For example, one place I saw this was regarding game mods, it allowed the mod creator/team a page that came first that wasn't really part of the thread so nobody had to dig through the thread and nobody had to edit the OP to keep it up to date and so on. (This was important when mods changed hands/teams.) The thread could exist totally unchanged but the page could add things like FAQs, directions, version updates, etc.

And at this point I'm repeating stuff in the thread already too much and don't have any strong preferences anyway so I'll shaddup.
 
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Do a wikipedia and have it to where anyone with an account over a certain age can write entries but have moderators/janitors that can edit/remove it as needed. This would allow the data entry part of the wiki to be crowd sourced and would not be any more "work for free" than people archiving things in the actual threads. As for your end of the work load I honestly cant think of a solution that wont require you to break out the midnight oil and elbow grease.

One thing that might help is having a set format and focusing on short and descriptive rather than sprawling and autistic. An example would be to have a timeline of key events, and rather than rewrite those events just have a short synopsis and a link to the relevant forum post, and only in cases where a relevant post is not aplicable or the info is spread across several posts then create or merge those into the time line in a case by case basis.
 
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I had an idea where a moderator or a designated person could highlight posts in a thread that actually matter (real content, not commentary) with a different background color or something so that it is easy to find things later on to add to the OP or to integrate into a wiki. I am not a programmer, but I would hope that something that automatically quotes highlighted posts and adds them to the OP or simply adds a link to the OP in chronological order is plausible in lieu of manual labor. might be able to make the number page of the thread change color to indicate that there is content that is highlighted so that people can more easily skip discussion if they are searching for something. The issue of judgment is never going to be subtracted out of the equation so I have no idea how to pick someone, but I suspect the best people would be those who are going to read a thread from beginning to end for the first time. I do that from time to time, even really long threads.

that's my idea, probably exceptional, anyway thanks pooperator for starting this discussion.
 
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I don't want to give up on the wiki idea. If nothing else, it's useful to keep track of the Rat Kings, who by their nature are incestuous.
 
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Organize everything chronologically by blocks of information made by contributors

1) The original post will be a wiki style block of text and photos

2) You can add to the block by posting:

{OPEN_WIKI_QUOTE) -information here- [END_WIKI_QUOTE]

3) each wiki quote you post has to have a date for the information attached. The wiki/OP will automatically organize all wiki quotes by the described date
 
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I couldn't come up with any good solutions/considerations to your 3rd problem but then I came up with the idea of distributed hosting of the wiki in order to make it more durable. I'm an idiot on this topic so I have no idea what type of resources are available to make this happen and how much work is required or even if it would work. Although I also did come up with the idea of having torrents of the html of a wiki page available in addition to whatever the wiki becomes so that if the wiki goes down the torrents are easily accessible. This seems pretty easy to implement and torrents are more difficult to get rid of than webpages especially if people already have them downloaded.
 
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Judge Dredd said:
I think users would have to write a new OP in the thread that a mod can copy and paste. Far from an ideal solution, but it's low effort.
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Not exactly. If only certain parts of an op need to be edited it can be difficult to coordinate especially if it's a large op and adding images- especially with specific formatting and ensuring that those images are properly archived has given me a lot of problems in the past. But it's also possible that I'm just stupid.
 
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Jack Awful said:
I suggested this a while ago, but what about an expandable "IMPORTANT INFO" box at the top of long threads?
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It would feel like reading a textbook.

The obvious solution is to just open a wiki subforum for people to collaborate on articles.

KillThemCrackasBabies said:
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...).
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ED isn't about obsessively policing users. The lulz is more important. Aaron Carter is a great article. Things are just slow right now.
 
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Freya said:
The obvious solution is to just open a wiki subforum for people to collaborate on articles.
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I agree with this but also the idea posted earlier that brand new accounts can't post in it. I think this is important because some cows have communities on other sites like plebbit and when they come here not only do they sometimes act like re,tards, they often don't have the cow's facts straight but are quite confident that they do and would be eager to contribute, but it would be a hassle to repeatedly correct them/undo the misinfo, etc. from this type of user.
 
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