A Final Solution to the Wiki Question

[GethN7]

Just throwing out there if anyone is worried about wanting to have a wiki with regular moderation, I'm willing to throw myself on that autistic sword if need be.

 

[MediocreMilt]

This probably isn't what you're looking for, but perhaps a system that filters post by positive rating? The really good/informative posts in any given thread tend to have a higher positive rating; if you could filter or something based on a rating threshold, it would cut away a lot of the chaff, allowing people to more easily go through the good bits. Again, this isn't really what you're looking for, but in a short term way it might make the bigger threads more accessible. I have no clue as to how viable such a system would be in xenforo.

Disagree. A great many shitposts are given likes and winners.

A great many actual information posts are given horrifyings.

Null would likely need a system based on machine learning in order to accurately read the current ratings system into this.

 

[Twinkie]

Or a new archival/newsworthy type rating. But it would be useless for anything posted before the new rating was created.

 

[Xenomorph]

I can help out with the ALR wiki.

 

[Cheeseburger Picnic]

Unless there is some kind of micro reward gimmick for participation every single well-intentioned person volunteering to help curate wiki posts in this thread (besides @GethN7 because this kind of thing is his Special Interest) is going to get bored or lazy within weeks to months when life gets busy or their favorite lolcow slows down or they get really into LoL - especially if the expected tone for articles is more serious business and less tabloidy. People generally come to the farms for funny, mean-spirited entertainment and I can't picture a comprehensive wiki sustaining interest in the long term for most people if it isn't funny or entertaining.

I have thought for a long time that there should be a way for thread OPs to belong to the people as soon as the OP loses interest in updating or disappears. Maybe not entirely open source but close enough to it with final mod approval. I know that's essentially what a wiki entry is, but the key is tone - OPs are more TMZ. The LolcowWiki was boring and tl;dr.

 

[Christ Cried]

Make a tab for the thread and then a tab for a wiki style version. Allow competent members of the thread, (OP, people who provide consistent relevant information, etc.), to have slightly elevated status within this little subsection of the site.

 

[GethN7]

Unless there is some kind of micro reward gimmick for participation every single well-intentioned person volunteering to help curate wiki posts in this thread (besides @GethN7 because this kind of thing is his Special Interest) is going to get bored or lazy within weeks to months when life gets busy or their favorite lolcow slows down or they get really into LoL - especially if the expected tone for articles is more serious business and less tabloidy. People generally come to the farms for funny, mean-spirited entertainment and I can't picture a comprehensive wiki sustaining interest in the long term for most people if it isn't funny or entertaining.

I have thought for a long time that there should be a way for thread OPs to belong to the people as soon as the OP loses interest in updating or disappears. Maybe not entirely open source but close enough to it with final mod approval. I know that's essentially what a wiki entry is, but the key is tone - OPs are more TMZ. The LolcowWiki was boring and tl;dr.

I always considered the Lolcow Wiki a condensed version of threads, and thus, some lack of entertainment is to be expected. The threads are the entertainment, but they can become unwieldly monsters of utter signal to noise imbalance and not everyone has the autism to sift through hundreds long pages of a thread for information.

The wiki basically stripped out all the crap and just posted a condensed version of facts, and while that is more helpful for the normie, I agree it can be boring regardless.

So, if the wiki comes back, why not take a few pages from the CWCki and spice it up with funny fanart and quotes and videos based on the people in question? Basically ED-lite, but with less bullshit and more funny.

 

[Jaimas]

The problem with the idea of a wiki in general - any wiki that covers things that change constantly, really - is that inevitably you're only going to have a handful of productive spergs working on them, and because of that, they will be eternally out of date. In the case of a single-subject wiki like Chris-Chan's this is less of a thing because there's a lot of people willing to cover him, and with cows on a slow boil, like say, Jay Geis, keeping things up-to-date is certainly feasible.

But in the case of any frequently productive lolcow that has a smaller pool of coverage and a lot of content to cover, you're going to wind up in a situation where the stupid things they do will completely outstrip any ability of chronicleers to keep up with it all. Trying to keep active tabs on a particularly productive cow, without a team of dedicated editors on it, is an endeavor basically doomed to failure by default without sufficient people working on it.

 

[Twinkie]

I mean wikis/articles don't really need to be perfectly up-to-date because that's what the threads are for. If it's happening right now you can just follow along with the thread. The issue is more about people having questions about a cow's history or past events and not wanting to read through a 2,000-page thread.

 

[The Fool]

I'm going to echo the idea because I've been asking for it for years, let users tag posts and search those posts by tag.

Users that can tag should be exclusionary, but I think it should be done by a role lesser than a moderator, like anyone can just opt-in to be a tagger at the approval of a mod or even trusted taggers. Users should be able to tag their own posts, but if they aren't authorized then the tags don't take effect until a tagger validates that post. Somewhere in the thread, maybe over/under the OP, there should be a collection of these tags that a user can click and see every post with that tag. Like "stroke" or "divorce" or something, maybe even embed the last tagged post for each tag in a thread. Because almost anyone can be a tagger, a mod should be able to roll back their changes up to a certain point, just in case they used to legitimately tag posts but then went rogue. Maybe regular (long-time) users can also tag any post while having it in an unapproved state until a registered tagger approves them.

I was even thinking of an idea where anyone can create their own tag pool, as kind of a custom "thread highlights" system, but I didn't really consider it all the way through and as-is it's not a perfect concept.

As it's been said in this thread before, it may not be a wiki, but it will significantly accelerate the editing process of a wiki. It might even be possible to automate editing a wiki page with specially formatted tags like "wiki:[section name here]" where it'll append the post to a timeline with the timestamp of the post.

I know that's a lot of shit to implement, but I was just fleshing out a suggestion.

 

[Trig.Point]

I have thought for a long time that there should be a way for thread OPs to belong to the people as soon as the OP loses interest in updating or disappears. Maybe not entirely open source but close enough to it with final mod approval. I know that's essentially what a wiki entry is, but the key is tone - OPs are more TMZ. The LolcowWiki was boring and tl;dr.

I agree, however I think having one active member as the single point contact for the OP could minimise the amount of work the Mods would have to do. That member would have the ownership for that single OP , the mods would only need to get involved if there was some dispute.

Also One Wiki feature that might be useful is the Sandbox. The ability for people to copy an OP in it's entirety with formatting, make changes / edits and then post for feedback/revisions. This would also make it easier for the owner of the OP to simply copy and paste text and formatting as needed.

 

[Failure_Personified]

One of the largest issues I find with threads and the like is the sheer amount of "fluff" that gets added in.
In the moment it's ok because, part of the lol factor of a cow is the simple fact most of them never learn; confirmation bias is a nice feeling when it's affirmed, and that's what you get when you constantly expect someone to screw up, and they do repeatedly.

This does not make for an interesting wiki. A wiki is supposed to be a jumping off point, not how many times a cow has shat themselves in the last month. They should be mostly condensed, getting to the root of the discussion and have lists of back links to the forum for noteworthy moments that should be easy to navigate.

I won't read a wiki if there's 15 pages on meaningless fluff.
That's my main issue with the forum threads. We have seen attempts to mitigate this issue by editing the OP with links to "OP worthy" posts but those don't always catch everything.

I think a wiki would be an excellent idea, but I don't see a managable way of doing it without several members going full on no-life every few days a month.

 

[awoo]

Your updoots are to the left . The "rewards" should only remain within the wiki. Cross platform bling will only cause more issues. If your only editing the wiki so you can get a fucking badge on the forum then please for the love of god go suck start a pistol.

Ok then what is there to prevent the wiki from dying like last time?

 

[sad cowboy cat]

I genuinely think the idea of a dedicated offsite webpage is a good one. it's especially effective when you consider that many try to hide their identities through many aliases, straight up change their names or have such a long history of misconduct over different now-abandoned names that it could be hard for a newcomer to recognise who they are now/who they used to be.

 

[awoo]

I genuinely think the idea of a dedicated offsite webpage is a good one. it's especially effective when you consider that many try to hide their identities through many aliases, straight up change their names or have such a long history of misconduct over different now-abandoned names that it could be hard for a newcomer to recognise who they are now/who they used to be.

Isn't that handled by the thread title?

 

[registered 2 hide avatars]

Here's my opinion for what it's worth:
Highlighting "useful posts" is a decent idea (as long as it's not based on ratings...), but in my experience you lose a lot of the context and details when you only look at the handful of posts deemed important.
Wiki articles CAN include these details and provide a much more coherent set of information, but require more work and readers also miss out on following the chronology of events and seeing how other people react to these events, which can be pretty funny.

 

[BrainProlapse]

Have an option to flag your post as an update, new happening etc, then have the jannies verify it. Hell you could appoint sub-jannies out of the better users in each thread that could help determine the key posts.

To help cut out all the crap add a button to skip between the flagged posts.

 

[Jaimas]

Ok then what is there to prevent the wiki from dying like last time?

The biggest contributor to the wiki dying is that there was a handful of people who actually contributed. This meant big articles covering things that deserved to be covered were only happening if one of a small number of users actually worked on them.

 

[slimes]

I'm already one of those autists who will pick a thread and read all 500+ pages of it for no discernibly sane reason so I wouldn't mind helping flag posts that are noteworthy or actually informative if we go with an option that incorporates that idea. If you had a group of people willing to read and flag posts and another willing to compile said posts it would cut the work down to one specific task for each group and make it go by faster.

 

[Twinkie]

I'm already one of those autists who will pick a thread and read all 500+ pages of it for no discernibly sane reason so I wouldn't mind helping flag posts that are noteworthy or actually informative if we go with an option that incorporates that idea. If you had a group of people willing to read and flag posts and another willing to compile said posts it would cut the work down to one specific task for each group and make it go by faster.

There would still need to be another way for people to fix things though other than flagging, because how would you know that what you're flagging as informative is in fact accurate especially if you're picking threads at random to read through with no prior or in depth knowledge of said cow? The person who posted that info could've got it wrong and no one else bothered to correct them. This happens all the time on the ALR forum because there are so many threads and it gets tiring to correct misinfo.