Re:Reddit is Fun will shut down on June 30th in response to ...
by dredmorbius on Saturday June 10, 2023 @01:18AM
(#36267830)
On Wikis: even with search, most people simply won't look at them. Search is most useful for a very small set of power users ... and for mods who are looking for the appropriate cluestick to whack an offender with. Even with a relatively small wiki, I'm often struggling to find content I know (or am pretty sure) exists. The whole thing reads like an intern's summer project, and I strongly suspect it was.
The notion of having both an ongoing transactional dialogue and an accumulating finished work, somewhat analogous to a financial journal (transactions) and statements (finished works) is something that I've long wanted to bring to online discussion. Again, Wikipedia (and similar projects) most closely resembles this, though even back in Usenet days there were newsgroups and the periodically disseminated FAQs of accumulated knowledge and behavioural norms.
Determining what each should do is key. There's a long history of discussions being bundled up as books (lectures, meeting notes, bull sessions, etc.), of serialised publication, of collected letters or other epistolary exchanges.
There's the case of Stack Exchange which as I see it somewhat has the opposite problem: it tries to treat the transactional discussion as the finished work, with a great deal of feather-ruffling. I'd think that SE would benefit from a different approach in which the live / current Q&A discussions are allowed to happen, but examples of especially good answers being canonicalised and surfaced in search, perhaps refactored into articles.
Another problem with knowledge corpora is that they both get out of date and/or are subject to malicious (or simply uninformed or misguided) edits with time. These are problems which long predate online versions and variants (one joy of mine was discovering a 19th-century encyclopaedic edit war: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...>).
Ultimately, this requires real work, with procedures and time devoted to review, screening, and updating articles. It's not what every group will want to take on, but some most definitely would see benefits.
The notion of having both an ongoing transactional dialogue and an accumulating finished work, somewhat analogous to a financial journal (transactions) and statements (finished works) is something that I've long wanted to bring to online discussion. Again, Wikipedia (and similar projects) most closely resembles this, though even back in Usenet days there were newsgroups and the periodically disseminated FAQs of accumulated knowledge and behavioural norms.
Determining what each should do is key. There's a long history of discussions being bundled up as books (lectures, meeting notes, bull sessions, etc.), of serialised publication, of collected letters or other epistolary exchanges.
There's the case of Stack Exchange which as I see it somewhat has the opposite problem: it tries to treat the transactional discussion as the finished work, with a great deal of feather-ruffling. I'd think that SE would benefit from a different approach in which the live / current Q&A discussions are allowed to happen, but examples of especially good answers being canonicalised and surfaced in search, perhaps refactored into articles.
Another problem with knowledge corpora is that they both get out of date and/or are subject to malicious (or simply uninformed or misguided) edits with time. These are problems which long predate online versions and variants (one joy of mine was discovering a 19th-century encyclopaedic edit war: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...>).
Ultimately, this requires real work, with procedures and time devoted to review, screening, and updating articles. It's not what every group will want to take on, but some most definitely would see benefits.
General agreement otherwise.