As an example, orphan articles (ones not linked from any other pages) [1] are categorized and tagged on Wikipedia. There are many editors that spend their time trying to find places to link to orphaned articles, which improves discoverability of that information.
The best programming language-specific Wiki I've found is cppreference.com. They have a very nice stylistic approach to dealing with the different C++ standards.
An example that probably everyone can understand is youtube. Content creators are often begging for like/subscribe and even present graphs that show that only 10% of their regular viewers are subscribed. This seems like a social problem to some, but in reality it’s a technical problem because if you like/subscribe, your feed will drown in “similar” videos of much lower quality and that will haunt you for weeks. And there’s a whole set of other ui/ux issues even if you decide to subscribe. So many people avoid interacting with videos too much because of that.
I know youtube is a beaten horse, but it is a textbook example of what I mean. I could theorize about what’s wrong with wikis, but wiki guys see it much better. My key thought here is “check twice that it’s not technical before calling it social”, but it may not be the case here.
As an aside though, only 10% participating isn't very unique to youtube. Its a pretty common rule of thumb that 89% only lurk, 10% participate in some limited fashion, and 1% become super active, in any online community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
But I agree in general that a problem may be sort of recursive or self-supporting and not always technical. I just see people often enumerating simplest solutions and defeating them in the same comment, so that nothing gets done or even tried, when real-world systems are always complex and complexity is hard but at the same time has many potential tipping points. People build empires on default settings alone and lose businesses on a tiny but stable leak in the funnel. Thinking that there’s no such important and easily overlooked points in any non-trivial system, and it’s just all about users, is a mistake.
The amount of trivial self-defeating ideas that for some unclear reason supposed to prove the absense of a solution - with the current solution being a dead stupid counter - is amazing.
MediaWiki uses the term "category" for its system of tagging pages. This generally is used as a very complex system of hierarchy with many nested levels and prescribed "correct" categories.
Some people think we should use "tags" instead (e.g. less nesting and more intersecting. Instead of a category "People in Belgium" use a tag "People" and a tag "Belgium" and apply both).
On a technical level the feature requirements are basically the same, but the word tag and the word category have such strong connotations that the mere name strongly supports one social organization over another (imo)
We definitely need an official Discord equivalent with wider adoption. I can't effectively use IRC on my phone and computer simultaneously. In terms of editor outreach, I don't have any easy answers. Wiki Education is very good at bringing in editors.
Aside from Mediawiki.org, Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, has written extensively about wiki patterns. He’s also created a reference implementation for a federated wiki that attempts to solve the fork & revision control use cases centralized wikis struggle with. See https://github.com/fedwiki
the extension recognizes when you’re on fandom and recommends equivalent community wikis instead
fandom will not take down old wikis (that’d be bad for SEO), so the fandom content persists even after a full community migration.
just one of the many shitty things that company does.
Thank you from a long-time hater of Fandom and PE-driven enshittification and lover of community-driven knowledge work
For some very stupid reason, Bethesda decided to launch official modding support with Starfield while their wiki is "temporarily down for maintenance". But it's been like that for at least 1 year, so seems unlikely to ever come back, and who the fuck takes down something so vital for a feature you're shipping in a major game anyways, without letting a read-only copy remain online at least?
My initial guess is ads, but is there more to it?
Said videos take about 10 seconds to show up and will cause the screen to scroll to a different point from where you are currently reading
Their privacy policy is exhaustive, and you opt in by default to sharing your data with Google and 7 other analytics providers
UI noise like "share to Instagram/YouTube/LinkedIn" that probably 0.1% of people even consider using
When you're on a specific game wiki, you care only about that wiki content, but fandom places a Fandom navigation bar and side menu
Their default email strategy sent almost daily updates for random posts on (unrelated) FANDOM community when I made a couple comments on a specific wiki a decade ago.
Also, Fandom got its start by taking advantage of the easy, permissive nature of CC licenses of major early wikis, including much of Fandom started as chunks of even Wikipedia itself that got excised for "relevance" or other "non-encylopedia" factors. Even in some of the cases where communities have decided to leave Fandom, Fandom believes it remains their right to scrape the community's new site and not need to include links back to the "real" home, so Fandom itself becomes an SEO disaster for the community. Even communities that had hoped to protect themselves from such situations by choosing a more restrictive CC license with the NC (Non Commercial) clause have been struggling with revoking Fandom's access to their content against Fandom's legal team saying that Fandom's commercial waver to the content was both retroactive and in perpetuity, and those wikis would have known that at the time.
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[I’m an adult] [I’m a kid]Fandom is SEO spam infested with intrusive and obnoxious ads and is terrible at being an actual wiki. It fails at everything but co-opting community generated content to make money.
I agree with you in general though, the GitHub wikis really don't feel the same.
I think one of the best alternative (that is still free) is actually github pages. The problem is that the contribution model is not trivially solvable via permissioning - the owner of the github page has to approve (the PR changes).
Ideally, what would be best is if there's a set of github action that would automerge changes from a list of approved contributors (who would first fork the page, make the edits and submit a PR). This set of github action would need to be a turn-key setup, without needing much technical knowledge (so that the laymen can do it).
I think that would be http://fed.wiki/view/welcome-visitors (the author of wikiwikiweb's new thing)
My understanding is that Wikipedia has been in decline (in terms of user activity) since 2007 (much as Stack Overflow has since 2014).
(It doesn't help that Wikipedians abuse the "reliable sources" policy constantly to advance their own political agendas.)
Any tips on docs that integrate with support tickets and maybe some AI would be great.
Both systems are able to link to each other. I worked for a company where Jira was configured to take a support ticket, and then link it to a knowledge base article in Confluence based on namespace and topic I think.
That conflicts with things like known governments and corporations: authoritarian, if not also bureaucratic. The attempts to control wikis make people much less likely to contribute.
If you don't know what Fell Running is, you probably would have little use for it and it wouldn't ever be on your radar -- as would be most things outside the pale of pop culture or your own version of the Roman Empire.
So if you are setting up your own wiki then you need to spend a lot of effort to create and maintain the ToC/landing page and build those interconnections up, and just hope Google indexes everything so you can search etc (... and if you have an internal wiki at work then you are basically screwed because Google won't index that). Otherwise you write your articles and they "disappear" and are not readily found.
At least that was my experience of working with media wiki and dokuwiki - the sites always felt "empty" even if you had teams of people contributing articles, because it was hard to see what was there in a meaningful way. And so they always felt moribund and abandoned even if they actually weren't.
Patiently waiting for someone to create an overhauled UX. Potentially one that does some sort of clever LLM-powered hierarchy so people can browse and peruse page hierarchies sliced-and-diced by some sort of topic/area-of-interest. So say I enter "engines" or something as my area of I treat, the LLM auto-categorises the pages into a sensible hierarchy that I can view, then I change my term to e.g. "steam engines" and it recalculates the hierarchy and shows something sensible for that etc.