Largely replace General Programming with Wiki
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Fruny made a suggestion here (in response to my idea to distill a General C++ FAQ) to create a Wiki. The vast majority of questions on the technical forums have been asked and answered before - and often even on the creative forums. If we replaced most of these forums with Wikis, people would find existing answers to their questions quite easily and redundancy could be removed easily. In conjunction with an earlier set of comments on purging older GDNet contents, this would be a perfect time to merge both projects and increase overall usability/usefulness of this site while reducing server-side memory usage.
As a side benefit, it might motivate more interest in other forums (given that the highest traffic ones - General Programming, Game Programming, OpenGL, DirectX - will basically be saturated) which may also expand overall knowledge in the community.
Thoughts?
Sounds nice but,
Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. [...]
What has to do a webpage editor with replacing "most of these forums with Wikis, people would find existing answers to their questions "
I can''t get the point, please explain to help me understand.
Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. [...]
What has to do a webpage editor with replacing "most of these forums with Wikis, people would find existing answers to their questions "
I can''t get the point, please explain to help me understand.
I was also thinking that heavy (automated?) cross-linking à-la everything2 might be a desirable feature.
There is potential for chaos (crap posts, flamewars) which would require kill-on-sight moderation (i.e. keep it technical, no politics & whatnots), since it wouldn''t be confined to self-contained threads anymore.
And no, I''m not volunteering to do that.
Documents [ GDNet | MSDN | STL | OpenGL | Formats | RTFM | Asking Smart Questions ]
C++ Stuff [ MinGW | Loki | SDL | Boost. | STLport | FLTK | ACCU Recommended Books ]
There is potential for chaos (crap posts, flamewars) which would require kill-on-sight moderation (i.e. keep it technical, no politics & whatnots), since it wouldn''t be confined to self-contained threads anymore.
And no, I''m not volunteering to do that.
Documents [ GDNet | MSDN | STL | OpenGL | Formats | RTFM | Asking Smart Questions ]
C++ Stuff [ MinGW | Loki | SDL | Boost. | STLport | FLTK | ACCU Recommended Books ]
Author
quote:Original post by xaxa
Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. [...]
Such as a FAQ...
quote:
What has to do a webpage editor with replacing "most of these forums with Wikis, people would find existing answers to their questions "?
Most threads in the technical forums boil down to How do I do X?, and have often (very often in General Programming and Game Programming) been asked before. With a Wiki and a good set of indices, people see the topic they''re interested in and can read the existing answers immediately. They only need to "post" if they have something new to contribute/ask.
quote:Original post by Fruny
There is potential for chaos (crap posts, flamewars) which would require kill-on-sight moderation (i.e. keep it technical, no politics & whatnots), since it wouldn''t be confined to self-contained threads anymore.
Yeah, I was thinking that we''d cross-breed Wiki and CVS. When a person posts, it creates a "branch" which must be integrated by "powermembers" with appropriate permissions (staff, mods, members of extremely good standing like yourself). Certain notorious members could even have their posts default to being invisible to non-powermembers to mitigate their effectiveness.
Author
quote:Original post by Fruny
I was also thinking that heavy (automated?) cross-linking à-la everything2 might be a desirable feature.
Good point, since many topics span multiple areas of interest. Perhaps we could allow users to add keywords to a Wiki, which would cause it to be cross-linked with another Wiki with a similar (>50%) set of keywords? Or something else that achieves the desired result.
The problem with Wikis is that they sort of assume a certain level of maturity in the users. Now, I''m not saying the users of GD.net are immature, but you do get all sorts, and Wiki''s indescriminance when it comes to who can do what might lead to some very undesirable effects.
I have a feeling that in an environment like this one, the moderators would have to be extremly vigilant and active and in the end, it''ll be more work than it''s worth.
Don''t get me wrong, we use a Wiki internally at work, and it''s great. But like I said, the users need to have a certain level of maturity which you don''t alway find here...
I have a feeling that in an environment like this one, the moderators would have to be extremly vigilant and active and in the end, it''ll be more work than it''s worth.
Don''t get me wrong, we use a Wiki internally at work, and it''s great. But like I said, the users need to have a certain level of maturity which you don''t alway find here...
If I had my way, I''d have all of you shot!
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quote:Original post by Dean Harding
The problem with Wikis is that they sort of assume a certain level of maturity in the users. Now, I''m not saying the users of GD.net are immature, but you do get all sorts, and Wiki''s indescriminance when it comes to who can do what might lead to some very undesirable effects.
quote:Original post by Oluseyi
Yeah, I was thinking that we''d cross-breed Wiki and CVS. When a person posts, it creates a "branch" which must be integrated by "powermembers" with appropriate permissions (staff, mods, members of extremely good standing like yourself). Certain notorious members could even have their posts default to being invisible to non-powermembers to mitigate their effectiveness.
Been thinking about it too.
There is also the question of intentional/unintentional misinformation. While someone answering a question incorrectly on the forums is not a problem (they are usually corrected, and it would likely only affect a few people even if it wasn''t), someone posting incorrect information into such a system could be much worse. Once something gets in it would be hard to get out, as most people aren''t going through random "articles" fact checking (if they already know the answer to the question they likely won''t visit those articles).
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