Discourse's community-editable Wiki Posts could be a useful feature

I fully agree that wiki for Thimbleweed Park is a nice idea and a helpful, organized platform for community-feeded resources. This concept is very different from a forum, and neither one replaces the other.

In that sense, I did not mean to promote Discourse’s “Wiki-Posts” as a Mediawiki replacement. Indeed, they are not designed to compete with Mediawiki and probably it would be quite awful to both consume and to maintain a real, interlinked Mediawiki-style set of resources on a forum like this one. In that sense, the name of this feature is probably prone to cause some misunderstandings. I envision them more like the “community wiki” posts on Stackexchange.

Regular posts - but editable by any user - in order to aggregate information in a denser way than it would be possible with just a long chain of small posts.

This is still a useful feature for a forum. Take this thread as an example. People seem to have fun with discobot (I was not aware what I accidentally triggered and I wish I hadn’t) and information gets scattered in a thread. Some posts add new information or different thoughts, other posts pick up a facet and discuss one detail further. That is just the normal momentum of forum communities. some threads are created to gather pieces of certain information together, and a forum is just perfect for that. In some forums, it is common that certain long, multi-page threads contain a post (usually the first or second one) which is dedicated to be edited and regularly updated with some kind of summary. Discourse’s Wiki Posts make this really easy because everyone can help updating, not only the original poster.

Film references were mentioned here and I think this is a good example. You have a thread in which all kind of TWP film references are collected and discussed. Still, if someone has a new film reference, they could update the list in a wiki post at the beginning of a thread.

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Oh, sorry, I have misunderstood the way you were suggesting to use Wiki-Posts, then. I apologize.

Since you mentioned some topics that seemed to me a typical content of some wikis (the “List of…” Wikipedia articles is the first that came to my mind) I assumed that you were suggesting to create and manage this kind of collaborative content through Discourse’s “Wiki-Posts”, where instead I would have suggested to include them in a normal, real wiki (mostly because this community is quite small and in my opinion it would be better to focus possible collaborative edits into one more structured project).

I agree with you that, in a general sense, the Wiki-Post feature can be an useful one!

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Ha!
@discobot tell me about Loom™!

Hi! I currently know how to do the following things:

@discobot start new user

Starts one of the following interactive narratives: new user.

@discobot roll 2d6

:game_die: 3, 6

@discobot quote

:left_speech_bubble: Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you — Princess Diana

@discobot fortune

:crystal_ball: Outlook good

This bot has still a lot to learn.

Also such Wiki-Posts still may be moved to a proper Wiki(a) later when they evolved to something useful.

Holy ⁎beep⁎, they have already listed more than 100 tropes!

That’s true. But it’s also true that you could have something to learn and to earn from the bot, if you are in the mood for a little “text adventure game”. :wink:

Is it fun?
I don’t really care about stinkin’ badges :slight_smile:

Only in part.

It’s one of those educational games that doesn’t contain strict jokes, but someone could find the behavior of the bot amusing. It doesn’t take more than five minutes and it’s always possible to learn something new about the forum (not really, if you already used all the main features).

I consider it a short example of interactive fiction.

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