19
votes
Per Tilde Tag Based Background Reading Links (wikipedia?)
If tildes wants to foster deeper discussions I wonder if there should be some mechanism for linking off to external background knowledge. This could possibly be semi-automatic based on the containing tilde & topic tags.
If we end up with news discussions around topics like say Israel & Palestine in order for anyone to begin to understand wtf is going on (and so reasonably discuss the current news topic) there's a load of relevant history. It seems like it would be nice to have a link so that a topic from poltics.news with the tag Israel could automatically get some further reading links.
Wikipedia has the advantage that it's another user driven org so this could have the added benefit of motivating people to fact check & improve it.
I'd like to have a wiki and also a short-link format to link to any given page in the group's wiki by name, like we do with ~groups and @users, maybe $wikipage and $group.wikipage. That way pages are easily shared and referenced in the group's comments. It'll make them into more of a community resource, and since you can put anything in a page it'll serve as a group's public record of important topics to that group.
It might make a great logical extension to a hashtag format, so #tag or even ~tildes#tag would lead to the global and group-specific pages, which would have the wiki content, as well as sortable lists of posts and comments with that tag. In many cases, the wiki content could simply be the opening to the related Wikipedia article.
I'm picturing things like #[something]101 taking off. A basic curated page with useful links to start out learning something, and also tons of comments and threads specifically about people's experience and advice on starting out. Could be incredibly useful!
This is an interesting idea. I've said before that I think other link-aggregator-like sites really don't do enough with bringing in other relevant information about posts, and I hope we can come up with some interesting ways to do better.
As a much more frivolous example than Israel & Palestine, I definitely think we could do things like have a link to a specific game's Steam page automatically available whenever a post in ~games is about a specific PC game. For example, this post about Monster Hunter World could automatically have a link to its Steam page available in the sidebar or something.
I think we have to be careful not to commercialize too much. It's one thing to bring in information, but another to basically act as an ad.
I'd say prioritize linking to open databases that are public-access rather than privately owned whenever possible. We can use and grow the commons at the same time. Wikipedia, Musicbrainz, etc. There must be one for games by now.
I think perhaps we don't have to worry about this. Default is wikipedia but sub-tildes can be configured by their mods & individual tags can be hard coded and maybe even have more than one link?
Disambiguation pages? The link checks for a page here, if it can't find it, then it goes offsite instead. All sorts of possibilities.
I think maybe we can wait until after Tildes is wiki-enabled for the details, work it out then.
If tildes is clear that it's providing referral links I don't see a problem with it. I struggle to imagine what I'd do with a link to a games Wikipedia page. If someone is recommending a game is good I'd actively like a ~tildes referral link to GoG, Steam or Humble.
We've talked about this before in the context of populating music submission metadata. I'm so excited to see some of this stuff come to fruition.
Are there any referral codes for steam? Like, say we click a game on here the site would get money if we buy it?
edit: corrected a typo
Referral codes, and yes.
There are for humble bundle
On reflection perhaps the way to do it is to have a sidebar link pane which users can post links to and vote them up and down in.
Then we can automatically populate it by matching to similar topics by sub-tilde distance & tags. Show the top n links with the option to expand it.
I think sensible defaults that can be edited by high rep users is the way to go. If it's a new tag in chat wikipedia, if it's a new tag in gaming GOG, steam and wikipedia.
I agree it should be in the Topic Info sidebar as you say.
This sounds a bit like Stack Exchange's tag wikis - if anyone actually used them, they could be a pretty neat feature.
This is a very interesting concept. I like the idea of clicking on a tag and getting the Wikipedia entry on the topic.
Maybe you could also populate the list of suggested tags with existing entries in Wikipedia or other datasets?
I don't think it can work like that, clicking on the tag should get you relevant tildes topics otherwise it's breaking expectations.
I was more thinking each topic tag could cause potentially several links to be put on the sidebar in that topic. I guess it does mean that topics need some kind of per sub-tilde meta-data.
A news post on UK politics might want to link to wiki entry on a couple of UK political parties and the UK itself. A discussion on a computer game release that happens to have a UK publisher it probably isn't relevant.