Musings on Tildes' topic wikis and resources
TL;DR: I did not know each individual group had wikis and I find them pretty great (the LGBT and tech ones in particular). Do they get updated regularly, are they searchable via the site-wide search, and who can contribute to them exactly?
I was looking through the "note-taking" and "productivity" tags for recommendations on a new note-taking app when I came across the extension resources wiki article in "Tech". It hasn't been updated recently but it made me realize one of the reasons why I find places like reddit useful is that the "Pinned FAQs", "Beginner Guides to <Hobby>", and "Megaposts" on reddit are an excellent source of (for lack of a better term) "peer-reviewed" recommendations and are often the catalyst for fun discussions.
I have, through my time here on tildes, discovered so many excellent recommendations even by just using the search bar and browsing threads - to the point that if say, a reddit and tildes post give me conflicting recommendations, I would trust the tildes post 9 out of 10 times. The climate of posts here are less inflammatory and the discussion on pros/cons are more calm, friendly, and thought through. I admit they have impacted my views on a bunch of things (not least of which is trying firefox as my main browser).
Are resource dumps like that something that the community here find viable in general? Are there plans for updating their implementation to be more easily accessible or is it too far removed from the discussion-based fluidity of the site? I understand that there are other places online to find information, but rarely do I find it at this level of transparency of bias and (on average) free of any bloat.
I guess I'll end this little thought stream with a thank you for all the people who post here and a curiosity for the future discussions to come. I've lurked a lot and learned a lot.
There is an index of all wiki articles on Tildes which one can bookmark that to avoid going to each group to click the article links. The wiki these days is pretty inactive and you can see the last edit time in the sidebar. A record of all edits can be found in the git repository.
Anybody can contribute to the Tildes wikis (or even get moderator permissions for the entire site), you just need to PM/email @Deimos.
Oh, wonderful! I'll look into contributing as well. It's a shame they haven't been edited for a while but that's understandable. Thanks
More like occasionally rather than "regularly", but they do get updated. You can see all the commits here: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes-wiki/-/commits/master
Not that I am aware of, but that's probably a good idea... so I have added a gitlab issue for the suggestion: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/702
A bunch of users (myself included) have been given access over the years, and while AFAIK there is no list, you can at least see who has made changes in the above commit log. @Deimos also seems pretty open about giving wiki access to most who ask though, so if anyone wants to contribute they can probably just PM him saying so.
There are a number of gitlab issues with feature request for improving the wiki system. See: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&search=wiki
However they're likely not much of a priority given it's not the primary purpose of the site, and especially given the currently limited resources.
Thank you for starting an issue there on the subject. Gitlab is intimidating. I'm sorry, I don't know anything about code but it is nice to see that it's still being maintained, one way or another.
Yes, agreed. In hindsight, wiki things seem more likely to be a beautiful byproduct of a healthy discussion and that's fine with me. The more active and quality userbase is definitely higher priority. I'm glad we have what we have and will try to contribute my knowledge responsibly where I can.
Yeah, it was intimidating for me at first too, but TBH despite how complicated it looks at first glance it's actually not that bad once you get a handle on the basics. Regardless, there is no need to feel bad or apologize; ~tildes exists precisely so users not familiar/comfortable with gitlab or programming can still contribute to tildes development, and I don't mind transferring the ideas people express here to Gitlab anyways, so it's no biggie. :)