That could tie back to my major vs minor edit concept.
I think this is a double-edged sword and I do feel quite conflicted about this.
Being able to own something provides a lot of incentive to produce something great and keep it up to date and it should give a more consistent tone and structure for an individual post.
However, it provides this at the cost of less incentive to improve what others wrote, which is quite important (maybe even critically important) for a community-driven site. You don’t want every one of thousands or millions of users to provide their own answer to something, nor do you want a user to just move along if they can contribute something truly useful. And you certainly don’t want an amazing post to go to waste because of some minor (or major) issues the author hasn’t seen or gotten around to fixing or adding (possibly because they’re no longer active on the site or don’t have the knowledge required to fix it). This is especially true if we just want one “review article” per specific topic.
I’m curious whether removing reputation for posts while keeping individual ownership would be enough to encourage the latter above the former, which Stack Exchange does struggle with fairly often.
In theory I would say the community-owned model is more appropriate.
In practice I know I personally would be a whole lot less motivated to contribute if that wouldn’t give me some posts I can show off (even if I do often make extensive improvements to other posts and help in other ways that give no reward). Although, if posts were individually owned, I would also probably be much less happy mostly improving posts of others (as opposed to posting my own) if I felt this is how can I best contribute.
SE trying to mix the two has always felt a bit awkward, even if there are some CW posts that work well (or so I’ve heard). I think a lot of people have no idea when to use it, wouldn’t want to if they should and are understandably upset when change is forced upon them.
Since what’s proposed here is something separate from the core Q&A’s, I wouldn’t quite consider it to be mixing the two. The Q&A’s can still be individually owned. It’s seems closer to the difference between tag wiki’s (which aren’t really attributed to a specific user) and posts. More importantly, it will always clear who owns what from the start and this never changes.
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I don’t think the decision has to be made.
We’ve seen this on SE, where sites splintered away from a general interest site certain questions became their respective subtype, eventually it made sense to create such website.
Codegolf.SE was created for a similar purpose. It splintered away from SO, because people wanted to discuss a certain type of question, spawning a certain type of discussion - in the case of CodeGolf, it mainly questions for improvement in applied programming.
I’d say let balkanization like that take it into its own hands. If people find a site is lacking or rather disallowing a certain type of question, it might be the right time to open such site for exactly those kinds of questions (iirc, that’s how ServerFault, SuperUser and Unix.SE were created).
In a similar vein, should a site decide to curate more towards knowledge base repository, and there is a sizeable amount of users who’d want a site specifically for quick Q&A, including direct answers, opinions perhaps, or suggestions, then it might be the right time creating a Q&A-heavy site, right next to the more curated, knowledge base based website.
However, I don’t think it should be a meta-like website attached to every single website like that.
If it’s community-owned then it would list all contributors (or be anonymous I guess, like tag wikis), so “putting words in your mouth” isn’t really an issue. I was also understanding the “review article” analogy as something that’s created that way from the start, not something that is done to something that was written for a different purpose. I agree that it’s not nice to appropriate others’ contributions like that.
I want to be clear that main Q&A should continue to be owned by individual authors (with helpful third-party edits welcome). This is a different type of post, created with different goals from the start, and it’s ok for it to handle attribution differently.
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Looking into it, that looks like a community/moderation issue – a dispute between you and whoever decided to convert it.
But there are a few topics which it’s good to have as CW – perhaps for example …
… which were maybe intended to be CW from the beginning – and I suppose the software should support that.
Whether or not people use and/or use it wisely+politely is another story, there’s a certain amount of “co” in “codidact” which I’d be a bit sorry to lose.
I’m not sure what you’re really sad about.
Its being CW meant you stopped getting “rep”, and you like “rep”, so I assume you’re sad or angry about that, and I don’t know why it was converted to CW.
Looking at the edits the “zombie hordes” only changed formatting and spelling – which tend to be harmless/beneficial little edits – not “hostile” edits by which I mean “writing something, e.g. something wrong, which the original author wouldn’t have wanted to say”.
So perhaps you disagree with SE’s editing policy – especially about When should I edit posts? – which other users might take to be axiomatic.
I think that’s related to but not quite the same topic as “community wiki”.
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This whole discussion of how to make a semi-separate area for not-exactly-Q&A with larger-scale collaboration, shared ownership, and so forth sounds suspiciously like a re-implementation of Documentation, but no one has so far mentioned this AFAICT, or the systemic problems with Docs that led to its eventual shutdown.
Docs aimed to solve the problem of canonical info by collecting examples and other pieces into semi-structured topics with some additional Markdown features, a different approach to reviewing, and a different rep structure that gave rep to everyone who’d contributed significantly.
Unfortunately, the rep remained both abusable and too difficult to get legitimately until the end, the content review queues never reached the necessary bootstrap level of expertise-recognition, and the structure was too vague and free-form in practice to really welcome contributions from experts without a lot of time to spare.
At least the last two of these require a really first-class solution to be in mind before writing any code. If the basic design of this part of the site doesn’t naturally tend to select and promote genuine topic experts who are competent and willing to review the substance of edit suggestions, it can’t work. And likewise (apparently) if there’s little more than a blank page, inspiration will be slow to strike. (Even Wikipedia, which does start with a blank page, has spent years building up nested layers of complex but simple-to-use templates for every imaginable aspect of any kind of page, making it practical to copy-paste from half a dozen similar articles, replace a bit of text, and go. Docs had a few such features, but all implemented in closed-source code with lengthy iterations.)
Rep, badges, or other recognition would also be good to get at least basically right for this subsystem before beginning any work on it, although to be fair, I’m pretty sure that the rep reworks during Docs didn’t doom it.
This sounds very much like SE’s existing Community Wiki implementation (which preserves individual ownership quite well). Unfortunately, it’s not very widely used for most purposes; not even all intentionally-canonical posts end up CW.
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How about this for Canonical posts:
- Single item - i.e., no separate Question/ultiple Answers. Just one “thing”
- Partially mixed with regular Questions in that changes make the item “active” and show up in the Home/Recent pages.
- Linked on side above “related questions”, so that these items have “priority” for reference purposes
- Included by default in Search, but search should have easy selection (include/don’t include: regular Q&A, Canonical posts, Meta (if it is included and not totally separate), Blogs (if we have them))
- No voting, since there will be a relatively small number of these posts in each Community. But maybe a “This helped me” (aka “like”) button so we know if the posts are appreciated by others.
- Allow comments, though even more than elsewhere comments that are helpful should be edited into the text.
- To give a sense of ownership, have “% by” like Community Wiki, though perhaps a bit expanded - e.g., show the top “up to n’ users as long as each > 5% of the changes”.
- Relatively high rep/Trust Level needed to start a post, but minor/major edits follow the same levels/approval process as regular Q&A.
- Posts can not be flipped between a regular Q and a Canonical post. If someone starts with a regular Q&A and then decides it would make a good Canonical post, they can add a new Canonical post and (depending on the situation) keep or delete or close the original Q.
- Tags same as regular posts to help with searching.
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This would be a substantial improvement already.
I’d also suggest having a way for interested users to subscribe to comment/edit notifications as though they were the owner of the post (non-exclusively), kind of like Wikipedia’s watchlists.
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That’s a good idea in general - i.e., I might see an interesting question and want to know when it is answered.
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Might be good to borrow (most of) Discourse’s quad-state notification arrangement, with separate choices for immediate notifications and for aggregated counts in a dedicated location. So it would be possible to imitate SE’s favorites system by picking posts to count updates to, but also to go a step or two beyond by picking posts to get immediate notifications for.
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I’d like that.
I call that one “thing”, a “document”.
More suggestions:
- Encourage the use of section headings (i.e. using
##and###markdown) - Auto-assign an ID/anchor to section headings, so you can link to a section (like GitHub’s markdown)
- Auto-create and maintain a table of contents (so readers can review the structure of the document, and skip to a specific section within the page by clicking on a link
- Allow people to discuss (comment on) specific sections or subsections – with two-way kind of links, so that when you read any given section you see links to any commentary associated
- Who has edit privileges – e.g. can I edit your document or only comment on it?
- If you have edit privileges for the document perhaps you should be able to edit, relink, delete all commentary too (other people’s comments) – so comments are a living/maintainable part of the document.
- As a use case, consider this – the document is a sofware design specification, and the comments (discussions) are from stake-holders and others who collaborate to improve the current spec
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I like the single thing too, because why take the time to write up a community wiki answer, only to have others write other non-wiki answers that get rep while you don’t?
For example,
https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/96/where-in-europe-is-wild-camping-permitted?rq=1
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Agree on first 4 bullet points (section headings, anchors, TOC, comment on sections).
Basically everyone. But within the constraints I have listed elsewhere - basically Minor Edits require a certain level of approvals until you reach a certain trust level; Major edits require a certain level of approvals (possibly more than Minor) until you reach a certain trust level (which would be a level up from that needed to make Minor edits without approval); top levels able to make any edits.
Maybe. Comments are (as discussed elsewhere) a tricky thing. Editing the main text to incorporate items/feedback from comments is a given. Deleting comments should be a moderator (or high trust level) privilege. Editing other people’s comments is a bit trickier. Ideally, all comments would over time either be self-deleted, moderator deleted or incorporated into the main text.
That certainly could be. But I was thinking more that this wouldn’t be specs but rather for “answering frequently asked questions” - like the SE bike parts example posted earlier.
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More than that. Even ignoring the entire rep issue (which some people want to do, some people absolutely don’t want to do, and some people (me) are in between), the advantage of this different type of post is that it won’t get “lost” the day after it was last updated because it will be more accessible than “ordinary” questions.
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For some (didactic) use cases, maybe the commentary is first class.
Maybe the purpose of the community is to get some document reviewed by experts, and the experts’ comments are to be preserved.
In software this might be for “requirement traceability” – if the document lists requirements then the commentary explains why and what various people think about those.
If the documented is edited, though, then the editor (or the document-specific “moderator”) ought to be able to maintain the comments too – decide which to keep, maybe copy-edit, and perhaps relink (link to a different section of the document) if the structure of the document changes.
I think I can see that use case, because that (i.e. “software engineering”) is almost within my knowledge domain. I don’t know other domains – academic reviews of paper? scientific reviews? non-software engineering reviews? business processes? contracts? what else… oh yes: journalism? planning a party or a social gathering? designing a bike-shed? – in any of these domains an avid participant might care about the comments too (unlike on SE where of course comments are deliberately “2nd-class citizens” and “no chit-chat” is the rule).
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I am perfectly fine with keeping comments around. IMHO, as long as they are reasonably well-intentioned, they are OK. (And that includes “fun” comments too, just not “hate”). I am just saying that (a) if they can be reasonably included in the text (e.g., Alice writes the text and Bob knows enough to say “what about x?” but doesn’t feel knowledgeable about the topic to actually change the text, Alice can change the text to included x and then Bob’s comment should be deleted) then they should be deleted and (b) editing someone else’s comments seems “off” because they are “comments” and not “statements of fact to be corrected, polished, finalized, etc.” OTOH, I often find comments where I wish I could edit for spelling & grammar.
I didn’t follow or don’t remember the progress of Docs too well, but of all the concerns raised about Docs initially, reputation, ownership and review was pretty far down the list. It was more concerns about the general purpose and viability, which were never adequately addressed.
Reputation and review may have been the nail in the coffin though.
It would take some convincing for me to believe these canonical posts would not have similar problems and suffer a similar fate.
I suspect we all have different ideas of what such a post would actually look like in concrete terms though.
I am thinking of something between a plain list of links to questions and what tag wiki’s sometimes look like now (taking R as a random example): mostly just some links to stuff that gives you a good introduction to the topic and some useful links to get you started (okay, the R example seems to strive to be more complete than introductory and is probably a bit too overwhelming to be useful, but the general idea is there). Useful, sure, but not trying to itself be a (primary) source of information. It also covers a big enough topic that trying to be a source of information would also be roughly impossible compared to just providing some links.
If this is all it is, the question of reputation and ownership almost answers itself: it’s “just a bunch of links”, so no-one (or everyone) should own it and no-one should feel all that attached to it. It’s also much easier to maintain, since you’re not trying to aggregate a bunch of ever-changing information from other sources.
I suspect others have different ideas, but I can’t really share an opinion about that because I don’t really have a concrete enough idea of what that might look like, what specific topics it would cover, what would be on the post itself and what would be linked to or how much detail it would go into.
(Although we’re probably getting a bit off topic.)
The answer to that is: varies by site. But since various sites have tried to do something like this, some examples so far:
https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/244/terminology-index-a-list-of-bike-part-names-and-cycling-concepts
https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/168564/first-time-changing-switches-and-outlets-receptacles-anything-special-i-shoul
https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/96/where-in-europe-is-wild-camping-permitted
https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/19254/official-providers-of-topographic-maps-per-country
These examples vary quite a bit but I think they all fit this mold. I can think of a ton of other useful ideas - and they all fit the Q&A model in the sense that they do one or more of:
- Answer questions that would otherwise be (and often are) near-duplicates
- Provide reference information that may not be an entire answer to a question but at least provide a starting point for users to do their own research
- Provide background information (e.g., bicycle parts) so that new users don’t have to jump all over the place to get explanations of terminology in answers to their questions and/or help them to ask better questions (by using the correct terminology).
- Provide new users with much more of a useful learning experience than they would get with a simple answer to their initial question Teach a Man to Fish
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Yes what you say there is very much the ethos around comments on StackExchange – that, and preferring to post a comment instead of editing each other’s answers.
This isn’t only an SE clone/replacement though, is it? But more general.
So IMO the use case, people meet online to discuss drafts of a document – and may or may not eventually produce a “final” version.
But, I don’t know, look at Parliament – they pass written legislation eventually after talking about it, but there are wonks (possibly including judges sometimes, I don’t know) who want to look behind the document and see the intent: whose idea was this? what did this bit mean, exactly? was it important, can I change it? and so on.
This functionality might not be for an initial MVP.
I’d like to propose it though as an inherent capability of the software, while we’re “brainstorming”. There might be a simple way to implement it – possibly by version controlling the lot, plus being able to assign moderator-like privileges to some user[s] but limited the scope of that to a specific document (i.e. not site-wide), so they can control the commentary.
Of the first 4 bullet points (i.e. “section headings, anchors, TOC, comment on sections”), the first three might be fairly localised, features of the markdown editor/converter.
It’s the last one – i.e. “comment on sections” – that’s the wildcard in terms of the “database schema” given that we’d also want to be able to edit the document, rearrange its sections. There’s the rub, perhaps, and how obviously to implement that I suppose might depend on what kind of database it is (“relational” or “document-oriented” or some hybrid).
I didn’t know the Beta existed, I wish I’d seen it.
I don’t know but this post …
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-documentation
… might imply that the problem was mostly commercial …
In order to hire more people, we need to make more money. That might mean helping more developers find a great job or selling more ads or signing up more businesses to use Enterprise. In the future, it might mean selling Channels to new teams. The business pitch for Documentation was that it’d bring in new users who might be in the market for a job. If the feature were particularly successful, it would create new opportunities to sell advertisements. At the end of 2016, we established a metric to aim for: substantially increase the number of Documentation users.
By May, it was clear we weren’t on the right path. New users weren’t coming to Documentation. So we went back to the drawing board and started another round of user interviews focused on Transact SQL. We brought on a user experience researcher to help us interview technical writers. The results were encouraging in the sense that we know a lot more about what makes for great documentation and how we might support that effort. But it was also clear fixing Documentation would require a significantly larger team.
In addition, it’ll be a very long time before that work will pay off in terms of bringing new users to Stack Overflow. Our interviews showed even very experienced users of T-SQL felt inadequate to contribute documentation. Users with less Stack Overflow experience tended to be intimidated by the prospect of making even trivial edits. So the programmers most likely to become Documentation contributors were already heavily engaged in using Stack Overflow.
… plus I don’t know it’s saying there about T-SQL but maybe it was hard to use as well.
Does that sound like “similar problems” or maybe not?