Would be interesting to transform certain highly influential threads into -- very roughly/broadly speaking -- something community wiki like.
But not actually wiki, because no one ever uses them either...
I don't know if this is something that would need a change in policy as such, namely, whether you can expect a post to be edited for reasons other than strictly content moderation. Or if a post is considered ones' own copyright (which I believe is the case right now?), then how much and in what ways that might change with community editing.
Obviously, it would require much more effort on mod staff's part, or some other kind of arrangement (that may or may not be easily supported on the forum already, or with plugins, or if those plugins work at all well..). I mean, not that there are all that many mega-threads here, and, the minimum effort would be just pasting in a list someone else has already compiled; but, more than zero effort towards such a task anyway, I mean.
As-is, it's entirely up to individual responsibility, how good of a netizen someone can / wants to be.
Like, one should
always post with the expectation that their content could lead others to success or failure, and do a best-effort job preparing that content, and then nurturing and managing it as needed.
But that's obviously very unrealistic in practice.
The balance to that, then, would be allowing others to assert those responsibilities, under suitable circumstances; but that again takes work. (Imagine that, responsibility takes work, no matter who's doing it...).
It would be interesting to have some features like Stack Overflow (namely, that questions and answers can be edited by anyone with sufficient rank), but their complete model as such, discourages conversation (at least, most stacks do, I guess?), and probably creating a stack specifically for these kinds of topics or related, might not be a good fit to their policies (i.e., hacking content might be discouraged?). There are also facets of blogging in such threads, where people do research here or there -- maybe half-assedly or less, but still, something to add to the conversation; but it's also more interactive than standard blogging-as-such, as others reinterpret and direct such research, for example.
Or various note-taking or knowledge-base kinds of systems, but those also require responsibility (you're not going to opt-in everyone at random who could scribble over or delete your notes..) so are largely team-invite managed, in practice.
As for existing solutions; I mean, if there's value in it,
and I mean literally, how about let people put their money where their mouth is -- I believe it's been noted that asking for donations is acceptable here?, and, if people want to, say, sponsor someone to dig through and do all that dirty work in their otherwise-spare time, well, that'll sure make it a hell of a lot easier to justify. And then maybe OP adds that to their post as a courtesy; maybe we decide it's okay for mods to do a courtesy edit to similar effect; maybe it's just posted in an entirely separate thread, and interested posters just add enough cross-links to make it obvious where to find both (or say maybe stickying the index instead of, or in addition to, the original).
But the biggest barrier to that, I think, is almost everyone comes here specifically because it's free, no responsibility beyond basic courtesies, just a few header ads. So. Y'know. There might be plenty to complain about, but... it remains just that, complaints, lost to the wind?
I suppose the flipside of that is, give or take copyright or plagiarism or whatever, one is free to simply copy (or rephrase, or compile, as the case may be) whatever information they find here, and if those collections happen to be monetizable for them... that's... simply whoever else's problem for missing out on those opportunities...right?
Tim
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
