Title says it all. Unless I’m missing something, I don’t see a way to do anything wiki related at the subs I’ve created.
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Gitea, GitHub and the like allow the owners of a repository to create an associated wiki by selecting a preference check box. You should be able to copy the relevant code from any free/open source implementation. It would be useful for providing Frequently Asked Questions for the community for example.
I don’t want to be constantly comparing Lemmy to Reddit, but on Reddit, the wikis were invaluable. As helpful as the threads were, the wikis frequently had amazingly useful info.
That said, I’m not sure I think adding wikis to Lemmy is the right way to go. “One thing well” and all that.
Maybe instead, some ancilliary wiki platform that can be run alongside Lemmy that lets a community mod easily set up a wiki that can be linked to in the sidebar?
Or we could go really simple and just link specific posts in the sidebar with useful information of the kind you’d otherwise put into a wiki.
Funny in nearly all the subs I was in I only ever saw the wiki’s when on desktop and based on how many “trigger” bots subs had to answer common questions no one read the wiki’s anyway.
Mostly I mean the wikis for really informational subreddits like /r/bodyweightfitness or /r/personalfinance. Those would usually be the best place to get information on whatever topic that wasn’t mostly sponsored propaganda. And it had uses that the threads didn’t fill because the wikis would take a comprehensive view of the subject matter whereas threads would be about one or another detail.
Who knows. Maybe I was the only one who felt like they got benefit from the wikis. Ha!
As a former member of personal finance I never used the wikis.
For the first option you mentioned, a user already suggested a service called Hubziller. My issue with it is it might be a bit tacky or confusing for readers if they subscribe to a community but have to visit a separate service to access wikis, instead of making them in house. Maybe it’s just me being stubborn and not thinking outside the box since I’ve been a mod on Reddiy for 10 years, but that’s my humble opinion.
The second option is a more practical solution for here and now but it doesn’t allow for collective editing or reverting changes.
Yeah. I’m definitely for some pretty seamless integration. Probably in the optimal case:
- The wikis would be hosted on the same domain as the Lemmy servers.
- Any account you had on the associated Lemmy server would automatically exist to the wiki as well.
- If you were logged into Lemmy, you’d also be logged into the wiki.
- Only mods would be able to enable wikis but the process of doing so would be trivially easy.
- I’d personally say that it makes the most sense to just have the mods link the associated wiki from the sidebar rather than creating new special interface features to add a link outside the sidebar or whatever. (Unless some kind of plugin infrastructure that would allow that already exists.)
But all that can be done without putting any wiki-specific code into the Lemmy or Lemmy-UI source repositories, which I think is preferable for the same reason you wouldn’t add flight simulator code to a spreadsheet application. (Ok, maybe a bad example, but you get my point.)
Edit: And I’ll admit there are both upsides and downsides to my approach here. One downside would be that some Lemmy instances would offer attached wikis and others wouldn’t. It’s possible it also just wouldn’t catch on at all and nobody would enable attached wikis as a feature if it was a whole separate step to setting up “Lemmy”.
It would be a nightmare to implement a wiki over activepub, so it would probably need to exist outside of federation.
It also feels like the kind of feature creep that made Reddit unsustainable. Software should do one thing and do it well - Reddit’s reliance on 3rd parties fixing core functionality while they pursued every shiny new thing their product managers and software engineers wanted to put on their CV should be a cautionary tale.
I feel we would be better served with wikis stored outside of Lemmy and simply linked in the description. Lemmy exists on the web and shouldn’t try to pretend it doesn’t like corporate social media.
Sorry for my ignorance but why would it be a nightmare to implement over Activitypub? Would there be an issue with approved editor accounts from other instances?
I don’t know if I would consider wiki pages the threshold for feature creep. It’s been a basic feature for Reddit mods ever since I joined Reddit 10 years ago. Therefore it existed before all the new.Reddit features were thrown in. Mods use wikis for directories, tutorials, archiving select content, and bot configs. Yes you could link to external wiki pages but IMO the experience for reading, editing, and adjusting settings would not be as seemless.
Sorry but I fail to see why support for wikis would be synonymous with corporate social media. IMHO, it’s a fundamental tool to have.
For example, what would happen if two people change the same paragraph in two different instances at roughly the same time?
This is already a problem for existing distributed versioning systems (like git), and in those the merge conflicts can only happen when the users explicitly request them. With activitypub the merge conflicts would happen in response to asynchronous events and to make things worse, different instances might see different events. How would you surface the conflict to the users so they can solve it? Do you send an email to the user which was a fraction of second late saying their edit got rejected? Do you reject both of them and keep the old content? Do you overwrite the first edit silently?
These are already hard UX problems on centralized wikis, and the technical aspects of a distributed system would make them worse. So much worse that I would say it’s orders of magnitude harder to implement than a link aggregator.
different instances might see different events.
Why would this happen? Does it have to do with not running the latest software? If so, it seems to me like a responsibility the server admins should be mindful of.
Do you reject both of them and keep the old content?
Why not simply reject both but save them in the history tab and then send PMs to both users involved to inform them of the conflict?
Why would the wiki page have to be decentralised? Each community lives in one instance, the wiki page could similarly be attached to the instance, but with federated users
That’d be great
