www.macosxhints.com as a wiki?

[hayne]

Christopher Clark suggests that the main macosxhints site would be better as a wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki):
http://decaffeinated.org/archives/2006/05/04/hints

Opinions?

[Jay Carr]

With the number of technical people who frequent this site, that could only be a good thing. The ability to constantly tweak articles until they are perfect would be rather nice.

Plus searching and navigation would be slightly easier. I agree with the article when it says that an article in a wiki is much harder to bury.

One question though, will access to editing the articles be restricted? Or will any joe-mac-user be able to just edit an article? I don't know if it's that big of a deal, but I worry about wiki's sometimes because I don't know how verified the articles are.

But overall, I really like the idea of it being a wiki.

[Mikey-San]

No.

Actually, wait.

Yeah, still a silly idea. Nothing's broken. Hints are submitted, reviewed, cleaned, posted, and commented on. Is there some breaking reason Mac OS X Hints needs to hop on the Wiki bandwagon?

Nothing to see here, move along.

Edit: If searching is a problem (never had a problem here, honestly), that still isn't a reason to shift the entire site dynamic. It just means search needs improvement.

[styrafome]

From the article seems like the only thing to fix is have a way of versioning the tips. No need to migrate the whole site to wiki just for that. I'd suggest adding the ability to have a tip appears as two tabs: "Current" and "Original". Display defaults to Current. The discussion comments would stay so everyone knows why the original is no longer current.

Wiki migration would have to be done carefully if it was done, because at some jobs I've seen some internal team wikis that were completely incomprehensible to navigate for anyone outside the development team. The Web wikis seem to be better, like Wikipedia and memory-alpha.org.

[Raven]

A bit more laymen terms for what styrafome just mentionned... As long as its clear and easy to search, its fine with me. Would this still allow for an RSS feed or it makes that more complex ?

[griffman]

I posted my thoughts (http://www.robservatory.com/archives/2006/05/07/why-isnt-macosxhintscom-a-wiki) on the "why isn't macosxhints a wiki?" question over on my blog, robservatory.com.

Basically, I agree that there are elements of the site that would work much better with a wiki-like structure. But there are elements of wikis that are just plain dangerous for a site like this one. Imagine scripts being updated to delete all of a user's files, for instance.

At the end of my post, I list what I'd like to see from a "next generation" hints site, and I'm working with Macworld to try to get many of these things implemented, at least to some degree.

-rob.

[CAlvarez]

The current way it's organized is very hard for me to use and follow. Could be just my brain. I like the Wiki idea but see Rob's point perfectly.

Maybe scripts could only be modded by the original poster or a mod/admin?

[hayne]

The current way it's organized is very hard for me to use and follow.

Of course there's no reason why someone couldn't start their own wiki-based "table of contents" (or other organizing scheme) for macosxhints.
That is, no reason other than the hosting/bandwidth costs.

[ibroughton]

Of course there's no reason why someone couldn't start their own wiki-based "table of contents" (or other organizing scheme) for macosxhints.
That is, no reason other than the hosting/bandwidth costs.
I have a reseller hosting package and a few spare domain names floating round, so if anyone wants to help out on this then I'd be happy to oblige. :D

[pedz]

The original Clark article makes sense ***if you are the type that does not read and understand things***. I can imagine Joe Googler spotting the hit on google, rushes around, and uses the old script. But I don't really care about him frankly. I prefer Suzy Googler (Joe's pet rabbit). She takes the time to read the entire article and the replies and picks out the proper script for her situation. I LIKE Suzy!!!!

Having said that, is there a weakness in both systems? Suppose Bad Bad Billy submits a hint: good, useful, productive hint with a script. It gets accepted and praised by all. Later Bad Bad Billy "updates" his script to re-elect George Bush. Does anyone sanity check the updates in either the Wiki approach or the current "blog" appraoch?

[griffman]

In the current system, Billy Bad can't update his script. He can only post a comment. The original hint remains untouched. I (very nearly all the time) post all scripts directly on the site, too, so people can't just change the source on the "linked script" and have their evil scripts propagate.

But Billy Bad could post a comment containing a link to his bad script, but he would be able to do that under any system that allows feedback. To a large extent, it's up to the community to prevent such things from being accidentally obtained by naive users.

In my proposed new system, Billy Bad still wouldn't have direct access, and we'll probably include a "report this comment" button to make it easier to find and weed out evil scripting comments :)

-rob.