Still need a real wiki

In another thread, @ben mentioned making a forum post a “wiki post.” It appears that this is a feature only available to admins:

What it does is make any one individual post in the thread editable by anyone comes by.

While that’s an interesting feature, it’s not the same as a full wiki. First of all, you’re missing the discussion and history features of a real wiki which are invaluable for technical topics where people often just get confused and start editing based on some completely different model or device type.

Imagine someone who starts editing a zigbee bind topic on the basis of what they know about zwave Association, for example, and throws in a bunch of stuff about the Minimote. Being able to revert to a previous version is very helpful.

In addition, a wiki provides a very important table of contents feature which would be missing from a simple wiki post in the existing discourse forum.

I like the discourse forum for exactly what it is, a conversational forum. It’s not a substitute for a wiki.

As others have mentioned, the more forum topics we get, the harder it is to navigate to base information like current device types or examples of standard routines.

A wiki serves as a reference for established facts. Not for peer-to-peer discussion threads about opinions or personal experiences.

I think a wiki is particularly of value for open platform Systems where there are so many different devices and use cases and yet, at the same time, it’s quite likely that someone else has already solved the problem that a new person has just encountered.

Wikis also have the very big advantage that people who wish to refer others to the listing of established facts don’t have to remember exactly what topics those facts were stored under. :wink:

Like I said, I like the forum for what it is. But I think there is a separate and growing need for a wiki as well.

In order to keep a wiki from being burdensome, the one thing needed is an active community of many experts. Which is exactly what SmartThings already has. A wiki allows that collective knowledge to be leveraged in an efficient manner for both writers and readers. :sunglasses:

UPDATE: Making this post a wiki to see how it used. Wonder if there is history of edits.

UPDATE: Edited by @sam to demo notifications

Edit from @mattjfrank testing editing your post and yes we need a real wiki

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Found the history, you have to tap the little pencil in the upper right. I don’t see any way to do a reversion though and there’s still no table of contents structure.

I would still argue that a real wiki is needed. :sunglasses:

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@JDRoberts I made an edit to your post but I don’t see history. I thought back when I was a “regular” I could see post edit history. I know I can’t see it now.

Note, we do want to add a TOC feature and have it slotted for next release. This topic on meta may be interesting to you:

Check out: http://community.quickfile.co.uk/t/sole-trader-bookkeeping-the-basics/8808

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And now we have one!

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