As the current season comes to an end and a new game reveal is less than a month away, we could expect the annual tradition of plethora of threads discussing various drivetrain, intake, and lift options. There is nothing wrong with the new students following in the same footsteps the path that senior teams have walked before.
However, we could try a bit different setup this year and pre-position necessary information ahead of the surge.
Assuming @DRow had followed Discourse default Trust Level setup, many vexforum TL2 Members will soon be upgraded to the TL3 Regulars.
The most exciting perk of TL3 is the ability to create wiki posts:
With the proper permissions, you may be able to turn into wiki any post, or forum admins could setup a special category where every topic is a wiki entry by default.
Lets use this thread to discuss what entries need to be created first (i.e. drivetrain options comparison and individual detailed entries for each type), as well as start gathering links to the relevant threads and external resources that need to be wikified.
I believe Wiki posts are already available to people. I’ve seen two, one from @Connor and one from @gilmorkn472 so I believe members can already do wikis. I even saw the option to make my post a wiki but didn’t try it so it could just now allow me but I don’t think so.
I could be wrong though.
Edit: I am TL2 and I can make this post a wiki so maybe I’m misinterpreting your post.
If you press the more option (the three dots) and then the admin controls (the wrench) you can make the post a wiki.
You are right @Fmaj7add9. I tried it few weeks ago and didn’t see the option.
Either I have accumulated enough posts / likes over time, or admins had changed the settings.
This a is test post, that anybody could edit below, just keep it civil
This is a prime example of what is wrong with Wikis. It can easily become chaos, we can’t even trust our own community. One person can ruin an entire wiki post and there doesn’t seem like an overall undo button besides just copying and pasting from a previous edit.
They can definitely be beneficial but when most users on this forum are edgy teenagers (like me) then it can easily spiral out of control with people messing it up for other people for a laugh.
Just gotta have faith in the community I guess.
I don’t think bans would do much in this situation, except probably an IP ban but you can get around that. If someone is set on messing up a wiki and they get banned they can make a new account and just keep wrecking the wiki on throwaway accounts. Rinse and Repeat.
tbh I’d prefer the good old conversation. It lets you read the flow of information seeing who thought of it, and whatnot. I think we can learn more from a conversation on, say lifts, then a wiki on lifts.
@Xenon27 we are, obviously, not going to discount how continuous conversation is great for figuring out evolution of the subject. However, I would disagree with the second statement.
There are multiple ways you could organize the information and different people may have different preference how to consume it. I find it best to put reference material into a wiki format. It is a long term storage format that many people could contribute to make it short and valuable, which will save much more time for the readers.
Forum format is great for the discussion on the subjects where the truth is not obvious and many people need to contribute their opinion and arguments. Persistence of such discussions is preferable and you need to be able to reference (link to) individual posts.
And, finally, chat style is best when you need to quickly get help or want to discuss latest news or memes. Persistence of chats is not required most of the times.
So, the short answer was that I have faith in the community.
The long answer is that, while it is very tempting for adults to organize the information and just give it to the students in the ready to consume form, the better way would be to try to do it together with the students. While it may take longer to get going with the wiki involving cooperative editing with both students and adults it will pay off in the long run.
First of all, adults don’t have that much free time to begin with.
Second, many students may not know all the physics and math that adults do, but are much more knowledgeable in the specific ways this stuff is applicable to the actual game.
Third, the students will gain much deeper understanding of the subject if they are active editors and not just passive readers.
How about I create a couple of practice wiki topics about drivetrains and everybody is welcome to edit and discuss them?
We will learn how this works, and then, after a week or so, will either abandon the idea or start expanding it with more content.
Here are several practice topics to get started with:
This project have been restarted using a new single topic Wiki .
In a single topic format it should be easier to maintain it with less administrative efforts.
The purpose of the Wiki is not to duplicate all important knowledge that already present on the forum and external sites, but serve as a concise curated index to make it easier to find that information.
This is important because there are plenty of VRC specific keywords and acronyms that make it hard for the beginners to use search function effectively, without prior knowledge of those keywords.
