4 ms·

Ask HN: Why do we not have a Wiki yet?

• faramarz 16y ago
  Gabriel's archive is a great starting point I think. Lot's of labour has gone into that already, use it as your base. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive Take the initiative and people will support you.
  • deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
• lfx 16y ago
  Yes, definitely, because is hard to look after all great content and "save" it for later reading and use.
• edw519 16y ago
  http://remembersaurus.com/askhn.html http://remembersaurus.com/askhn.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive
  • jdc 16y ago
    Are you saying "we already have wikis and they're good enough" or sharing a starting point? When I look at those pages I see a fracation of what an HN wiki could be.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  I'm working on something related - a repository for "Great Articles". It's currently in early ante-pre-alpha, and sitting partly idle while I use it for real and assess its shortcomings. If you want to have a look at what I have, email me.
• audionerd 16y ago
  I know non-coders might downvote me for this, but github's recently open-sourced Gollum engine might be a good basis. http://github.com/github/gollum Contributors could write their articles independently, send a pull request, and have their writing merged into the central wiki. There's also a (minimal) web UI for easy edits, or for users who aren't comfortable with git.
  • jackowayed 16y ago
    Gollum seems like a solid choice to me even if we most people don't use the git-ness at all. It allows lots of markup formats (though we probably would want to pick one so that we don't have one page in textile, another in markdown, and yet another in AsciiDoc, confusing people that try to contribute), does syntax highlighting (which will be extremely useful), allows posting TeX in case we make a foray into a group P!=NP proof, and does allow power users to edit the files in their text editor and git push the changes. P.S. clickable link: http://github.com/github/gollum http://github.com/github/gollum And you can see the editor here: http://github.com/github/gollum/wiki/Home/_edit http://github.com/github/gollum/wiki/Home/_edit
• antics 16y ago
  Well, what need of yours is not being met? Let's start with the problem you're having, and build something that can fix it. I'll even help you with the coding. :)
  • jackowayed 16y ago
    The need that I think we're identifying is that often you need to find good info about, say, the ins and outs of raising an angel round. There's lots of great info on HN but it's scattered about among many threads. So you can't just go to wiki.ycombinator.com/angel-round and find out everything you need to know. You have to search, sift through the results ignoring false-positives (say, comments that reference raising an angel round but don't tell you how to raise one), etc. So I guess the simplest way to state the need is that we need an easy way to access the wealth of high-quality information that's on HN. One solution is a wiki that structures a (hopefully high-quality) subset of that information. The best solution, were it feasible, would probably be a super-"smart" search engine where you could query "How do I raise an angel round?" and it would understand the query and scan HN's comments and submitted articles (since I'm sure people have submitted articles that give tips for raising an angel round) and return a lot of information that it has determined applies, is high-quality, and covers all of the issues thoroughly. But if you can write that, you should be applying it to the entire web and making billions, not just using it to search HN ;) So that's an example of a solution that would be better. Which means it's clearly worth spending some time considering whether there are feasible solutions that are better than a wiki.
    • mryall 16y ago
      Perhaps just adding a search box to the HN header or footer would help? It would certainly be better than clicking through to Google, then clicking to enter some search terms, then browsing a list of results on a completely different site.
      • jackowayed 16y ago
        The problem really is that googling with site:news.ycombinator.com or using Search YC isn't a very good approach. Using my raising an angel round example again, say you search "raise angel round" http://searchyc.com/raise%20angel%20round http://searchyc.com/raise%20angel%20round. The results suck. There's an Ask HN that could have been good except that it has no responses. There's an article that sounds potentially useful, except that the link no longer works. And then there's also a lot of things like "Tweetdeck raises an angel round." "Posterous raises an angel round." Totally useless in this case.
• KingOfB 16y ago
  A wiki just doesn't seem aligned with HN to me. It's a place to post links, not generate content. What are you trying to achieve? I just do the following: http://www.google.com/#q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+topic http://www.google.com/#q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+topic I guess if posts could be tagged you could have a nice browsing function. wiki doesn't seem like the right tool though, maybe a del.icio.us clone that monitors HN and auto-tags?
  • jtg 16y ago
    It _was_ originally just a place to post links, but I think it's clear by now that it's grown into something much more. Many of us value HN for the quality of the conversations -- there are so many other places (like our personal Twitter feeds) where we can find links of interest. Much of the value we get is from the content we all generate through these comments. It's clear to me that there's room for improvement when it comes to giving structure to all the great stuff that's discussed here. My gut feeling is that a wiki isn't the right way to go about it either, but there is certainly a lot of quality content being generated here.
    • jdc 16y ago
      I think we've established it should be user-editable. What structure would you suggest?
  • nkassis 16y ago
    What about a wiki for hot topics. Someone gave P!=NP as an example. Collecting everything we find on these subjects with some blurbs about them.
• kmfrk 16y ago
  I shudder at the thought of how the "Do I need a co-founder?" wiki would look. Absolute mayhem.
  • techiferous 16y ago
    It could be organized into different points of views. Each section could articulate pros and cons, for example. It's all in how you organize it; don't organize it like a fact-based wikipedia article.
• alttab 16y ago
  If its a wiki in the traditional sense, it will fail here. Why? Because its just another freaking wiki that needs updating. If there was an HN-endorsed crawler that could aggregate posts/comments about particular subjects intelligently and allowed posts on that wiki to inject into the relevant parts of HN (say, to a comment or a post), then it could be a Wiki-style meta-filter on HN. Just an idea. Otherwise a technical wiki would have nothing in common with HN other than audience and launch base. People won't go back there and it won't beat Wikipedia at being a wiki.
• tome 16y ago
  Answer HN: Simplicity.
• edanm 16y ago
  One of the problems here is that every week, someone creates a new Wiki, or Excel of HNers, or archive of posts, and a week later no one remembers it. What's going to stop the wiki from being forgotten? I'm trying to fix this "Meta" problem with a webapp I created, which is basically a (votable) list of resources for HN or any other site. You can find it here: http://resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com/ http://resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com/. It's helping me solve this issue for myself, so at least I'm scratching my own itch :)
  • wvl 16y ago
    This is a start, but it suffers from the same problem that all of the wikis, spreadsheets, archives, and alternative interfaces do -- how do people find it in the first place? But _this_ is the problem I see the Hacker News wiki should solve. Maintaining a wiki about all the subjects that get posted here would quickly lead to madness. However, maintaining a wiki related to all the meta information the site generates (such as pointing to previous attempts to hide the points associated with comments) would be extremely valuable. However, the only way this problem gets truly solved is if we can get pg to add a link to a wiki or something from the site.
    • edanm 16y ago
      Well, it is possible that pg will add a link to Resourcey. But my hope is this becomes a semi-known place to go for "resource links for hackers". That way you only have to remember one site, but whatever other site you go to, you can find interesting spin-off resources.
  • ecaradec 16y ago
    I think that this is a great idea, this is completly inline with HN. I added all the services I know.
• bhiggins 16y ago
  We should have our own jargon file too :)
• patrickk 16y ago
  I suggested something similar also - Resources for Hackers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1256069 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1256069 I suggested a wiki here too. pg's suggestion was to have a section for evergreen topics. Didn't get much attention at the time though.