This is a question a friend just asked, and I wanted to share it here in case it’s of interest to others.
Chess: Something that might be useful is a wiki. For terms, names, whos who, companies, etc. Might be good way to create a link bank and highlight words and directory use.
The Knowledge section currently is meant to function like a wiki. In any post, when you click the link button it will let you search for other posts and link to them.
Discourse (the software we are running on) also has an option to make the first post editable by anyone. So the first post becomes the wiki and the rest become comments. I haven’t enabled this feature on any categories currently, but I could. It’s an admin setting available to me.
The reason I have not done so…
Is because of how authorship works in my conception of the universe. Anyone who authors something gets admin priveledges, the ability to flush other people. And I did this with the sense of giving them autonomy over whatever they are publishing.
So I’m actually leaning towards, rather than letting posts be edited by anyone, if you have a different view of things just make a new post. So what rises to the top becomes more of a consequence of what people reference and comment on the most. And we retain the sense of individual autonomy, and it’s something that people can expect consistently in any area of the site.
I think that one of the problems with say, Wikipedia, is that it’s been captured by intelligence agencies and corporate PR people who use it to promote propaganda. This is quite well documented.
When you can edit a page, and then the past versions of it get hidden, that is a way of obscuring the voices of those who came before. It’s a way of memory holing.
Whereas if you never do that, if you say “This is what you said, and here it is in the record.” Then that is truly honoring free speech.
The antidote to bad speech is more speech. And the record of bad speech and how it was overcome is an important part of history.
Yeah… so I think the way it works now we will get many of the qualities you want out of a wiki. Without some of the downsides maybe?