Making better use of the Wiki

[talkingtoaj]

Often when I have a particular issue, I find the answers more readily in the forums than in the Wiki.

I use a wiki for my work, and good wiki use provides a very very powerful tool. While forums allow Q&A conversations, wikis allow good summaries of forum discussions. Is there any reason why the bulk of knowledge wealth found within the forum has not been added to the corresponding wiki topic pages? Anything I should be aware of before I personally take some initiative to do so?


In my org, we also use Wiki more to handle repeat forum questions. For example, the recent posting about teleportation that is a regular question... I begin a wiki page on teleport (I'll do that now... http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/teleport ). Now next time someone asks about teleport, after berating them for not searching the forum, when we cool down we can point them to the wiki page to save us a bunch of typing.

If their request is unique enough that the page isn't quite sufficient to their situation, instead of writing a forum answer we instead amend the wiki page, and again simply post the wiki URL for an answer. that way, the wiki page on 'teleport' is slowly fleshed out over time so 80% of people's queries, now 90%, now 98%, are answered by the wiki page saving tedious retyping in the forum.

Does that sound appealing?

[RKurtzDmitriyev]

Hi there talkingtoaj.

My apologies if I'm being dense here, but I don't believe that OFPEC has any official connection to the BIS wiki. Thus I'm puzzled as to why you're asking this here and not there.

Is there any reason why the bulk of knowledge wealth found within the forum has not been added to the corresponding wiki topic pages? Anything I should be aware of before I personally take some initiative to do so?

As far as I know, feel free to start. There might be copyright issues with simply cutting-and-pasting OFPEC forum posts into the BIS wiki, if that's what you're planning (but that's not what it sounds like).

But I think you would have better luck asking there rather than here.

Funny you should ask about this, though, because there's been some discussion among the OFPEC staff about creating an FAQ that's modifiable by the community, for reasons very similar to what you're describing.

[bedges]

Indeed. The OFPEC FAQ is currently being recoded to make it more Wiki-like. Work is necessarily slow due to RL committments, but I'd say it's about 40% there. I can't really give an ETA for it, but threads like this and others help to spur on the work.

It's good to see another individual with the motivation to help achieve what OFPEC sets out to do: help the Community get fast and efficient access to effective solutions to their editing problems. You wouldn't fancy joining the OFPEC staff would you? 

[talkingtoaj]

Hi Bedges, I appreciate all work being done on improving the OFPEC FAQ, but I don't think this can/should replace the BIS Wiki.

OFPEC may have no official link to BIS, but to most users like myself that is unimportant. Users are loyal to the game rather than one org or the other.

It would seem to me a little pointless to begin a modifiable FAQ for this purpose if a reasonably well written wiki already exists.

If BIS is happy to host a user-contributable Wiki, I think we can confidently synergize between the two.

Hope you guys will join me in the process

Bless ya!

[bedges]

The breadth of support sites available to the Community is just one of the things which makes it so successful. No-one is talking about replacing the Biki, just as no-one is trying to discourage you from augmenting it with editing information - or starting your own site for that matter.

What I am saying is that if, as you said in your first post, folks "find the answers more readily in the forums than in the Wiki", it makes sense to store that information in a FAQ at the source. If that data is copied to the Biki at some point, so much the better.

My point is that with a bit more work (which is already underway) the OFPEC FAQ could fulfill its original purpose in a better way - not as a substitute for the Biki, but as an effective supplement to it, giving the Community yet another tool to help them on one of the sites they already use.

Either way, best of luck with your endeavours