A proposal for a sane transfer of useful information trapped on Reddit ( kbin.social )

Emperor , 11 months ago

Another, more complicated, possibility would be to include a user editable wiki with each community

This would be my preference. Given some of the big tasks that still need to be done (advanced moderation tools, for example) adding a wiki is relatively trivial - you can piggyback off the existing user authentication and markdown regular expressions which are all the diffcult bits. I wrote my own wiki 10+ years ago and it was pretty straightforward.

DrNeurohax OP , 11 months ago

I'm thinking more in terms of syncing and storage. It all depends on how it's implemented. Does each community have a wiki that's synced with individual users' wikis? A separate wiki per instance? How to handle edit conflicts, etc.

You're right that just making a wiki isn't too tough, but in the case of decentralized, editable, moderated content, it's probably different enough to warrant an approach significantly different from a traditional, single site/many edit centralized version.

(We could always temporarily have a centralized wiki and roadmap out the transition later, too.)

Emperor , 11 months ago

Yes, the technical aspects are straightforward, the conceptual ones might need a bit of chewing over.

The way I see it, each community would have their own wiki but an instance could also have its own wiki for FAQs and the like which would then also act as the top level, linking to all the different wikis so it would appear as one cohesive wiki. Admins could edit any page, moderators could only edit their own wikis. You could either have a system to allow users to submit a draft edit or you could do that in a post in the community. Unlike, say, Wikipedia, there probably wouldn’t need to be large numbers of edits to a page in quick succession, so community members could thrash out a proposed update or addition in the discussion.

So, for example, I started a Home Video community and so I might want one page for a list of boutique Blu-ray releasers and another for a guide to buying a multiregional Blu-ray player. Over on Reddit I created a list of third party suppliers of STLs for the game Star Wars Legion that was well-received (which reminds me I must copy that over) which could be worth a page. Those pages would tend to be relatively static - only getting an update if a new Blu-ray publisher or STL maker popped up.

DrNeurohax OP , 11 months ago

There are lots of details to be ironed out if we go the wiki way, which is why I think the tagged route would be the best start. Start getting the data and develop the larger structure over time. Once we need the data to populate the wikis/dbs/whatever, any mod can filter the posts pretty easily.

Other problems I see happening - conflicts between mods on entries, keep or throw out entries when an instance defederates (the c/politics folks might not want the entries on Biden being a lizardman from Nova Scotia, but c/iliketohitmyheadwithbricks does), bad blood if some mods want tighter control over wiki content, syncing when federating impact if larger media elements added, multiple wikis covering multiple topics while there are multiple instances covering multiple topics (multiplicative duplication due to the multiple hierarchies of equal importance), and I'm sure plenty more.

Emperor , 11 months ago

which is why I think the tagged route would be the best start.

I think we’d need to do that anyway as a stop-gap measure because you could start that right now. If there’s a will for it, a wiki could be thrown together quickly but there’d need to be testing and the developers of Lemmy would want to be assured it won’t break anything or leave a security vulnerability.

If correctly formatted, the content could then just be scooped up and used to populate a wiki when it arrives.

Other problems I see happening

A lot of those are federation issues in general - for example, the wiki would be clearly part of another instances community, so a post about Biden being a lizard in a humansuit and a wiki entry on the same topic would be essentially the same.

DrNeurohax OP , 11 months ago

I totally agree on the first point, and might have a response in this thread stating much the same.

On the federation/syncing, I think it might need a more unique approach. Communities already have the problem of multiple posts linking the same article across several instances and communities, which don't sync comments. Making sure the complete wiki for a given community is resilient to instances defederating, shutting down, or vandalizing should be top priority, IMO. I don't know what the solution is, but I think we should be open to it looking different from the basic Lemmy sync setup.

For example, the wiki/extracted posts don't really need to sync as quickly as thread comments. Also, there should be some form of versioning in case of a credentials bug, hack, or intentional mass deletion or vandalism. We could aggregate points of conflict between instances/communities in a topic's main thread/stream/article and assign some for of weighting alongside the choice to continue reading from a particular wiki, which are return to the original thread/stream/article.

So, in the Biden-lizard example, the primary Biden entry that's synced everywhere could have a "Controversy" section with generally agreed on, real issues (like age, which is true for almost all US politicians) and fringe disagreements. Each fringe entry in the list would link to the page synced between instances that subscribe to those beliefs, but that page would not be a part of the larger synced Biden pages' contents. That keeps the lizard lovers' content off the larger, community-focused instances.

I guess I'm worried about conspiracy theories pulling users of the 'realistic' path, while increasing load on dissenting instances. I don't think Biden's a lizardman, so I shouldn't have to host the 12 hour long documentary on it. (We all know he's a reincarnated demon-angel hybrid. Oh, so now you don't agree? Fine, I'll host my 36 part finger puppet reenactment of the situation myself!)

Anyhow, I'm kinda babbling. These are just some general ideas off the cuff I wanted to get out there. I'm not a mod or an admin, so I'm hoping to get the conversation restarted among those with the ability to enact some of these changes. Reddit is still a knowledgebase of useful past discussions, and while new content is great, the more we can pull into the fediverse, the better.

Emperor , 11 months ago

And the name? Lemmywiks.

My job here is done.

kosure , 11 months ago

I think you're right: a wiki is probably the best place/format for this type of information. I think this post is more interested in the preservation of information than it's formating. In that regard I think the most simple way to get the most copies produced is probably the best.