Are there plans to add support for wiki pages?

capr@lemmy.world to Lemmy@lemmy.ml – 60 points –

Title says it all. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see a way to do anything wiki related at the subs I've created.

27

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

I don't want to be constantly comparing Lemmy to Reddit, but on Reddit, the wikis were invaluable. As helpful as the threads were, the wikis frequently had amazingly useful info.

That said, I'm not sure I think adding wikis to Lemmy is the right way to go. "One thing well" and all that.

Maybe instead, some ancilliary wiki platform that can be run alongside Lemmy that lets a community mod easily set up a wiki that can be linked to in the sidebar?

Or we could go really simple and just link specific posts in the sidebar with useful information of the kind you'd otherwise put into a wiki.

Funny in nearly all the subs I was in I only ever saw the wiki's when on desktop and based on how many "trigger" bots subs had to answer common questions no one read the wiki's anyway.

People didn't even read the sidebar, let alone the wiki, or even the pinned posts.

Mostly I mean the wikis for really informational subreddits like /r/bodyweightfitness or /r/personalfinance. Those would usually be the best place to get information on whatever topic that wasn't mostly sponsored propaganda. And it had uses that the threads didn't fill because the wikis would take a comprehensive view of the subject matter whereas threads would be about one or another detail.

Who knows. Maybe I was the only one who felt like they got benefit from the wikis. Ha!

As a former member of personal finance I never used the wikis.

For the first option you mentioned, a user already suggested a service called Hubziller. My issue with it is it might be a bit tacky or confusing for readers if they subscribe to a community but have to visit a separate service to access wikis, instead of making them in house. Maybe it's just me being stubborn and not thinking outside the box since I've been a mod on Reddiy for 10 years, but that's my humble opinion.

The second option is a more practical solution for here and now but it doesn't allow for collective editing or reverting changes.

Yeah. I'm definitely for some pretty seamless integration. Probably in the optimal case:

  • The wikis would be hosted on the same domain as the Lemmy servers.
  • Any account you had on the associated Lemmy server would automatically exist to the wiki as well.
  • If you were logged into Lemmy, you'd also be logged into the wiki.
  • Only mods would be able to enable wikis but the process of doing so would be trivially easy.
  • I'd personally say that it makes the most sense to just have the mods link the associated wiki from the sidebar rather than creating new special interface features to add a link outside the sidebar or whatever. (Unless some kind of plugin infrastructure that would allow that already exists.)

But all that can be done without putting any wiki-specific code into the Lemmy or Lemmy-UI source repositories, which I think is preferable for the same reason you wouldn't add flight simulator code to a spreadsheet application. (Ok, maybe a bad example, but you get my point.)

Edit: And I'll admit there are both upsides and downsides to my approach here. One downside would be that some Lemmy instances would offer attached wikis and others wouldn't. It's possible it also just wouldn't catch on at all and nobody would enable attached wikis as a feature if it was a whole separate step to setting up "Lemmy".