

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

The format of this site is great for news, but I've been thinking: this community could really compile some very high quality information related to technology and business.<p>If I built it, would you come?
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edanm
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/>. It's
helping _me_ solve this issue for myself, so at least I'm scratching my own
itch :)

~~~
wvl
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
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.

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KingOfB
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>

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
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
I think we've established it should be user-editable. What structure would you
suggest?

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audionerd
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
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>

And you can see the editor here:
<http://github.com/github/gollum/wiki/Home/_edit>

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kmfrk
I shudder at the thought of how the "Do I need a co-founder?" wiki would look.
Absolute mayhem.

~~~
techiferous
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.

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antics
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
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
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
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>. 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.

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faramarz
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>

Take the initiative and people will support you.

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RiderOfGiraffes
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.

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alttab
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.

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edw519
<http://remembersaurus.com/askhn.html>

<http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive>

~~~
jdc
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.

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patrickk
I suggested something similar also - Resources for Hackers:

<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.

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lfx
Yes, definitely, because is hard to look after all great content and "save" it
for later reading and use.

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tome
Answer HN: Simplicity.

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bhiggins
We should have our own jargon file too :)

