With the recent update of the forum, there has been a change to the software that I have suggested: Now I have set up the forum, so that everyone can turn their posts into wiki-posts, so that they can be edited collaboratively! Just click on the pencil and paper symbol at the end of your post to make it a wiki-post.
To edit a wiki-post just click on the pencil and paper symbol in the top right of a post.
If you create a new topic and wikify the opening post, then you should add the “wiki” tag to the topic!
With the new tag plugin you can filter the forum for topics that have a specific tag. When you filter for the “wiki” tag, then you get the equivalent of a wiki right here in the forum! This is really awesome! With those recent changes to the forum software, it becomes a viable alternative to dedicated wikis!
I think it’d make sense to have the presence of this tag automatically make the post a wiki post and to have no other way to make a post wikified. It might make sense to shield the tag from removal though, to make vandalism harder.
That is a very interesting feature proposal. Unfortunately, there is a
couple of minor problems with that. The wiki functionality is a Discourse
core functionality, while the tag functions come from an optional plugin.
Also, the levels for users able to wikify and tag posts can be set freely
by forum admins. This turns it into a feature with a relatively low target
audience.
Apart from that, it’s not clear whether the “wiki” tag should make every
post in a thread into a wiki-post, or only the original post. Tags refer to
threads, while the wiki status belongs to single posts. So, there’s a scope
mismatch in your proposal that’s not trivial to resolve.
If you still think your proposal is worth it, you could suggest it to the
tag plugin developers on meta.discourse.org. Or ask me to do that.
All that considered, it’s probably best to forget about making the tag do the conversion. However, it’d probably be nice to have the thread to automatically have wiki tag if it’s wikified. You’re bound to have people forgetting the tag if those things are separate.
That would be a convenient feature, but I’m not sure it’s worth the coding effort, if the wiki feature isn’t really used much by our users. Well, we’ll see how wiki usage turns out later this year. Until then, I think it should be easy for the admins to correctly tag the few wiki threads manually.
With those recent changes to the forum software, it becomes a viable alternative to dedicated wikis!