Ask HN: Would anyone be interested in a Hacker News wiki? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would anyone be interested in a Hacker News wiki?

27 pointsj_baker14 comments

I just saw this comment by pg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329415

I can understand pg's point of view on this. On the other hand though, I honestly wasn't aware of searchyc until I saw that thread. It seems to me that if pg won't make an official place to post links to things like that, there should be an unofficial place.

On the other hand, I can't really think of much else to put there other than a couple of iPhone apps and the link to searchyc. So is there enough content out there to justify a wiki?

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I'd love to see a wiki aimed at HN newcomers, with a page on frequent topics and a list of the most relevant threads on that topic. Of course, in order for such a resource to really be useful, newcomers would have to be made aware of it. That is, it would have to become "official" and be linked to prominently from HN.

> I'd love to see a wiki aimed at HN newcomers, with a page on frequent topics and a list of the most relevant threads on that topic.

I had an idea a while ago, that this could be the primary interface for a social news site: instead of having new posts get voted on individually and appear without context, which then has to be added in the comments, you'd have "news threads" on certain topics (e.g. "the iPad" would be one thread.). You'd post an article to a thread (different from posting a comment—it would appear at the top with all the other articles under the thread's discussion) and it would get voted on, only allowed to "come under discussion" of the thread once it passed a certain threshold.

* The front page of the site would be threads sorted by aggregate score of their article posts, weighted by the time of their most recent contributed article (so posting a good link would bump the thread.)

* Articles could be submitted individually (into the "uncategorized" thread, I suppose) and then moved into threads by moderation (which would give moderators an opportunity to create a new thread when a discussion doesn't already have a place—a possible insertion point for spam otherwise.)

* Every thread comment would be in reply to both a user (with root-level comments being "to" the submitter) and an article within the thread. Comments would still be threaded, so someone could add a new article to "cite" their comment upon as evidence for/against someone else's comment on a previous article in the thread. Comments in cite of articles that hadn't passed the voting threshold would be greyed out.

* "Spam posts" and "advertisements" would simply be threads, able to rise to the top if something in them happens to merit it.

* A "best of" post is simply a post of one of the thread's comments as an article to the thread, and ties that comment's karma score to the thread's aggregate score (allowing threads that have brilliant discussion, but bad articles/links, to rise.)

Anyone want to steal/implement this?

I cannot agree more with this. Perhaps this might apply to almost all discussion-based sites, but often at HN (especially Ask HN posts), it's sometimes frustrating seeing how new conversations regarding a specific topic - most likely as a result of a frequently asked question - keep popping up.

It's not that I find presence of FAQs frustrating, but has more to do with how useful information contained in different discussions tend to get increasingly decentralized. Furthermore, depending on the topic, the nature of discussions might change as time progresses, and those who might want more "classic" advices on that topic could really benefit from this proposed style of wiki.

For example, "recommend materials for learning higher maths" type of questions keep appearing consistently. Each time there's a new discussion that contains unique advices. If I were to refer a newcomer to past discussions right at this moment, I could come up with at least 5 of them (which I have done in one of my comments few weeks ago). A HN Wiki that centralizes gems from different discussions in this situation would be highly beneficial, a time-saver for many.

I suppose alternatives are tagging and improved search functions which are common elsewhere, but a somewhat-active wiki community (whether official or unofficial) where people are willing to organize useful information would be just fantastic.

Sure, I'd love to see all of the companies that YC has funded, what they're doing now, if they folded, were acquired, or more in depth details than what Crunchbase gives about them.

It could be a like a crunchbase, only a wiki. I like the idea.

Isn't CrunchBase a wiki?

I started this off: http://www.startupwiki.co.uk/investor/ycombinator

Never really took off though.

Cool man, I never even realized you had that!

Now, maybe if we asked pg to put a link... (oh, well never mind, it was only a joke).

But yes, that's a great thing to have around, one thing that springs to mind right away is a more expansive guide for newbies that we can point to when people are new, confused or both.

> Cool man, I never even realized you had that!

Heh :) I posted it once or twice - it got a rash of several additions and then quietened down, a bit too much for me to manually add in all the historical data sadly...

I'll happily add pages and bits and pieces if it's helpful (in a more HN specific way)... fire away with any suggestions.

- newbie guide

- gems section (great stuff, not unlike 'bestcomments', but plenty of really great stuff never gets the votes it deserves) that will be a great resource in and of itself

- hints and tips

- a set of links to articles about YC start-ups, integrated on the page about that start-up

Ok, stay tuned :) (might take a day or so to get to it)

Feel free to grab the list of ycombinator start-ups from my blog (http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...) if it'll help.

On a related note, http://ircstartups.pbworks.com/ serves the #startups channel, which is really the unofficial HN IRC channel on Freenode.

There's also this: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

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