The community is discussing the idea of community editing, where users can edit posts to correct grammar, punctuation, and minor mistakes. jae initially proposed the idea, citing its benefits in reducing confusion and improving post clarity. However, they also acknowledged potential challenges, such as implementation difficulties and deciding who should have editing privileges.
erlend_sh pointed out that Discourse has a reputation system called “trust levels,” which could help determine who should have editing privileges. Jeremy agreed that community editing could be useful and suggested allowing users to suggest edits to posts, which could then be approved by the post owner or moderators.
sam and codinghorror discussed the implementation of community editing, with sam suggesting that it would be relatively trivial to implement, while codinghorror expressed concerns about the UI and potential user confusion.
Ja offered to create a mockup of the UI, and codinghorror agreed that mockups would be helpful in addressing UI concerns. codinghorror also mentioned that wiki posts already exist in Discourse, and trust level 1 users can edit by default.
Overall, the community is exploring the idea of community editing, weighing its potential benefits against potential challenges and UI concerns.
As a community, what do we think about the idea of community editing.
Basically, other community members can edit posts (similar to what Stack Exchange does). I feel like one of the biggest things that hold traditional forums back is that they don’t have this feature, which causes a lot of confusion when people start using bad grammar/punctuation and nobody knows what you’re talking about.
The obvious arguments against this are:
It would be relatively difficult to implement. I completely understand this, but I would also be 100% in on helping out with the implementation.
Discourse doesn’t have a reputation system, making it hard to decide who gets editing privileges. This could be ironed out by the community, but there are definitely other ways to decide who can edit.
Discourse is meant to be a discussion board, not a reference. Yes, but as I said before, you can definitely benefit from editing posts in a discussion. I’m not talking about editing the essence of a post or adding more information to a post, just basic clean-up
Again, this is just a very spontaneous idea that I had, and I wanted to see what the community thought about it.
I don’t know how difficult it’d be. Its possible to edit your own posts already, so some editing functionality / versioning / diffing is there already.
The post that @erlend_sh just linked to is talking about adding more information to a post or a topic.
This topic could benefit from the feature you’re talking about:
It’s not difficult to implement, and we want to get to it, but
Not that many complaints about this. “Would be nice to have” sure. So would lots of stuff!
I worry about the UI. Where are you going to set the “wiki” flag on the post? Mock me up some UI. Where would that go? How would you “know” that something is editable other than seeing the edit pencil (inexplicably?) on a post you didn’t write? Wouldn’t that make you go “huh?” and possibly worry that something was wrong? It’s also kind of a fairly advanced feature we don’t want newbies accidentally getting into.
It’s not a common feature in a forum, there is little to no expectation that others will or can edit your posts. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad feature, just rare and narrow.
Not to sound too, for lack of a better term, “revolutionary”, but isn’t Discourse supposed to be a new kind of forum? [quote=“codinghorror, post:6, topic:12838”]
I worry about the UI. Where are you going to set the “wiki” flag on the post? Mock me up some UI. Where would that go? How would you “know” that something is editable other than seeing the edit pencil (inexplicably?) on a post you didn’t write? Wouldn’t that make you go “huh?” and possibly worry that something was wrong? It’s also kind of a fairly advanced feature we don’t want newbies accidentally getting into.
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I’d be glad to create a mock-up. As for new users, couldn’t this be a privilege only certain trust levels of users have?
Sure, mockups would be great. The feature itself is not hard, it’s just that I worry more about the UI and don’t want users to get confused by it, have it complexify the UI too much, etc.
Wiki posts now exist (since version 1.1?), a staff member should use the topic wrench to enable that on any post. Trust level 1 users can edit by default, see your site settings.
