Summarize this Topic → Write a Summary for this Topic

[Ajedi32 (Andrew Meyer)]

@codinghorror

You can already sort of do that… either:

• edit the first post to include the summary
• edit the second post to be a summary

Or, eventually:

• add another post and then manually. as staff, change the date on it so it sorts under the first post (not currently possible, but I think it should be)

True, but all of those actions would require you to be a site administrator, or at least a mod. Regular community members can’t edit other people’s posts, or mess with post metadata.

@codinghorror

The problem is that writing a real summary is real work by real human beings and is very unlikely to get done unless the human being or the topic is exceptional.

Having a machine summarize the topic by writing is basically impossible..

Right. In the original post I said:

what if Discourse allowed users to create community-editable summaries of long, popular threads

So the way I’m envisioning it a human (or multiple humans) would be doing the writing, and I expect this would only actually get done for long, popular threads. That’s why I also made the comment at the end about whether this would get used enough to be worth the effort.