It’s become a real problem on https://community.wanikani.com that TL2 users cannot edit the title of wiki topics despite being able to edit the wiki post itself. Several book clubs are run in this community, and the topic titles are generally updated to reflect what book is currently being read, whether we’re currently voting for the next book, etc. Even though these topics are wikis, only TL3 users can edit the titles (as they can edit the title of any topic), which is very restrictive. Allowing all TL2 users to edit the title for any topic (if that’s even a setting that exists) would be too permissive and could potentially lead to chaos.
Right now, there is a site setting min_trust_to_edit_wiki_post, which is defaulted to TL1. I would like to propose a new site setting min_trust_to_edit_wiki_topic_title. This could default to TL3, which should result in no change for existing installs since TL3 users can already edit the title for any topic anyway. However, then the admins over on https://community.wanikani.com could decrease that setting to TL2 to give us the flexibility we need.
@sam@codinghorror I know the two of you hashed out how you wanted this to work in the topic I linked to above, but I hope you’ll consider this addition. This proposal would really help with organizing these book clubs in my community, and it seems like the added flexibility could be valuable to other communities as well. Let me know what you think.
I think it is a reasonable request, it is just that I worry about having way too many knobs in Discourse and this could be 1 knob too many.
I do though acknowledge that you are having this problem in your community.
Is flagging out of the question here? Couldn’t someone flag with “helpful staff can you please re-title this topic” if this was done how many additional flags a week are we talking?
Flagging may be an option (I don’t really know if the staff would be annoyed by this), but I think the community likes to be self-sufficient where possible. As it is, I think people tend to wait for a helpful Regular to show up and take care of it. There’s also the matter of delay. Waiting for a Regular or a staff member to take care of it can add up to a day of waiting. This isn’t the end of the world, but can be inconvenient.
It’s a tough call for sure. I can see why you decided to not allow the title to be edited as part of the existing wiki feature, as there are certainly cases where that wouldn’t be ideal. Hence the request for an extra site setting. I feel like it’s a nice middle ground, but I get your concern.
The topics I’m talking about are like “master” topics. I didn’t go into these details in my initial post, but this community is a language learning community and the book clubs are “beginner book club”, “intermediate book club”, etc. When a new book is selected via poll in the master topic, it does indeed get it’s own topic (often several) dedicated to that book. But the master topic allows users to track/watch all conversation around the language difficulty they are interested in, including nominations, polls, and schedules. If the master topic was abandoned, there’d be nowhere to organize the nominations and polls, and users would potentially miss out if they happened to miss the new topic being created.
All of this is publicly available if you’re curious to see more detail.