Wiki Updates and Tab for Wikis

Hi all,

Two questions if I may;

  • I’ve just updated one of our wikis and noted that it didn’t cause it to be bumped, I’ve had a little dig around on meta and it looks like there are some topics asking for the opposite. Additionally, I looked at the “Reset Bump Date” and “Toggle Bump Date” features I saw documented, but the latter doesn’t seem to appear for wikis and now that I understand what the former does, it doesn’t help me either. So, how can I update a Wiki and have it appear under Latest having been updated?

  • Related to the above, the tabs across the top, you have Latest / New / Unread etc, is it possible to have one for Wikis, and then when it’s clicked it returns a view of all topics which have been set as a wiki? This would remove the need for the above to some degree. I note that there is a “in wiki” option in the advanced search, so the functionality to return topics of this type is available, I’d just like a one-click method for getting to them (and see them displayed as per the Latest formatting)

Thanks in advance for any help as always.

Kind regards

Rob

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An edit will only cause a bump if it is the final post in the topic. This is the same logic for normal posts and for wikis. Are you seeing different behaviour to this?

I don’t think this is currently possible. You can search for wiki posts using the advanced syntax in:wiki. Does that work for what you’re trying to achieve?

Hi David, thank you for the reply.

Are you seeing different behaviour to this?

No, it behaves as you’ve described. I suppose I was just wondering how someone would easily find out that a wiki had actually been updated, if the topic isn’t bumped on an edit, then the topic remains somewhat buried in the depths of our forum. In some cases, we may have also closed the topic, so people don’t reply to it, but still want the information to be available, so there would never be an opportunity for it to get bumped. I was surprised that a wiki edit doesn’t bump I suppose, or at least, provide the opposite of the Toggle Bump feature, e.g. perhaps by default it does what it does now, but you have a toggle which can cause the bump…

Does that work for what you’re trying to achieve?

Partially, from the perspective of getting the list, but many of our users wouldn’t even know we had created wikis, so the likelihood of them using the advanced search and then checking the “is wiki” option is probably somewhat remote. I thought having a tab linked effectively to the results of the advanced search when that option is enabled would actually pretty much do what I’m suggesting. The only difference is the layout, the advanced search maintains the search fields/filters on the right, where-as the latest view obviously doesn’t have this.

So, how does a new user who joins our community find out that we have a selection of wikis available for them? :thinking:

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A little workaround here is to delete the “@robmeade closed this topic” post. Then the first post is the last post, and any edits would bump the topic.

Personally I think it would be a cool feature. It’s not on any official roadmap right now, but there’s a topic here:

I think a lot of communities do this by having a category dedicated to wikis. On meta we have #howto, where a large number of topics are wikis. You can toggle the category setting so that all new topics in a category are automatically turned into wikis.

That said, I think a URL parameter for wikis is a reasonable feature request. It could function like ?status=open. Then it would be easy to add a tab to the top menu.

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I think a lot of communities do this by having a category dedicated to wikis. On meta we have #howto, where a large number of topics are wikis.

Yeah, I did contemplate that, but our categories are for different courses, things like Unreal, Unity, Blender etc, so if we put all of the wikis in one category it would end up being a bit of a mix mash of subjects if that makes sense.

That said, I think a URL parameter for wikis is a reasonable feature request.

Thanks :slight_smile:

It could function like ?status=open . Then it would be easy to add a tab to the top menu.

That would be really nice. When can I have it? :wink:

A more extreme version, which may then support your other fields would be to enable the creation of a tab, with a field for the display text, and then allow a selection from the advanced search fields/filters to be added to the tab. That way, users could effectively build their own tab, and use any/several/many of the advanced search features for a specific button press. With that, not only would we be able to create a quick “Our Wikis” style tab, but anyone could configure their own tabs for their own needs. Just a thought. More work, and more complicated, but I figure the underlying search/filtering is already their.

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One thing that has changed since this topic was originally written: if you watch a wiki topic – by that I mean a topic where the first post is a wiki – you will get notified of edits to the first post.

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