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Showing only those parts of the discussion which lead to #2752 and its comments.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Idea: Veritula Articles
Currently, Veritula is a discussion website. I believe it could one day do what Wikipedia and Grokipedia do, but better.
A step towards that would be enabling users to produce ‘articles’ or something similar.
An ‘Articles’ tab would be distinct from the ‘Discussions’ tab, featuring explanatory documents similar to encyclopedia entries, and perhaps also blogpost-like content.
Articles focus on distilling the good ideas created/discovered in the discussions that occur on Veritula.
‘Articles’ are functionally no different than top-level ideas in a discussion thread.
Top-level ideas in a discussion thread are not standalone pages.
One thing that Wikipedia does well is having a structured, high level page for each idea/subject. This enables readers to get a good sense of an idea quickly.
Right now, to get a good sense of an idea on Veritula, a user often has to study a branching discussion, which can take a lot of work depending on how the discussion played out. A discussion also emphasises things that were relevant to the disagreements that took place in the discussion, rather than distilling the most important elements of an idea into a hierarchy, regardless of disagreements that took place in getting to it (like an encyclopedia entry does).
Top-level ideas in a discussion thread are not standalone pages.
Every idea (including every top-level one) has a separate, linkable page. You can reach it by clicking the link starting with the # sign.
These are not standalone pages in the sense that a Wikipedia page is a standalone page.
Articles would have the same ‘page’ status as the discussion pages that currently exist. (Forgive my lack of technical vocabulary.)
A possible counter-factual that may or may not be relevant to the goals of Veritula: An article with title metadata ‘Boron’ would presumably be much more search engine-friendly than a top-level ideas for Boron where the metadata title is ‘#[ID]’ and the actual desired title is merely included as the first line of the body text, while it is effectively a subpage of a discussion of another name.
Right now, to get a good sense of an idea on Veritula, a user often has to study a branching discussion, which can take a lot of work depending on how the discussion played out.
While this is true for most existing discussions, it’s not a fundamental limitation of discussions in general. For example, ‘How Does Veritula Work?’ has several long-form posts without much discussion. It just depends on what kinds of posts people want to submit.
See #2777.
While it is true that discussions don’t restrict people from posting long-form content like what is on the ‘How Does Veritula Work?’ discussion, that is not the intuitive function of a discussion thread. I believe the long-form content in that discussion is much more natural to an article format.
I think it is worth noting that I am much more excited to publish standalone articles than to drop top-level ideas into discussion topics.
I am not marking this as a criticism, as my personal desires in this respect may be irrelevant to the goals of Veritula.