If you’re posting something informational that might get updated over time, you may have the option to make a post a Wiki. That means anyone with the requisite trust level can edit, update, and add to the post.
You must be level 2 (Member) to mark your own post as a Wiki, and at least level 1 to edit a Wiki post.
When a post is a wiki, the Edit button on a post will look slightly different and be visible to anyone with access to edit.
Check out this post, which is an editable wiki:
How does one find those posts which are Wikis?
It seems to me that if they aren’t easily discoverable it’s difficult to update them and keep them useful.
A quick look at the Forum’s home page didn’t seem to reveal a section linking to them, for example.
I don’t believe there’s a built-in way to search for specific wiki posts, but we could probably start tagging them. I’ve made a tag forum-wiki
The IF Resource links post is “pinned” so it stays at the top of the category until you read through it or un-pin it. You can re-pin it or hit the bookmark button to keep track of it.
To be honest I don’t think there are many wiki posts yet as I’m not sure people were aware of the functionality.
I found this on Discourse’s forum:
It might have some useful ideas.
After more research on Discourse Meta, the real way to do this is advanced search (click the search icon then the sliders icon on the right of the field):
Then choose “are wiki” from the drop down on the lower left as a search filter. You can also just add in:wiki to your search query.
Doing this, I’ve also applied the tag forum-wiki to the current posts that should be publicly editable wikis (and cleaned up a couple that really don’t need to be wiki.)
I just looked at the topic “What is a Wiki Post” ( What is a Wiki Post? - users - Discourse Meta ). It mentions that a Category can have the “make new topics wikis by default”. Perhaps a new Category with that flag might be appropriate, making the feature more obvious and readily available.
That functionality is possible, but the way our forum is set up, I’m not certain making every message someone posts editable by everyone else is a thing we want to have happen automatically. We’d need to make a “forum wiki” category which would make wikis not show up in their actual appropriate category. We can see how it goes and discuss further, but I’m inclined toward leaving the functionality of making your post a wiki a deliberate choice someone must make whilst knowing what they’re doing.
Suggestion: pin the “IF Resource Links” post in the Resources Category. It currently doesn’t seem to be and for some reason I didn’t see it when I looked at the Resources category just now.
I see it as pinned, but if you’ve read it once in the past, the Discourse forum software will have unpinned it automatically for you. (You can check that it’s pinned near the top of the Resources category if you visit the site when you’re not logged in.)
You can disable the automatic unpinning in the “Interface” section under your user preferences by unchecking “Automatically unpin topics when I reach the bottom.”
@StJohnLimbo is exactly right. That topic is already pinned (note the pin icon next to the topic title.) This keeps a post at the top of the category list until you read it.
Once you read it, by default it unpins and the pin will turn point-up, which means it sinks in the topic list like normal again. It’s meant to indicate something important users should at least look at once, which is why it unpins automatically once read.
You can click to pin it again (point down) but it will keep unpinning each time you read to the end of the post. You can adjust your preferences so something doesn’t unpin automatically as StJohnLimbo explains, or hit the Bookmark icon to save a link to the post permanently as long as you want under the bookmarks tab.
Thanks for the explanation! I’ll change that setting.
