I want to discuss the possibility of adding a community-submitted guides section here on the forum, where people could submit well written guides (e.g. how-to) about anything privacy-related.
Writing new guides would be restricted to trust level 2 forum users.
The benefit for us (Privacy Guides) is that this category could be used as a staging area before new articles are added to the website. It would be an easier way for the community to collaborate on guides before a PR is submitted, and comment on that guide and ask questions about it here directly instead of on multiple platforms.
For example, this would be the perfect place for the community to work on the long-awaited Windows guide collaboratively.
It would also be a good place for guides about niche or advanced topics that might not have a great place (yet?) on the website.
For example, guides about self-hosting various tools could be a good fit here.
Guides would be wiki posts, meaning that they could be updated by other forum members (with a public edit history), so they aren’t reliant on a single person to keep them updated in the long term.
A second benefit for us would be that people stop sharing links to Pull Request previews, which can appear as if they are written by Privacy Guides and approved by the community when they in fact aren’t. We have warning banners on PR previews already, but this new format would make it more clear that the community-submitted guides are written by individual members and not necessarily pre-approved or reviewed by anyone.
The biggest benefit of this layout for members is that any guides submitted here won’t be lost in the onslaught of other posts because we can keep a well-organized index in the sidebar.
I think a community submitted wiki or guides section can create cover more niche topics that we would otherwise can’t create.
That being said though, what topics can we expect people will organically contribute here? I imagine a lot of information on privacy-centered self-hosting and configs guides specifically
I don’t know how useful would it be, if it’s just any guide about any tool then I don’t feel it’s the place on privacy guides. On the other hand, it would feel as privacyguides.org guides are reserved to team members, as it would likely become harder to write a guide, as some will say “This can be in wiki, no need for this to be on the main website”.
I haven’t heard of any instance where this posed problem.
I guess this is kind of the goal, actually, the idea would be that people would start by contributing to this community wiki, and then team members can look through the community wiki and re-post some content on the website if it is really good and broadly applicable.
One of the reasons for this is that articles on the website need to be formatted in a very particular way, and should be highly polished for consistency. There is just a level of quality people inherently expect when reading anything published on privacyguides.org.
Frankly, this means that with many community PRs, they need to be (nearly entirely) rewritten before we feel comfortable posting it. Which is fine! It is still insanely useful for us to receive community PRs that are researched, and we just have to rewrite it to make sure it is clear to all audiences and consistently formatted, it does save us a lot of time.
Unfortunately, it does also still take us a lot of time to do these edits and rewrites, and I feel bad when some PR authors have to wait (sometimes very long) periods of time for their PR to be merged, because the information is usually good and just sitting there (so obviously they are excited to get it merged and read), but just not in a state where we feel comfortable with putting it in front of everybody and expecting them to understand it well.
This would allow people to immediately publish good privacy-related information quickly and in a format they prefer, for the benefit of people in the community who really need information on a pretty niche topic; and also give us time to go through and rewrite community wiki guides into articles that are at the level expected by readers of the website.
Can you elaborate on what you see the downsides of this approach to be?
Speaking of Windows, I noticed that a few Windows guides are now populating the community wiki.
I presume that these guides are from that PR? If we do decide on formalizing a Windows section later this year, what will happen to the community guides?
The Community Wiki category is restricted to staff-only viewing currently, but yes I am pulling in a few topics from existing PRs and that is what it will look like.
For community wiki topics that are covered on the main website, maybe we will add a notice banner to the top of topics like this?:
It also depends on whether we expect people to continue editing the guide after we publish an article to privacyguides.org. For some guides it may make sense to lock/remove them and redirect people to the new guide on privacyguides.org.
For others, like your article in the screenshot above, I think it is actually good to duplicate some content between the website and the community wiki, because I could envision other people adding information about browsers you didn’t cover in your article, since these posts are collaborative wikis. That’s the reason I added your article to this category.
I’m gonna be honest I don’t really mind this feature.
In fact this would help for the whole “Replacing your Smart TV” thing I’ve been working on and should allow me to freely express the hardware and software together for it.
I strongly disagree. It takes times because of lexical issues, yes - but also because of quality and fact-checking of claims. It is the combination of recommendations from everyone involved which improves the quality.
It is mainly about the way we run Privacy Guides. I feel that the community has less and less say on how things are run, and this would make privacyguides.org way less collaborative.
With all the above being said, I am not totally opposed to the concept, but only if it adds something, not substracts.
This poses clear problem as you are then not giving acknowdlegment of the original author. Even if you rewrite it, you still take all the research and doesn’t credit the original autor in any meaningful way.
I see this as making the guide development much more collaborative, because the community can iterate on and discuss guides here instead of on multiple platforms. Each community wiki post is also a discussion thread which can be replied to by anyone here if someone wants clarification or wants to discuss a change before making it themselves.
Wiki posts can be edited by other community members if anyone feels it is missing important information.
We would properly attribute any sources we use by, for example, linking to the original community wiki guide as a source on the new page. We could also reach out to guide authors and inquire whether they’d like to be included in the git log with their GitHub account (as the commit author or co-author), if attribution on that graph is important to them.
Additionally, this would not prevent anybody from submitting a PR. Going forward we will encourage people to contribute first to the community wiki instead, but we won’t require it, and we’ll especially be open to PRs from anyone who has successfully merged a PR in the past.
might not be sufficient as a restriction, as I’ve already seen bad advice of “citizens” on this forum.
I’d be very in favor if it would be mandatory to give reputable sources for claims made there (or to make changes to claims that have a reputable source backing that claim). Otherwise it might just end in wikipedia-like editing wars or just plain misinformation. It’s always easier to just claim something wrong, than to find a source to explain why something wrong is wrong.
[edit: I also don’t have anything against trying it out without such enforcements for few weeks to see if this would be a problem in this community]
I am hopeful that these posts can be “policed” by the community, so any confusing or incorrect information can be directly asked about in the thread, or the post can even be edited directly by the community with changes, since these will be collaborative posts. In particularly egregious cases, or in cases of edit wars where the original author isn’t accepting community edits, moderators can still step in to make final decisions.
Undecided. It wouldn’t be entirely useless, because limiting new posts to ≥TL2 and only limiting editing posts to ≥TL1 would still cut down on extraneous topics being created, while still allowing new members to contribute to existing wiki guides.
As long as TL0s aren’t able to edit wikis then I think limiting editing to ≥TL1 would be reasonable. We can always try it out and raise it to TL2 if it proves to be an issue.
This new section is now public at Community Wiki - this meta topic here will remain open here for a few more days so we can discuss it: what’s working, what isn’t, etc.
One change from the discussion above, we are allowing contributions from anyone who self-attests to the @wiki-editors group instead of based on Trust Level. We’ll keep an eye on it and see if that policy needs to be adjusted.
It’s already been populated with some posts so you can get a feel for what it looks like and the type of content we’re hoping for. Feel free to contribute
@jonah 2 things I noticed
first how can we set it to a category over here, for example say I want to make Surveillance Capitalism in Common Goals/Threats, how is that possible?
Second, is it intentional we can reply to these wikis? thanks
