(If you don’t like “knowledge base” just suggest a better name.)
Very good ideas! And we have all the building blocks available:
Questions about how to X get answers, which are properly documented in the first post thanks to wiki editing. Look at the current 2 examples on #help and you can imagine how they could evolve.
Discussions in General that might start broad and loose but, through collaboration, they manage to gather community wisdon and useful links that, again can be wiki-summarized in the first post.
A tutorial about X already exists somewhere and it’s perfect. We can create a topic about it, invite its author(s) too, and this becomes another interesting resource here.
This knowledge base would be useful to current members and visitors, and it would also contribute to the TSMN outreach outside of the Fediverse. It would also help organize and curate discussions to fill known gaps in the knowledge base.
i for one am likely to wrongly assume that others either already know the same things that i do, or are completely uninterested in learning them. it’s a common misconception among some generalized hackers.
fact is, outside a formal education, everyone’s practical toolset is collected piecemeal, so the overlap between the knowledge of any two participants may not be predicted. on microblogging platforms, people carrying on in replies about interesting things they know are often perceived as unwelcome. how to effect knowledge sharing without preaching to the choir?
wiki posts look like a good tool! but can anyone start those or is moderator intervention necessary?
i think no, although there is an overlap. the truth is that i was struggling with beyourownplatform.site in the sense that i didn’t want to create a kb of recommendations and reviews of websites which will slowly go out of date. i think tsmn is perfect for this as it is already populated with slightly larger scope and actual people who might have resources (time) to keep those links updated.
an immediate example is ‘where do you learn html’.
I’d be happy to ‘think aloud’ and discuss here about ByYourOwnPlatform and then work on both: .site and kb of tsmn.
I like that there’s a “technical glossary” section. It’s a good thing to have a wiki about: these are the core building blocks, they don’t really change that much, although resources for learning about them do.
Exactly! For example, many people are missing out on the great resource that is MDN – but, given what Mozilla is doing, what if it gets the axe next…
Something else worth adding would be the basics of digital audio - sample rates, bitrates, codecs, containers, metadata.
And how to use those to emit a “product-shaped” thing – e.g. loudness normalization, embedding the album cover to the MP3, encoding a video so that platforms don’t crush it further…
Perhaps a collection of open source tools, and recipes for doing things with them – so that people don’t end up getting accustomed to sketchy apps that give suboptimal results; and so that we have a sort of “census” on the FOSS artware ecosystem?
@unspeaker thank you for taking a first stab at the taxonomy, which has helped me think better about the problem we want to solve.
Concepts - Tools - Spaces - …
Sounds too abstract in my opinion… What if we start with clear calls to the main elements a music maker needs to make a living? If we are able to document our knowledge for that audience, I’m sure the rest of us will benefit too.
Nobody like (aspirational) professional music makers can help here and I’m not one of those, but something like
Publishing music - Creating your audience - Income sources - …
I was thinking of renaming Help as “Knowledge base” and dedicate that category to this collaborative documentation. People can ask anywhere in TSMN, and when we detect that the questions/answers/discussion are good material for the knowledge base, we can move them there abd improve the top post.
Alright, we have the foundation of the Knowledge base and we can start building it.
If you go to Knowledge base - The Social Music Network you should see a different style of navigation column. If not, hard-refresh your browser to remove the cached page.
Because we are starting from scratch, we can have just this category for now. If we ever need subcategories, we can create as we go.
The content of de navigation bar is defined by this page that only mods and admins can edit: Knowledge base index. I just listed something to test the plugin. Changing the sections and the labels of the pages is as easy as editing that page.
I have created one just to test the navigation bar and get us an idea about how we will crowdsource the knowledge base: Grants for music makers and friends. And yes, as soon as I linked it on the Index page, it appeared with its label on the navigation column.
Well, in technical terms that’s pretty much it. Now we “only” need to create pages.
This has also made me realize what perhaps was obvious from the beginning: a taxonomy is as good as the content it organizes. Therefore, I suggest we add the pages created and we organize as they come.
Now here’s something where Discourse really shines!