There’s so much information about Beeminder, but I’ve found it can be challenging to know where to look.
Is anyone else interested in starting a Beeminder wiki?
I brought this idea up with @dreev once. He expressed mild skepticism, seeing a hard-to-overcome diffusion of responsibility problem. But also said “we’d totally link to anything halfway decent.” So I’m starting this thread to see if there are others out there who could see themselves contributing, or if this may be a lost cause.
Some topics that seem useful to cover:
Beeminder Use Cases. Deeper coverage around common use cases like fitness, productivity, diet, business goals. Popular goals like mustdo, weight, language learning (duolingo, anki), TagTime, writing, bites of food. Explanations about some of the best “featured” goals. Each use-case could get its own dedicated page, exploring different approaches about what to track.
A Beeminder Getting Started Guide.
Manual pages for individual features. How the feature works. Link to blog posts announcing it. Recording the feature’s history?
Shared place for Akratics Anonymous to compile strategies such as dealing with Beeminder Burnout
Common support questions and their go-to answers.
All with more depth and community-participation than http://blog.beeminder.com/glossary/ can provide. Giving layusers a semi-structured place to contribute back and help make Beeminder even more awesome.
And for reference, here are some other examples of information-packed community wikis, that I’ve found super-valuable at times: RationalWiki, Minecraft Wiki, ExplainXKCD
I like this idea. It feels a little redundant, because all that info is out there somewhere, but it’s definitely not all centralized in a place that most newbees can find. (It took me three months to find Akratics Anonymous… I just never Googled it.)
I’d be up for helping out as well. But if this does get started, don’t abandon it!! Nothing is more frustrating than finding somebody’s great start at great documentation eight months after they totally abandoned it and it’s all out-of-date. Looking at you, people in my office.
I wouldn’t expect to spend much more time on a wiki than I do on this forum. When a topic comes up, whatever discussion there is could be summarized and wikified. If someone felt the urge or was researching some specific topic, they could maybe go through the archives and wikify what they find, and little by little the pages would fill up with the relevant information.
As one of the founding users of the ExplainXKCD wiki, and a long-time participant in several other big and small wikis, I’m quite pleased about this idea and would gladly help getting it off the ground.
But if this does get started, don’t abandon it!!
That’s the beauty of a wiki! With proper automated spam filtering, we can have the wiki publicly editable so anyone who finds something incomplete can contribute themselves, even if the original authors aren’t around anymore to maintain it.
In any case, the contents of a wiki are usually stuff that’s more stable over time (reference, howtos, etc), so I wouldn’t expect that to be much of a problem.
My guess is that this is the kind of thing it’s tricky to get and maintain critical mass for. Reminds me of the Beeminder subreddit, which I’m delighted exists but it’s clear to everyone that all the cool kids are over here so it’s hard to find motivation to put in effort over there.
If folks prove me wrong and the wiki picks up steam, I will be very excited. And definitely count my vote and willingness to contribute to it. Also say the word and I’ll shout it from the twittertops and beemails and whatnot.
oh man i was traveling when you posted and never saw this!! i am totally interested in trying this out, at the very least as an initial dumping ground for a lot of wheels i frequently reinvent in support.
if it’s no problem for you to keep it up, you will definitely see some initial data dumps from me within the next ~week or so.
