Question of the Day ScapeCrunch Course(s)???

[Art]

Making subsections before there's enough content can make it look very empty/lonely IMO

Agreed 100%. I'm concerned about that especially because articles tend to be very slow to write and significant time can be spent waiting for someone to want to write one.

I'm balancing also SEO. Behind the scenes, the article add-on has schema.org metadata markup to help identify this content as an article and associated author, which will be more highly regarded as quality content by search engines than a standard forum thread. This means it will be indexed quicker and ranked higher in search engines than just having it in a forum post.

How much added benefit we get is questionable.

Scratch the above. I have been able to confirm that we can set this up as a sticky in a forum as an article that has the correct schema for search engines. This means we can start with articles directly in the forums and still get the behind the scenes SEO benefit.

Once we get a critical mass of articles, I can commit to moving them into our article system (library format). The benefit to doing it this way is avoiding having an empty library while we accumulate articles. No one likes to walk into a library that only has a few books.

 

[Yugang]

Rather than articles, that are written once and remain mostly unchanged, I like the idea of a more dynamic knowledge base. Think of Wikipedia, that is continuously updated, collaborative, but in our case we should aim for a better quality management and ownership than that.

The idea would be to have a qualified volunteer to manage the content of one specific subject in the "knowledge base". This "knowledge base" is similar to an article, be it that it will be continuously updated and is alive rather than static, and the volunteer acts as a moderator and is expected to have relevant hobby expertise for doing so.

Forum members can at any time comment and make change/addition/improvement suggestions in posts. The best suggestions will be edited into the "knowledge base" by the owner of the subject. Interested readers are assured that the "knowledge base" represents the state of the art and latest consensus on the subject, is not outdated or obsolete as we sometimes see. Alternative views and discussion will remain visible in the posts that follow the "knowledge base", but will not confuse newbies who just want to understand the consensus position without immediately diving deep into all intricacies of the hobby.

When the assigned member is for some reason ready to retire from the responsibility, a new volunteer can be accepted by the forum members to continue the mission and continue updating the relevant subject in the "knowledge base".

Just a suggestion, not sure if more members like it and if it can be implemented in the forum.

 

[Art]

Great idea. Yes, the article process I mention can function this way as people can make posts in reply to the article with suggestions for modifications, deletions or additions. We can have someone function as the curator for the article and be able to make updates to it.

As with all things in a community, it takes volunteers to be willing to take on the responsibility for it. However, it is doable. In the interim, I can always make the needed changes to an article to keep it updated.