CP Wiki
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There's a lot of great content here, with more arriving each day. I see two forces: 1) It's desirable that the articles be able to be browsed as a web, but right now it's rare for authors to link to other articles in their own. Hence, if you browse the CP article-web you won't get far. 2) The best way of currently finding articles on a concept is to browse the article categories. I'm not saying that we should do away with the categories-- we really can't. However, drilling down into categories this way doesn't let you read an abstract of a concept, with links to helpful articles in the middle that explain facets of the topic, and links to related concepts at the bottom. I'm positive that there's a Wiki tool out there that would allow CP to serve CP-branded Wiki content with minimal modification. I really like Wikipedia. It's the closest thing to a decent FAQ for the world's knowledge that I've seen. However, it isn't focused on Windows and .NET, and it doesn't keep people on this site. A Wiki focused on Windows and .NET, backed up by great articles from the site, would increase the ease of navigation of the articles, decrease the number of stupid questions if presented as a FAQ in the right places, and be of more interest and use to the CP community in general. Also, it would allow serving more ad impressions if desirable. Wikis don't have to be editable by anonymous people, and I wouldn't advocate that for this either; in particular I wouldn't want someone to be able to delete content from someone else. I thought through a few options: 1) Let only those of a certain rank edit the Wiki - Discarded, since it's too easy to achieve high rank; witness Daniel Stephen Rule and his accursed chatbots. The only rank I'd use this way would be platinum, but to set the bar this high would be to reject the contributions of people who don't have the time to write 25 articles. 2) Grant certain decent people the right to edit the Wiki, without being full editors of the site - Pros: gives some people more personal stake in the site, pools greater talent and experience for the Wiki, and allows for a much larger volume of input, while inherently filtering spam; if someone abuses their role, just undo the badness and remove their access, something which might never have to happen 3) Let the current editors edit the Wiki - Pros: complete control over content probably guarantees highest quality - Cons: less grassroots power, smaller Wiki