Introducing a Wiki

Posted by Aniruddha on September 15th, 2009 Filed in Tutorials View Comments

Hello all,

At Codechef our goal is to help people become better programmers. An integral part of this is discussion and we find that sometimes, we are the bottleneck for growth amongst the community. In an effort to promote collaboration we are thinking about making the following changes.

1. Introducing a wiki: We plan on introducing a wiki where most users will be able to edit pages related to the FAQ, Tutorials, Tips, Resources, Strategies, etc… We want to create some easily achievable task as the criteria for becoming an editor. Our plan is to let anyone who has had at least one successful submission in any of our contests will be able to edit the wiki. We feel like this will encourage greater collaboration and allow all of you to contribute meaningfully.

2. Disabling comments : We thought that commenting on problems would be a good idea, but we are finding it is not being used in the way we intended it. The comments are mainly from new comers asking questions whose answers are available elsewhere. Unless we can figure out a way to ensure that comments are used for questions related to that problem specifically, we feel that through the wiki, forums, blog, email, twitter and chat (soon coming back), there are enough options to communicate with us and each other.

3. Introducing a new forum : The current forum is not well integrated into the site and also not integrated with our authentication system. We plan on introducing a forum which integrates better and retains the same look and feel as our site. We will also create a section for high priority issues which we will monitor carefully, allowing you guys to bring up any major site or contest issues to our immediate attention.

We would like to know what you think about these new features that we plan to introduce? Do you think that disabling the comments and restricting discussions about problems to the forums is a better idea? Or would you like us to scrap the forums and keep the comments’ section as it is? Also, what do you think about the idea of the wiki editing facility being open to only those who successfully solve problems in the contests? Do leave in comments to let us know what you think :)

Regards,

Aniruddha.

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  • pravinth

    Hi,
    i am against comments being disabled. people can read about the problem immediately only in the comments section. many people wont go to the forum to check.

  • pravinth

    Hi,
    i am against comments being disabled. people can read about the problem immediately only in the comments section. many people wont go to the forum to check.

  • Rooney

    After every contest, a contest analysis section in the wiki where different members can share their algorithm or trick. Having a a wide variety of approaches to different problems will be a valuable resource.

  • Rooney

    After every contest, a contest analysis section in the wiki where different members can share their algorithm or trick. Having a a wide variety of approaches to different problems will be a valuable resource.

  • http://www.cre8d-design.com Stephen Merriman

    I think they’re all good ideas, including getting rid of comments. Currently they’re mainly littered with people posting code over and over again and that would be much better suited to the forum. You’ll probably need a prominent link from the comments section to the forum to make sure people find their way there; having an integrated login would help here so people didn’t have to sign up again.

    Regarding the wiki – though this probably wouldn’t be done as the first stage, if you could get pages viewable based on whether you have solved a problem or not (as per Project Euler), that would be fantastic. A page for each of the practice problems viewable/editable only by people who have solved it would be a great asset for sharing different methods of solution, analysis, etc.

  • http://www.cre8d-design.com Stephen Merriman

    I think they’re all good ideas, including getting rid of comments. Currently they’re mainly littered with people posting code over and over again and that would be much better suited to the forum. You’ll probably need a prominent link from the comments section to the forum to make sure people find their way there; having an integrated login would help here so people didn’t have to sign up again.

    Regarding the wiki – though this probably wouldn’t be done as the first stage, if you could get pages viewable based on whether you have solved a problem or not (as per Project Euler), that would be fantastic. A page for each of the practice problems viewable/editable only by people who have solved it would be a great asset for sharing different methods of solution, analysis, etc.

  • http://codechef.com chef

    @pravinth – we are still considering this point… anyone else have feedback on if comments on problems are valuable?

    @rooney – we will definitely do this

    @stephen – we think this is a really cool idea, we will first release the wiki with very basic permissions, then try to set this up…

  • http://codechef.com chef

    @pravinth – we are still considering this point… anyone else have feedback on if comments on problems are valuable?

    @rooney – we will definitely do this

    @stephen – we think this is a really cool idea, we will first release the wiki with very basic permissions, then try to set this up…

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