Discourse Plugin Upgrade: tracking wiki updates

Yeah, in principle we have the same problem with wiki edits as we do with GitHub PRs; a PR could be a typo fix or could be a super important refactor.

My solution with the PRs is (mostly) that we should put in some manual information by linking to important PRs from initiatives; the typo fix either won’t be linked or will be linked with very low weight, while the important refactor will have stronger connections to the supernodes.

This won’t work as well for wiki edits because individual wiki edits are harder to reference and categorize. For now we could go for a three step process:

  1. Initially, every wiki edit gets an edge from the content in question. This will incentivize making many tiny changes and be pretty easy to game; we’ll need to rely on something like the honor system to regulate it.
  2. Afterwards, we can add a heuristic that the strength of the edge is based on # of lines changed in the wiki, or such. This would be harder to game since it’s more obvious if you make huge nonsense changes to a wiki, although it will still create bad incentives to churn with needless re-writes.
  3. Afterwards, we can come up with a cleverer system for evaluating wiki edits that involves more review by humans-in-the-loop.

Note that for the special case of initiatives and artifacts and such, I expect that a lot of the work will move out of the Discourse and into a dedicated UI within 2020.