Idea for a news page in the Wiki section

In another thread, because two weekly psi news bulletins seemed to have stopped appearing (or are appearing only irregularly), I wondered whether we could try something similar ourselves in the Wiki section, essentially by summarising and linking to posts here containing newsworthy information:
https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-a...ly-roundup

It occurred to me some people might not have read that thread, given its title.

I think Laird and I are happy to contribute - and I will try to put together a possible prototype page soon - but other people are welcome to help!

I've now put up a prototype Wiki page for the first fortnight's news:
https://psiencequest.net/wiki/News_-_12-25_January_2020

Comments and suggestions are welcome!

[Laird]

Comments and suggestions are welcome!

I like what you've done there, especially the parenthetical "Discuss"es. I think this endeavour has the potential to draw new members to Psience Quest. Kudos.

One minor nitpick: though I had to resort to looking at the comments on the video to discover this, it seems that the video posted by The Institute of Art and Ideas was put up over a year ago - perhaps the wording of that entry could be adjusted a little so it doesn't seem to imply that the video was put up only recently.

I like what you've done there, especially the parenthetical "Discuss"es. I think this endeavour has the potential to draw new members to Psience Quest. Kudos.

One minor nitpick: though I had to resort to looking at the comments on the video to discover this, it seems that the video posted by The Institute of Art and Ideas was put up over a year ago - perhaps the wording of that entry could be adjusted a little so it doesn't seem to imply that the video was put up only recently.

Thanks. I must confess I had noticed the video wasn't new, and on that basis probably wouldn't have included it as news, but I left it in this time to give an impression of how the different sections would look. I've now amended the wording to make the vintage of the IAI video clear.

I hope this may attract some more contributors to PsienceQuest. Perhaps links to the most active discussion threads could also be included without stretching the definition of news too far. Would there be an easy way of identifying which threads had most comments during the previous week or fortnight?

[Laird]

Perhaps links to the most active discussion threads could also be included without stretching the definition of news too far.

Yes, perhaps as "internal" news "about" Psience Quest discussions/threads as opposed to "external" news "disseminated by" or "covered by" Psience Quest discussions/threads. That's kind of a rough distinction; I imagine you could better refine it.

Would there be an easy way of identifying which threads had most comments during the previous week or fortnight?

I could probably write a little bit of SQL to pull that info out of the database, and somehow make it available publicly. I don't think, though, that there's an existing way to do this via the MyBB forum software's web interface.

[Laird]

One other thought: perhaps we could find a way to get the words "parapsychology", "psi", and "paranormal" into the introduction of the page so that people searching for "parapsychology news", for example, would have a decent chance of the page turning up in their results.

[Laird]

Would there be an easy way of identifying which threads had most comments during the previous week or fortnight?

I could probably write a little bit of SQL to pull that info out of the database, and somehow make it available publicly.

I wrote a little plugin to do this. You can see its output here:

https://psiencequest.net/forums/popular_...hreads.php

It's a little rough (e.g., it isn't paginated), and could do with some better presentation (e.g., there's probably no need to show the "Subject" of the earliest and latest posts), but it's a start.

I haven't linked to it from anywhere else as yet. Perhaps it can eventually be added to the forum's header.

[Laird]

and could do with some better presentation (e.g., there's probably no need to show the "Subject" of the earliest and latest posts),

I've improved the presentation a little.

There's still no pagination, nor any possibility of customising the period - it's hardcoded to the most recent 14 days.

[Laird]

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I edited into the current wiki news page the following section. Is this anything like you had in mind for that sort of content, Chris?

==Philosophy of Mind; Science of Consciousness==

===Dialogues, Debates, and Conversations===

*The latest (sixth) letter in the dialogue between Philip Goff and Massimo Pigliucci [https://letter.wiki/conversation/277 On The Problem of Consciousness, Panpsychism & more] has been shared; Massimo Pigliucci's [https://letter.wiki/conversation/277#letter_1328 On Nature of Science & Speculative Metaphysics] ([https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-a...6#pid33076 Discuss])

Laird

Thanks for your comments.

I've edited the introduction to include the keywords you suggested.

The additional section on Philosophy of Mind; Consciousness Science looks good.

Thanks also for the plugin producing the list of discussion activity, which is just what I was thinking of. I think discussion can be news in its own right (given that we're linking to blogs, news articles and dialogues), though obviously some selection will be necessary.

My thought was that once we get going there could be an index page giving a list of links to the fortnightly news pages, with the most recent first. So probably once that's there, the link from the main Wiki page should point to the news index.