[Done] Establishing NEAR Wiki

Wiki has been established: https://wiki.near.org


I would like to launch a Wiki for NEAR Ecosystem and hope to gather support from community to fill it in and help maintain going forward.

Reason

Currently there are some info on the https://near.org page but it’s naturally limited and updated slowly as it’s designed to attract attention and route people. Future rebrand is going to just make that more clear but not going to create more place for content. Website is also maintained by the Foundation and has limited capacity for maintenance of some content that is changing.

At the same time https://docs.near.org became very developer focused. There are clear things that developer wants to see from the start, but all the general info / token related / validator related info was pushed out (some of it still there, but harder to find).

There is also no place linked directly where to learn about community, Guilds (what are they, how to start one, etc). There is no place that would collect various information sources from the ecosystem (like nearweek.com, neardaily, medium, etc).

Wiki

The idea is to have a place where a person can learn from basics about NEAR, it’s mission and vision; learn strengths of the protocol and see how it compares to other potentially familiar chains; learn about ecosystem (guilds).

For more technical reader, there will be deep dives into specific details how accounts are structured, how sharding works and other.

At the same time for more non technical, there will be more information about guilds, how to start one, where to find references and more.

As we are finalizing governance, standards and Treasury DAO - having those items described in a tutorial like fashion is also important.

It would be important to have “router” places that would be informing where various info lives.

A good version is an old version of Polkadot Wiki (currently it became too overloaded): Polkadot · Polkadot Wiki

Ask

Would be great to have commitment from teams and guilds to contribute the initial content but even more important to continue improving and contributing to it over time.

Comment here with your commitments and what are pieces of content you would like to see or can write.

39 Likes

Well said and detailed. Wikis are one of the first places I look for information due to the efforts and work that go into creating and maintaining one. That’s why it would be interesting to see one being created. I did look look for NEAR wiki when I first got here. Good to see it is finally being brought up.

PS: I’m not an all-star contribute but I can make some OSS contributions (contributed to Aeternity wiki in github the early days).

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I would support NEAR Wiki, would be happy to contribute and point people to it.
We indeed are missing “one place for everything NEAR ecosystem”.

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Love the idea! It is clearly needed to help support the ecosystem as it grows and could be a good value proposition for NEAR. Not many chains have a comprehensive wiki (I would say Portal for more marketing flair). I would love to help and even lead the charge. I’ve been thinking much about this lately and have documented the needs/pain points the community is experiencing through growth.

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The MarCom team is producing good content for playbooks, we can contribute with a good portion of that content. Let’s build our Wiki!! :star2:

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Thank you for the NEAR WEEK mention @illia ! I agree, the ecosystem is missing an overview which is easy to navigate in - especially for the first-comers / non-technical. Crypto has a reputation of being complex and hard to understand, however I believe it is a communicative and UX/UI challenge that can be solved by initiatives like a NEAR Wiki. I am certain it could greatly benefit the ecosystem and help achieve more users and faster adaptation.

NEAR WEEK is very open to collaboration and would love to engage on this.

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This is a good idea. We have a lot of Near information, but it’s scratted in different place and not easy to make reference. In additional, sometime we want to read about Near in an overral context, or linking, comparing between Near’s technology with other cryptos, other sharing technologies. With Near wiki, the translation for different language would be easier, and by that way, more people can know and understand about Near

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Newcomers are finding it difficult to find all the information needed to get involved. I think that a section dedicated to opportunities that NEAR offers for learning and getting involved would be very much appreciated (e.g. content on guilds, NEAR Academy etc…). Perhaps it would also be useful to complement the section on NEAR’s objectives with perspectives that are more outward-looking and that stress more the concrete social issues that NEAR tries to tackle. The 4NTs guild has already quite some content on that and can certainly contribute.

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Love the idea! As for the software, I try to follow this kind of apps (don’t know why)

It’s seems that choice is quite limited:

As for the content, I believe docs.near.org became greater compared with a year ago. IMO our docs is very similar to wiki (despite that it’s not so easy to contribute there from the UI). Agree that docs are too development related. It might be because it called “docs”.

I would like to see everything we have in docs in new wiki + all other info like economy, guilds, ecosystem and all other with possibility to go deeper in specific area.

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Yeah, I agree. We were planning on installing a wiki instance for collecting community resources- the why, what, how of guilds, how to contribute to NEAR etc. and had asked @chefsale to help us with a mediawiki installation. But then we decided to go with Gitbook for the playbook’s that we’re producing, just because the UI seemed to better and it was easy enough to get it set up. FWIW, Gitbook also seems to have all the primary needs of a wiki- collaborative, has timestamps & is SEO friendly. One thing that a gitbook doesn’t have would be the “Discussions” tab for each page. We thought that discussions around specific topics could take place on the forum instead.

But if the wiki needs to be a wiki, we can port over the contents from the gitbook.

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I agree with Gitbook as an option. The key will be the information architecture to ensure we have a good model similar to the gov.near.org.

I could however see some a customized design to ensure the overall UX is similar to other NEAR assets.

Integration into the wallet/explorer would be another great feature as these are the major entry points into the ecosystem.

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Created a quick poll for the platform: https://twitter.com/ilblackdragon/status/1414626912681476107

Please respond there if you have suggestions for the platform.

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wiki.js https://twitter.com/SashaBaksht/status/1414919045539848192

Other alternatives:

mdBook - mdBook Documentation - static pages with edits through github, so it might be a bit involved (we already use it for the nomicon)

https://www.bookstackapp.com/ - PHP-based fully-featured wiki engine

1 Like

Thanks everyone who participated in the vote (https://twitter.com/ilblackdragon/status/1414626912681476107) it came out pretty much equal.
Did some more research and thanks to @blaze for digging through Gitbook settings.

Here is my scoring based on your input:

  • Gitbook: good layout/UI, good search, a bit complex contribution flow (either via github or need to become writer first), but editing itself is WYSIWYG which is a big plus for non engineer contributors. Interestingly there is a custom SSO support, which if NEAR wallet supports can be added. Github provides a rich interface to discuss the contributions and issues but they are not visible in Gitbooks.
  • wiki.js: can do sign up via NEAR and allow anyone to contribute, layout and search are meh. Editing is Markdown (with viewer). It’s open source and self hosted, which means it’s possible to customize more. There are discussions on the page.
  • mdBook: meh UI, only github contribution.

Generally, Open Source solution is preferred but at this point speed of deployment and ease of collaboration is important. Also familiar layout for people is important as well.

I suggest we go with Gitbook at this point and fund a development of a Dapp that uses NEAR and one of the storage protocols to create an Open Source and Web3 Wiki platform with WYSIWYG capability, contribution tokens, editors DAO and more exciting Web3 capabilities.

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Illia thanks for taking the time to interact with the community here and on Twitter. It’s a hard decision to choose a platform.

Love the idea of creating a Wiki dApp based on NEAR. This would be a fantastic asset and showcase of “dogfooding” - we eat our own dog food. lol

On a separate but related topic of SSO. Having the foresight to open an issue with the Wallet team for Oauth3 and SAML integration was great! Consider adding OAuth / SAML · Issue #1926 · near/near-wallet · GitHub

These SSO options via the NEAR Wallet will help extend NEAR’s reach.

Sample of proposal for NEAR Wiki.

Hope a fancy day ya’ll are having NEAR cuties.

Got a healthy idea that i want to bring to NEAR commune which other crypto networks have:
NEAR Wiki – Full encyclopedia about NEAR Project.

Website concept is the same as in any wiki website format – users can create pages with posts, other users can correct them and fulfill with updates.

Why NEAR needs it?

  1. Imagine knowledgebase where whole info about NEAR blockchain, De-Fi, Guilds, DAO’s, products, NFT projects, partners, collaborations, hackathons, achievements, events, Paras, Mintbase and all FAQs that you can think of can be seen in one place. A perfect chance for newcomers and infohunters to obtain content grail and remove some of copy/paste work from admins and commune welcomers.

  2. International orientation. Since english is not the only language we speak here and for some users it tough all the content that NEAR has, can be translated and understood in regions. An additional chance for national guilds to interact together giving their members opportunity to create and translate content in exchange receiving some coins.

  3. Picture of how HUGE is NEAR Protocol for media journalists, investors, talented people who consider joining NEAR community, product developers and creators. In general no need to google out every medium blog related to NEAR with a chance to miss something that could be important for individual. I see it as an additional marketing tool that can work as a sponge sucking in people attention and giving a warm hug to search engine AI optimizing and increasing “mentions” to increase rankings and authority.

  4. Unobvious reaches - indeep introduction with NEAR protocol. I’ve been working in translation and content creation in other crypto networks what results i saw from aside:

  • When you write or translate your learning process is much higher when if you read text, or watch video or join a meetup. Knowledge remains in your head.
  • Convert authors and translators into active community members. I joined some projects because of translation opportunity cuz it’s an easy task, tho trough getting familiar with project after looked for other opportunities. So it simply allows community user from “just to hang out” convert to “i got ideas, how i can realize them here” user level.
  • Strength the local communities for common task. Bring together people from your speaking language to assist with content writing and translations, later on you might see yourself as local community leader.

What needs to be done before launching it on Sandbox?
TBD:
Content Plan +100 topics for articles collected form NEAR ecosystem.
/Can take it on myself. Worksheets are amazing to create construction./

Website structure (categories and languages).
/Simple, collect languages from existing communes and add additional when asked./

Design logo and brand look of NEAR Wiki
/We need a designer/

Develop (or use existing) backend and frontend of website and maintain it.
/In search of developer, help needed/

Later on an admin to hold work with coordinating content authors, translators and check if articles are not simply Gtransladed.
/Content admin also to be found/

Rates of payment for content creators and translators for adding articles to Wiki.

Sample to discuss:

Rates ar for 300 words (A4 page).
Simple: Just written text
Medium: Text with added contextual pictures
Hard: Text with pictures and tables, or content for developers including coding samples.

Content writing: S 10 NEAR / M 12 NEAR / H 15 NEAR

Contents translation: S 6 NEAR / M 8 NEAR / H 10 NEAR

Content adding (already created posts from guilds, news media, etc.) S 2 NEAR / M 3 NEAR / H 4 NEAR

Content editing (fixing mistakes and visual structure): 4 NEAR

Let me know if rates look fair.

Have seen that as an engine most of you voted for Github. Adding my NEAR coin for discussion:
Since i’ve worked for another crypto commune on Wiki creation at a peak it got +100 content creators, translaors and editors and aprox 5 admins for quality of work. So enterprise level +400 USD for subscription might apply.
They use mediawiki.org engine for it. Cuz it’s simple. With it can be few issues on path when adding multiple languages, still can be solved and it’s easier to manage. For users it’s also easy to edit and add new posts cuz has same WYSIWYG.
Maybe from visual perspective won’t be so cool.
Also as a bonus big G loves it, cuz it’s realy light for SEO purposes.

Will ask web developers from our side how familiar they are with Github.

So yeah! To start it just need web developer. At beggining could manage all processes. From Latvian NEAR Guild we got already one admin who could coordinate workflow with content creators and another girl is 50/50 for now.

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Update here: https://wiki.near.org is live but still very early.

Information design is still in progress, but if you want to contribute:

  • To get writer access, respond here with types of content you want to write and I’ll DM you writer access to gitbooks.
  • Or contribute via Github UI: GitHub - near/wiki: NEAR Wiki

Hope we can grow this quickly into powerful resources of NEAR’s information.

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Hey Illia,

Can I get access to the Gitbooks, please?

I’d like to expand on the following:

  • Setting up your NEAR Wallet
  • Acquiring NEAR
  • Interacting with your first NEAR dApp
  • The NEAR Community

Cheers

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Fantastic. Formally requesting writer access for myself. I added the Wiki link to the Homepage and added a bit of info about contributing and linked in the Contributing page.

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