This morning, Mike Gunderloy announced the launch of Rails Bridge, which sounds like a great way to repair some of the damage that has been dealt to Rails over the last few years. I'm not one to hand-hold newbies, but I do think that if someone asks a good question, it should be answered without insult. If the same question is asked a dozen times, then clearly it's worth a full explanation somewhere, it shouldn't be met with anger and bad attitude. 

I've been wondering for awhile about a git-style wiki system, and I think this might be a good way to get started on it.  In my vision, you'd basically have wiki pages that would be articles, info pages, or tutorials.  A user could fork one of those pages, make changes, and request that they be merged back into the official page/article/tutorial.  You could also 'watch' pages or users that contribute to topics that you care about.

While all of that is going on, it'd be super awesome to be able to note the relevant libraries, then when one of those is updated it pops up a flag asking if the article needs to be updated for the new version.  An article wouldn't necessarily need to follow the edge updates, but if it was updated at the stable versions, then it'd be *way* ahead of anything else out there.  Some kind of relevant notification would be needed to tell followers of that page/topic that it might need attention, then one of them would need to make the changes.

I think the following issues would be solved by such a system:
    1. Nice way to keep newbie intro info up-to-date and easily linkable
    2. Would help to ease some of the blog plagiarism we see with copy/paste tutorials that go out of date quickly
    3. Would encourage people to make small incremental updates to tutorials without re-writing everything from scratch

Allowing Comments/Suggestions Properly

Now... would people be able to comment on pages/articles/tutorials? A lot of wikis have a separate discussion area per page where policy, best practices, and suggestions are made.  Comments can be added to commits on github now, so perhaps that'd be the way to handle comments on something like this?  The problem I see with comments is that you have a huge percent of them that are just 'thanks' messages that don't add any real value (even though they are appreciated), another large percent are people debating techniques you used and making their own suggestions, and another part is random off-the-wall stuff that may or may not be useful.  I think that overall, if people have suggestions, they should fork & write, or they should use a proper discussion area to make a case.  Perhaps traditional comments could be turned on/off per page/topic/whatever.

Moderating/Approving Changes

The creator of any page/topic/article should be the one that approves modifications and assigns permissions to it.  If someone doesn't like the info or if they have another strategy, they can fork it and make changes.  If that fork becomes higher rated than the original, then it'll be the one that gets found on the search first.  I think the relevance of the information will win and people that create pages that aren't ever updated will quickly fizzle out.