What do you think about Bobino's use of a curated channel?

[Bobino]

Warning, this post got me to learn discourse only accepts body shorter than 10000 characters (there should be a badge for that). So I had to split this in 2 separate replies.

Ok, I'll share a bit more about how I think / behave and we can go from there.

I'm sure we'll agree that everyone's brain is different, when it comes to categorization and tagging this becomes even more evident.

Our site has this structure:

1. Categories (top level channels?) (called Sections/Forums by @Cecile earlier)
   1.1Channels (sub-channels?)
   1.1.1Topics (looks like nesting is only 2 levels deep, sorry for anyone with OCD)

Each topic can be turned into a wiki after the fact (per the author's trust level of by an moderator / admin), letting anyone edit the original post.

Each topic can also wear any number of tags.
In some scenarios, assigning a tag is mandatory, sometimes it is not.

Each topic can have many comments from community members. (unless comments have been disabled)

Each comment can generate a new topic (if instead of replying you click on the chain icon and select 'New Topic').

Also to note, some top level channels have no sub-channels, while some others have many and yet others have a single one (those last ones are the hardest for me as it sometimes blurs the definitions of the 2 levels, like with Heads-Up and In the News).

Topics cannot belong to more than one channel (or sub-channel), so ideally channels do not intersect. I did post about a recent OAuth whitepaper under Heads-Up (really meaning 'In the news'), and just re-classed it under the WhitePaper sub-channel of the resources channel.

Wikis typically address this problem with transclusion, as it lets you visually display in a page the content from another page. Pages have a single place in the wiki hierarchy, but you can easily create a new page displaying the same content. You only have to manage the content in the original page.

Here is the about topic for Curated Collections:

@Cecile

This channel is a visit in members’ curated collections of articles, links, resources, etc. The validity or accuracy of the content is the curator’s own responsibility.

If you would like to have a Channel to host your collections, just write to Admin. You will get your own Channel here as well as moderation rights for that specific Channel.

It so happens there is only 2 other members with curated collections, but they are pretty emtpy or were used for testing purpose. So in terms of making sure I mimic other curators, I don't have much to go by. Still, that was compelling for me for the following reasons:

• Like all of us, I do have my own vision on things & what is useful / valuable to share. I am nowhere near having a 'following' but I think there is value in packaging together content that comes from me or is initiated by me. (as opposed to scattering this across categories and channels all over the site)
• Valid / accurate is on me. If I say something wrong elsewhere, I may be misguiding someone. If I say something wrong here, you chose to come here and pay attention to what I'm saying, I did not push it in front of your face. + some of what I say, is subjective and can be disagreed with.
• If you disagree with me, and happen to not have much etiquette about how to voice your disagreement, I'm moderator in here, so pick your fights wisely and stay professional. (@Cecile I still do not see anything that makes me moderator in my channel, we can discuss about that as an aside)
• All in all, it makes a stronger statement about who owns / maintains the content.

So collection is not specifically defined in the 'about' page, it mentions some example content 'articles, links, resources, etc'. I interpreted it as the channel is a collection in itself.

It seems I have many because @cecile writes:

@Cecile

@Bobino regularly ask questions in his collections

So, interpreting the channel is a collection in itself I went and made an about for my curated channel:

@Bobino

Hi everyone, this channel is where I share stuff with other community members and seek to get feedback about alternate ways of doing things that may be equally valid or let me improve my toolkit & techniques.

So It seems my use is not the one that was intended by @Cecile. She mentions 'Windows user library' something I know nothing of. She envisioned 'lists of references organized by themes'. I can only assume the theme would be the topic title, and references mean there should be no original content, only links. She then gives an example in a later comment, where topics File Upload Checklist - #13 by tonywhitelive & FMPA Install checklist - #7 would have been created elsewhere on the site and I would then have created a topic where they are gathered, suggesting in this case something along the lines of 'Useful checklist'.

My problem with this is:

• little value added
• added burden (instead of 2 posts, I need to create a 3rd one)
• the grouping today may not be the grouping tomorrow
• finding something can be hard, more so if you are mostly listing links. (was it under 'useful checklist', 'best practices', 'I wish I knew' or <...>)
• some lists may have single items
• some theme may require a lot of time before there is mutiple items to group in a list.

I also believe those items are why, here like elsewhere, we see little of 'top 10 custom functions I use' / 'My favorites plugins that pull me out of trouble', or anything similar. Who cares about Bobino's usefull checklist, why would I even go look at that content (unless we are talking about someone who has achieved a level of fame far beyond what I'll ever reach)?

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Continued in the next comment