IF there was a Wiki, how would one organize it?

Yeah, the Help is usually the basic descriptions, good for jogging my memory but…

Epicor Course Guides are pretty good but… not always readily available.
FWIW… here is a screenshot of an old E9 Requisition Course Guide

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P.S.
i.e. why a Wiki (or something)
I’m sure, like myself… many other users have created/collected End User docs over the years?
image

I have dreamed of a common repository for uploading “stuff”
self organizing, with advanced search capabilities
and finally “someone” who could spare the time review from time to time and clear out any stray “chaff”
but… might be a lot chaos to overcome?

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Me too!!!

But then I search “Cycle Count” in EpicCare, EpicWeb, or EpiUsers/Yahoo. So many hits. There are posts about the process, about specific Vantage/Epicor/Kinetic functionality, errors running, etc.

What I’m promoting is not necessarily a wiki in as much as an executive summary of the resources it points to. I only use wiki because it has to be crowd-sourced and easy for people to contribute to.

In the early days of the Internet, there were just ftp servers with files. You had to know which server and the filename to get anything. Then someone came up with Gopher. It was just text files that contained descriptions about the files on that particular ftp site then became a menu system. Later, other search engines indexed the Gopher pages (Veronica and Jughead were the most famous which were competitors to Archie - which actually downloaded FTP files to try to index them IIRC…). Eventually, this gave way to modern search engines. And honestly, search hasn’t gotten much better. Having some curated pages that would help the search engine is really what I’m after.

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Reminds me that I used to have a Compuserve account - where things were "kind of " orderly.
In spite of the constraints, I sometimes look back fondly to times before the chaos of the internet.

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70243.1353

:wink:

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I just had a thought! (I know, I’m proud of myself too)

I think there should be a “This answered my question” somewhere. Whether it is for the whole post, the response that was marked as the answer, or just any reply.

Wouldn’t that help in building a Wiki? Here is my example. I was looking for some help on how the out of the box Shipping Labels work. I searched and got a bunch of hits. After opening a few, I finally found my answer here.

It got me thinking because if you search for Shipping Labels across the whole site, it was way down in the list. If we allowed an answered my question functionality, then we could use that as a sort. Posts with most answered my questions rise to the top.

Thoughts?

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My thoughts exactly.

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I like this a lot.

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How’s this different than clicking on the Solution though? :thinking:

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Because EVERYONE gets to say “this answered my question” - not just the OP.

Ahhhh. And the OP doesn’t always click the box either.

We could choose an icon maybe? Have the crew add a Check Box icon. Just don’t know if you could search by that…

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Like this site:

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That’s the point of the Solution Checkbox no? We could add an upvote feature… I think we have that ability

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I think that’s what is being proposed. Does that appear in the advanced search too?

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This is the plugin that’s available (still WIP)

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I don’t know, I am not a big fan of the “upvote” because it is just saying “I like this”. I can’t remember what site I had seen it on, but the button was literally “this solved my problem”. Technically we can already upvote with the like button using the :+1:t2:. If you hover over it, it says +1.

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Yes but UpVote raises the reply to the top (moves it up) I mean I think that the Solution Checkbox is what this is for. We need to be more vigilant to get those checked and if something solved your problem and it wasn’t marked as a solution perhap we could flag it and we can mark it ourselves. shrug

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Yes, for the original poster, the solution checkbox lets us know that there was an answer to their problem.

What I would like to provide is more of a crowdsourced answer. So, I found my answer today without having to start a new post (which I think is a common goal here). But the answer was buried in a list of posts. If 10 other people had marked the solution/post/topic as answering their issue, it would raise the topic to the top of the search. Basically trying to make finding solutions easier.

What we are trying to capture is not the solution to the topic. Instead we are trying to capture all of those times someone comes to the site, searches for an answer, and finds it. How many times have you (well not you @josecgomez , as you provide the solutions) come and searched the site and found the answer to your problem? No one knows that you had a problem because you did not create a new topic (nor do we want them too as there are plenty of topics already). Additionally, no one knows you found the solution to your problem. If I have a similar issue, I would like to know what posts have helped other users. I think of it as just an extra bit of information to help people find the answers they need.

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And sometimes the answer to MY question is not the answer to the original question.

Meaning if a thread has 20 posts,

  • Post 1 is the question
  • Post 18 might be the answer to post 1
  • But post 7 answers a completely different question, the one I needed (but not necessarily the one the OP needed)
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However I do see the dark side of this, where sometimes people respond, oh I don’t know, “Don’t use widgets; just learn C#” or something like that. Hypothetically…

Yeah, that is an answer, and to a degree it’s a valid answer. It would get the most votes, I’m certain. But if you are searching on how to use widgets, this may not help a ton.

I’m not saying you can avoid this. Just playing devil’s advocate.

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