How do we make the "gems" hidden on NG more easily discoverable? Wikis and pinning?

[tkrunning (Thomas K. Running)]

Hi all,

I’m posting this in the GV category since it’s the most active part of the forum, but it could of course apply more broadly.

I’ve seen a few comments lately that it would be helpful if we could somehow make the most useful and helpful content more easily accessible—both to help more people and avoid the same questions being asked over and over.

Just in the last days:

@jb4422

(Really, what might be useful here is pinned threads added to the PT GV Guide page. There are a few threads here that contain the bulk of the useful info around the topic of fund selection, fund risks, PFIC and taxes, citizenship, paperwork, etc. Several of us have dumped a lot of time and thought into posts in those threads and while the details may change, the core principles don’t. )

@Garbonzo

For many topics on NomadGate and potentially on Nomad list where information rapidly changes or becomes obsolete it would be quite helpful, in my opinion, to have a wiki type approach. It makes it easy to update information by trusted members and keep the most accurate and relevant information front and center. Otherwise, important posts get lost in the clutter and people repost the same questions over and over, resulting in the most knowledgeable members losing interest and stopping participation. Just my 2c.

Discourse (the software powering the forum) has a wiki feature where a post (typically the first post in a topic) can be converted into a wiki—meaning that anyone except new users can edit it:

Create a Wiki Post

Would it be helpful to create (or convert existing topics into) these kinds of wikis? Do you think the community would be up for keeping them up to date and relevant? Or would it be better to just try to surface individual posts making significant contributions (wherever they are located) by linking to them from a centralized place?

Last year I made @minimaxr’s guide to the automatic renewals a wiki, and it has been kept up to date, but only by @minimaxr. Not sure how we’d encourage other people than the original poster of a specific piece of content to pitch in to keep it updated.

Assuming we want to create wikis, how do we make sure these topics are easily discoverable? Discourse offers the ability to pin topics within a certain category, however the default behavior is that they get unpinned for a particular person once someone they have opened them once. So perhaps not the best solution for referring back to these topics/posts over time?

There’s also tags (we could for example use tags for wiki, how-to etc) which can be accessed through the left hand panel (on desktop at least).

I also like @jb4422’s idea of linking to some of these resources from the main Golden Visa guide (which I actually already do to a limited extent). Although I’m not sure how often people actually refer back to that guide once they have read it once?

But I could potentially combine this with relevant tags (e.g. wiki and how-to) and automatically show the ones with the most likes directly in the GV article, with a link to explore all wikis and how-tos by linking to the relevant tag pages (e.g. https://community.nomadgate.com/tags/c/residency-citizenship-migration/portugal-golden-visa/22/how-to).

What do y’all think about this? Any other ideas for how we can improve the discoverability of the true gems that can be found here?

[Garbonzo (Paul Pierce)]

This is a great idea that will hopefully quell some of the anxiety. In particular the Wiki idea.

By my estimation there are about 10-15 core posts that could (should) be elevated to Wiki status. A good example is the Auto renewal summary by @minimaxr

Other examples are the timing posts for Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, Phase 4 of the GV which get a lot of activity but very little in the way to relevant updates.

Every week someone seems to come and post a new thread announcing new regulations for the citizenship law even though its not new news and its not actually the regulations that are being announced. Topics such as that warrant a wiki thread in my opinion.

Maybe other members can recommend key posts that can become wikis. I think there are plenty of people who would be willing to update the wikis when new information is announced.

Bonus points if you can enable the ability to subscribe to a specific wiki post and get notifications when that is updated.

[tkrunning (Thomas K. Running)]

A few questions that needs to be answered to implement something like this:

1. @minimaxr’s how-to guide was timely and complete, and it was relatively straightforward to make it a wiki post. But how do we start “wikifying” the dozens of insightful posts that are scattered through threads with hundreds if not thousands of posts? Do we (and is we = me?) create a composite wiki post that references all those individual posts? Do we use GPT-4 to summarize those posts? Do we insert a new wiki post at the beginning of said thread or create a separate topic?

2. What exactly should the wikis for the various stages contain? The crowdsourced DB is kind of a wiki of the activity, but maybe it makes sense to include something about exactly which steps needs to be taken within which stage (paying of DUCs etc), approximate wait times, etc?

3. How do people propose new wikis? How do we let people know that they can propose and edit wikis and what the process is like?

I’m sure there are many more questions, but these are just some that come to mind right off the bat. Would love to get the input from the community here!

[jb4422 (Jeff B)]

IMO, what it is is that there are certain sections of threads where a question has come up and 2-3 people have made really coherent replies. The thing being that you can’t just pin a given post because without the rest of the nearby thread you have no context, e.g. what was the question being asked. Or the “answer” came out because of a discussion between two or three people and the collective answer is really spread across 5 posts.

I think that for many of the major threads I mentioned, there’s maybe 10-20 posts that really capture 90% of the sum of information of the thread. But it’s buried in 1000 other posts and thus just not reasonably discoverable. But who wants to sit down and read 1000s of posts? ex. I know I’ve written the same text about the nature and rules of private equity in response to someone complaining that it doesn’t work like stocks/ETFS time and time again. I’d repost it but that’d mean trying to find it in the first place.

There are a few of us who are SMEs of a sort - I do taxes and PE funds, @tommigun has done a lot with DIY paperwork, @cj807 did a ton of work on the legal stuff around mais habitaco, someone else has said a lot about the issues around kids, others know a lot about IMGA or banks or lawsuits. (If I don’t mention you, it’s not an insult, I participate less anymore and can’t remember everyone or it’s on a topic I don’t engage on.) But you could probably key on, let’s call them, posts by senior names (oh let’s face it, we all know who they are, plus or minus) that are above a certain size and use those as “anchors”.

@tkrunning

Not sure how we’d encourage other people than the original poster of a specific piece of content to pitch in to keep it updated.

The normal way, through credits. I think this gets easier though once the initial content is in place. It’s easy to go in and update or add a paragraph. It’s hard to marshal the will to create the piece in the first place.

[cj807 (Chris J)]

Good ideas here. Personally I think trying to wikify existing forum posts doesn’t really work. Instead, draw up and publish a list of topics, eg “What to expect at a biometrics appointment”, "Should I file a lawsuit against AIMA? ", “Living in Portugal before final approval” etc.

Invite people to volunteer to take on a topic. The volunteer drafts and publishes a mini-guide to address their topic. Then you allow edits to that guide to be made in wiki style. I’d happily do a couple of topics.

[cj807 (Chris J)]

You might even invite a couple of lawyers to do articles under their name. … some of them are very keen for the publicity.

[Garbonzo (Paul Pierce)]

I disagree with the notion that wikifying existing posts doesn’t work, primarily for the reason @jb4422 mentions. You might have dozens of hours of legitimate contextual documentation on a topic in a post. So, starting a totally new wiki thread you lose all of that historical context. I would rather see the wiki added as the first post and then people can choose or not choose to read all the other posts to get more detailed information.

[ohbee (Full Name)]

A well written wiki article would contain all the context it needs, but that’s a lot of person hours.

[anonymous82]

Either approach would be a big improvement . And maybe another approach is to have the new wiki and link to the old thread with more detail. Effectively the same thing so we are splitting hairs to some degree. The whole idea of the wiki is that one person does not need to do it all but rather a collective approach . However it practically would be necessary for one person to take the lead on each topic.

[Starts (Peter)]

The site can of course be improved, and one of the pleasures of Nomadgate, which i enjoy and hope is not lost in a wiki version, is the ‘social’ side. Here users can share comments, opinions and links in different subjects. New users can learn and assist later joiners. I would love to see a balance between the two formats.

[garrett]

Certainly, but a wiki linking specific posts is much friendlier for new people than “go read this two thousand post thread to dig up exactly what you need”

Especially with the search being relatively terrible

I’d be happy to work on a wiki page for imga tax filing in the USA if y’all like

[Onward (M-n-G)]

Lots of good ideas here - to enable newcomers to help people and reduce repetition. Happy to contribute or collaborate with others.
Another area is encouraging use of the search function!

[Garbonzo (Paul Pierce)]

@tkrunning

Once the wikis are complete you should charge lawyers to access and use the content . It’s not really a joke - if you know what I mean, you know.

[tkrunning (Thomas K. Running)]

I created a post outlining how to contribute a guide/wiki here:

Guides and wikis: How to access and contribute

The Nomad Gate community is a treasure trove of knowledge, however it can be hard to find the truly useful posts as they tend to be buried deep within threads with hundreds or even thousands of posts. In an attempt at making it easier to access this immensely valuable knowledge, the community proposed putting together guides that summarize the information contained within the community. Each guide will be made a “wiki”, meaning that anyone (except brand new users) can edit them to add in addit…

Welcome to hear any feedback you might have, things are obviously not set in stone yet.

Also feel free to edit that post to add in any further topics you think should be covered. If you want to “claim” any topics, just add your name next to it on the list.

[imarkphillips (Mark Phillips)]

StackOverflow is probably the best example of a site/platform that does community aggregation really well.

Its highly searchable, SEOed, as well as having good categorization. Its designed for software developers & contains lots of example code to help others get past complex development issues.

The user voting, and ability to update years down the track make it a solid source of contemporary knowledge.

I don’t know what platform they use though.

The thing with Wikis is that they can take some time by a few people to update with volatile info. (We run several wikis in our business. Wordpress based and one called LiveAgent).

Slack is a popular tool but either expensive or time limited. (We switched to Pumble for these reasons).