I’m not utterly against a wiki per-se, but I am being fairly realistic as to the likelihood of events.
I can’t help but feel that the “Goto Discord for instant help” thing has perhaps shot a few in the foot, with a demand now exceeding capacity, frustrations rising from the repetition of advice being given etc.
In order for any solution to work it would need some form of process, and one of the things I’ve always been fairly good at, in fact my previous employment relied upon it, was finding all the holes in said process. One of the difficulties you will have here is that this is, by all accounts, being community driven, e.g. there’s no guidance from the GameDev.tv team themselves on what they want, and that causes a problem because when you are not sure whether to do something, or not do something, or how to tackle it you’ll need to ask, and potentially wait a little while for a response, because again, this isn’t likely to be a high priority (in my opinion).
With regards to other solutions, I would suggest rolling the issue right back to its root, get some statistics, how many people are we actually talking about that don’t understand NullReferenceException error message for example, in which lecture/section does this occur the most, or, where does this issue first arise? Have the team been made aware of this? Have they been given information that demonstrates the size of the issue, or is it more of a “Yeah, a few people have been having this issue”, if it sounds casual, it’s probably not likely to be taken as a pressing issue. Where are these issues being logged? Who is logging them?
Also - what happens if you just don’t do anything? If you didn’t post that repetitive answer again for the 1000th time on Discord, what happens then? Does the student go off looking elsewhere and still struggles, do they managed to find out some information for themselves and resolve it? Are they ever directed back to the Q&A to get a response from the instructor team themselves?
There really are so many questions around this whole topic/process, the above are just a few that spring to mind without a great deal of thought/effort on my part, but it strikes me that jumping straight into a solution without fully investigating the problem is going to hurt in the long term. Who benefits from this solution the most right now? Is it the students? Or is it those that are frustrated posting the same information time and time again? Fairly certain if the student doesn’t get an answer on Discord, they’ll try somewhere else, and probably eventually find their way to the Q&A. If the Q&A gets overloaded and the workload for the student instructors gets too much that it is no longer easily managed then that itself should be a warning sign to the team, because at the moment, the more the community does under the guise of support the more the issue of problems with the course content may be hidden from view - until its too late/a huge problem.
Just thinking about the wiki idea itself… what was the plan? One topic, many headings? Like the official ones? Lets say that gets supported well and is updated regularly and has grown over the course of 12 months, its now pages and pages and page long… I’m a new student, I have got stuck, I end up asking on a question on Discord and get given a link to the wiki - “Have a look on the wiki, its covered there” comes the response… I follow the link to a page that is enormous… I scroll a bit, I scroll a bit more, I see lots of things being explained that I didn’t even know about yet, it looks very technical and complicated. There is a mixture of different writing styles, I spot a lot of typos, then there’s a code example which seems to be all over the place because someone hasn’t applied the code formatting correctly. I keep scrolling. This isn’t fun. I try the browser’s Find feature, I type in “Rigidbody” - it indicates there are 253 matches… I click “Next”…a lot…I give up.
Or, was there a different plan for the wiki?
At the end of the day, reducing the amount of support that is required by the team should be something that they are interested in doing, finding ways to monitor the problems should also be something that the team has an interest in, as mentioned this could be through reporting and feedback from student instructors but backed up with some data/evidence - this is all only of any use/point though if something will then change afterwards, e.g. changes the course material where appropriate.
