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New post type: a recap table
Motivation
I often want to use a table to:
- Compare different solutions (for example, solutions addressing a new feature-request).
- List related posts and duplicates (some topics can be extremely diluted in dozens of posts in a community or even spread over several communities. In this case it would sometimes seem useful to me to list all these related posts in one place and it could prevent new duplicates by giving more visibility to the initial post).
However, currently I don't know where to put such a "recap table" as it belongs neither to a question nor an answer.
On Meta I allow myself to be more lax on this aspect and I sometimes post this type of recap in an answer like here. But this way of doing things does not seem viable to me on a site other than Meta because if we do not respect the very principle of what a question or an answer to a question is, we risk losing the interest of a Q&A (IMHO).
Proposal
A solution could be to create a new type of post (let's call it "Recap post" but I'm not good at choosing names ;-) which can only be a table with a caption (and optionally also with a title: TBD).
The problem is, How to force the author to write only a table while allowing a lot of freedom on the content?
One solution could be to automatically detect if the post contains:
- A table (typeset in Markdown).
- A caption (limited in size, the limitation should probably be dynamically linked to the table size because a big table could need, for example more footnotes to explain their content) (below the table maybe).
- (Optionally a title, limited in size, above the table).
If it is not possible to automatically detect such complex content, then the user can tell the number of rows and columns and then the corresponding table cells could be filled one by one in separated text boxes (idem for the caption and the title), something like that:
It is not optimal because it is cumbersome to fill in and the text is not contained in one single Markdown block. It makes links harder to make between cells and between cells and caption...(But even in that state I will definitely use it personally!)
Whatever the technical solution adopted, this post type could have the following feature (IMHO):
- "Middle level post" maybe displayed just below the question and above the answers.
- Freely editable: anybody with the Participate Everywhere privilege can edit the post directly
- Cannot be voted on (TBD)? (or maybe yes if it encourage people to make it when necessary...)
- No tags (TBD)?
- Allowing comments (TBD)?
- Maybe "owned" by the person who created them as for wiki posts?
EDIT after follow-up comment:
Issues
How to deal with answers posted after the "recap table post"? How to encourage people to update the "recap table post" if relevant?
The freely edit property is necessary but not sufficient (even if the owner is notified when a new answer is posted). Another solution to encourage editing would be to display a warning to a user posting a new answer (if a "table recap post" is already present), but again, maybe not sufficient.
Note that this issue is mainly present when comparing answer of the same question for example (but the range of use of this type of post would not be restricted to just this use)
1 answer
If I understand correctly, you'd like to have some sort of "summary table" covering all the answers for a question that has a lot of them.
While this can't be manually curated (but wait, see below), we do have a table of contents that automatically appears when a post has more than a certain number of answers. You can see an example on this question with more than a dozen answers. Click on the "table of contents" button under the post.
I said this can't be manually curated, but it kind of can. That post is a new feature announcement and answers reported bugs or requested changes. Developers added status tags to the beginning of those answers, and the TOC quotes the first couple hundred characters of the answer, so you can see it there.
The community should discuss this, but if a question has a lot of answers, then if a short summary were added at the top (either by the author or by someone trying to curate a recap), then those summaries would show up in the table of contents automatically -- no manual table construction or maintenance required.
Would that help?
(The number of answers to trigger the TOC is settable; default is 3. We can lower it on Meta if that helps.)
1 comment thread