Why was the Wiki deprecated?

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I looked through fCC’s various repositories and found a Wiki that was marked deprecated. Made me wonder why would the wiki be deprecated when there are so many people willing to contribute and maintain it. It would have been a great help for people leaning on fCC.

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I can’t speak to the specific reasons, but generally… It takes work to maintain things like that. Putting the FCC brand on it would mean that we would have some responsibility to make sure it is accurate and not being used for illicit purposes. Furthermore, the FCC curriculum keeps changing and it would be a lot of work to keep up to date and to monitor everything and keep it clean. As it is, these solutions seem to get used in the curriculum, which personally I hate. I think they get used to cheat and some of those solutions are just horrible. Plus, a lot of them are based on older versions of the challenge and no longer work, causing confusion. Personally, I wish we’d get rid of the solutions.

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I guess that’s true, especially given that fCC is non-profit with limited funds. I do wish there were a smoother way to integrate people with non-tech backgrounds and non-native speakers of English into fCC’s curriculum. The number of people in the forums who look completely lost saddens me. I do have an idea to smoothen the entry barrier and I’ll make a post about it when I think it through.

Have a good day!

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If you aren’t at least a little lost, you aren’t learning coding. And if you don’t learn to search for answers externally, you won’t make it as a coder - that is a fundamental skill. For me taste things have become too coddling and “gamified”, but maybe that’s just me.

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Thigs that now exist:

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I agree that getting lost is all a part of the process. What I mean is that if we compare the process of learning to traversing a forest, a lot of people here don’t even know how to read the map i.e., don’t know how to ask questions, search online, etc., . This has turned into quite a help vampire problem. There is the problem that not a lot of people don’t know how to use forums (or probably don’t even know what they are prior to fCC). We have to come up with a solution before the it turns into a bigger problem.

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The new curriculum was trying to do that, it doesn’t seem it went as hoped…

It’s difficult to find a solution, unless we just give people the answers, people will always search for help

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I beg to differ, the new curriculum definitely achieved it’s aim - to enhance learning using projects, smoothening the difficulty curve by introducing concepts JIT and improve retention via repetition. All it needs is a little iterative polishing.

I think the number of completely clueless people isn’t a curriculum problem but rather a community problem. Let’s try to see it from their perspective - they’re probably new to tech, they want to learn coding on their first laptop that they bought for college and some friend tells them that fCC is a cool place to learn. They start going through the new RWD and suddenly they stumble upon a challenge that they can’t comprehend. A shiny button that says Ask for help shows up and they go to it. Turns out there is this nice website that they can ask for help and get it. They get used to it and start making posts without bothering to look online. I think we have to find a way to gently nudge people into being a little self-reliant.

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One thing I’ve noticed is a lot of people don’t describe their coding problem in the ‘tell us what is happening’ section.

And I don’t think that’s because they’re being lazy, I think a lot of people simply do not realise they can actually write things in that text box. Because a lot of people seem to use the topic title to describe their coding issue.

Also, lot of people also don’t realise how to format their code. I feel like there needs to be some kind of introduction instructions explaining that (if there aren’t already and I forgot about them when I signed up).

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Help vampires are always going to help vampire. I usually just try to nudge them in the right directions, slowly raising the sarcasm on them.

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Perhaps if when they they click ‘run the tests’ they get told to look up the topic they’re trying to do?

I.e. a search term they can put into a search engine to give them a start in working out the problem.

…this however would use up a lot of volunteer time to do for every single lesson.

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I also feel like spoiler answers in the forum seem to be like playing whack a mole. A lot of people don’t know why giving others the answer is an issue.

Or why them getting the answers doesn’t help their learning and makes coding much harder (I learned this the hard way.)

I feel if there was some sort of article or explanation that was given to people from the get go on the issue with spoiler answers, they’d happen way less.

But again, that uses volunteers time to make this kind of resource. :sweat_smile:

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Yes, but a lot of help vampires don’t do this intentionally. Most of the times, they simply are unaware of the fact that they can look for information online.

I think @Griff got this spot on. We definitely need to have a way to teach people how to use tech forums. Discourse’s discobot tutorial doesn’t really show up until you have used forums for a while. I’m sure there is UI/UX solution that we can engineer if all of us brainstorm.

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There is a good chance that such an article already exists, but it is buried in a sea of all the other articles. Maybe if we pinned such an article to the homepage so that it’s better visible, we could see an improvement in forum decorum and self-reliance. If such an article does not exist, then I can try my hand at writing it :crossed_fingers:

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