I strongly agree. Looking through the first few pages of the all-time highest-rated posts, it’s surprising how many of them contain implicit dependencies. For example, even Yvain’s standalone post Schelling fences on slippery slopes contains an implicit reference that leads all the way back to CFAI via the Gandhi example. That said, “has a dependency” is not a binary condition that disqualifies a post from being accessible, since one can still enjoy Yvain’s post without knowing the reference. So some good taste will probably be required to determine if a post is accessible to people who don’t know the prerequisites.
I was thinking of a coarser dependence structure: packaging posts into collections, ordering them within collections, and suggesting other collections or original sequences as prerequisites for new collections.
Could be implemented using some kind of “call for post suggestions” threads that specify a topic for a collection to be constructed, or central posts that set the topic. Note that even Yvain’s summer 2011 post sequence isn’t collected into a list accessible from the wiki (IIRC).
I strongly agree. Looking through the first few pages of the all-time highest-rated posts, it’s surprising how many of them contain implicit dependencies. For example, even Yvain’s standalone post Schelling fences on slippery slopes contains an implicit reference that leads all the way back to CFAI via the Gandhi example. That said, “has a dependency” is not a binary condition that disqualifies a post from being accessible, since one can still enjoy Yvain’s post without knowing the reference. So some good taste will probably be required to determine if a post is accessible to people who don’t know the prerequisites.
I was thinking of a coarser dependence structure: packaging posts into collections, ordering them within collections, and suggesting other collections or original sequences as prerequisites for new collections.
Could be implemented using some kind of “call for post suggestions” threads that specify a topic for a collection to be constructed, or central posts that set the topic. Note that even Yvain’s summer 2011 post sequence isn’t collected into a list accessible from the wiki (IIRC).