I’d like st start a glossary to demystify the experience of technology for “non -tech” professionals/people.
This will clear misunderstandings between the non-techies and techies and bridge a gap we need to fill.
Awareness is the key and defining what we are talking about will educate people who don’t understand.
So how do we do this? Make a category?
An example of a term to define is decentralization of internet
Sounds elementary yes but necessary-
Yes, we discussed this before. A good idea. I suggest it should be a glossary not just for tech terms, but other expert domains that play a role in CHT, like psychology (though tech dominates).
Unfortunately, while there is a really cool plugin that automatically creates dropdown boxes with a description for predefined terms while typing, this plugin is not available to hosted forums like this one.
We are working on categorization and will have a Community category with a Help sub-category. Here could be a pinned topic Glossary within which for each domain a post can be created. By making this a wiki post, anyone can edit/maintain it.
Having a separate sub-category of Glossary seems overkill to me.
In a general description e.g. the FAQ page there could be a link to this glossary topic.
Thx for writing this all out @aschrijver!!
The FAQ page link seems good. You see…, for non techie persons even the term wiki and plugin is still a little intimidating to explore believe it or not. So if you have to “know” what one of those things are, the non techie will lose interest, or even become non supportive and irrational about technology. Terms have to be obvious- and yes health terms too- Just brainstorming here - maybe a Tech for dummies page;). So people think- oh yeah I belong here- to keep it clean- because the misunderstanding is where the divide happens.
I am happy to mention that there is now a solution for creating a glossary on this forum!
With help of Discourse support team I have installed a Theme Component that allows Admins to add words and abbreviations plus an additional text, using a limited (in functionality) UI:
The component is really meant for frequently occurring abbreviations, and therefore will offer limited, not extensive, glossary support. The terms that are defined in the UI will automatically lead to a dotted line to be added to the words when they are used in a post. When you hover over the term, the explainer text will be displayed.
Let’s show this in action in sentence:
“The Cognitive Bias explainer was really tl;dr for me, so I should rtfm later.”, said the man.
Note: Terms can be suggested by adding to the wiki post here: Glossary of Common Terminology
