"State of the art" Theories

[SpinningSky]

Hi everyone!

I've recently joined the community and it's been a blast, I especially love the theorycraftig aspect, it's great ot get a chance to theorize together and get feedback from all kinds of people.

One thing that I wish we had, was a section where people could find linked all the "majorly accepted" theories. That is, a place where a newbie can go an quickly access all the currently unproved theories that a big part of the community found to be very plausible, so to be able to catch up with all the major ideas floating around without having to comb through the huge archive that is this forum.

What sparked this idea in me was this particular theory: https://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/95749-theory-taln-wasnt-the-herald-who-broke-it-was-chanarach/

In this case, I was lucky that someone had answered to the theory recently enough that the topic popped up, but as far as I know there might be many theories with this level of quality and that received this level of agreement that I'll never see because there's just nothing more to say and they remain hidden under the newer content, and can only be found in Chaos's "about me" section now 

What I'm envisioning would be a more curated area, where every theory is presented as a single post rather than a conversation, which the theory crafter would get a chance to put together following the conversation on the forum. The original post, and any realated ones if it applies, would be linked to it. This would be sort of a "theroy wiki", with sections where theories which were proved\disproven can be moved to keep it organised and accessible. It'd also work as a theory "hall of fame" of sorts

Of course defining what would make a "comunity accepted theory" must be very complex.
One idea I had was a poll function for people to vote whether they find the theory correct or not, and the theory would be taken into consideration by mods for the "special section" after a set number of people voted on it and the agreement rate is above a certain percentace. Much like the [discuss] tag, this poll function should be availible only the OP requests it, as I understand that negative feedback can lead to a negative environment if not handled properly, but I personally appreciate it when people argue against my ideas in a post. 
I also feel it'd be different from negative reputation points, as it doesn't affect your user but rather than a proposed idea after an explicit request for feedback.
 

What do you guys think? Especially I'm curious if the mods think if something like this would be doable or if there's some major problems with it I'm not considering

ah of course if something like this is already availible and I havn't realized it, "shame... shame... shame..."

 

 

[Morningtide]

I like this idea. It would be a really nice way to look at good theories, and also make it less plausible that a bunch of "new" theories pop up that are actually just an old theory (and then whoever wrote the theory feels bad and nobody's happy).  I have absolutely no authority to implement this though

[Chaos]

It's a reasonable idea, but the upkeep on keeping that up to date sounds really intense, especially in the long run. It'd be a lot of management to sift through and determine what qualifies--to say nothing of other implementation issues.

[SpinningSky]

To try and simplify the whole idea, how about just having "theory" tagged posts tied to the option of having this "believabilty" poll, plus the option to filter and sort topics according the "believabilty" rating?

It would require no mainantance, though of course I'm not sure what it would require from a technical standpoint, but it would stil provide an easy way spot the most belived and accepted theories.
Maybe the proven\disproven state might be handled by the section moderator on a case by case basis, only for the most outstading ones, so to avoid "already proved" theories to clog the section when ordering by "believabilty", but it might not even be necessary if it becomes complex from a maintance standpoint.

 

[Chaos]

I mean, that's simpler in maintenance but not in development. That's harder than it seems, and anything custom we make makes it more challenging to do software updates in the future.