As anyone who spends much time among the Toshiba Forums community knows, the expertise of members here has populated our message boards with a vast amount of valuable solutions and information. We're now adding to the community a curated view of select solution and information topics as articles in the new Toshiba Forums Knowledge Base.
While the set of Knowledge Base (KB) articles that we're launching with have been authored by Toshiba staff, the core information in many of them originated as forum posts. Forum members whose postings provide the source material for these and all future articles will automatically be attributed as article Contributors and each article for which they are Contributors will become part of their community profile. These attributions influence rank level and permissions to enhanced features, as with message board postings and received Kudos & Accepted Solutions.
Current Toshiba Forum members with the highest community ranks will find that they now have a 'Topic Options' menu item called "Nominate to Knowledge Base." Selecting this menu option initiates a workflow and results in that topic being added to a review queue for being considered as the basis of a new KB article. (A topic can only be nominated for the KB once, so the option will be grayed out of the menu if the article has already been nominated.)
All forum members who have established a moderate amount of ongoing involvement in the Toshiba Forums will be able to post Comments to KB articles. We expect that input from Comments will improve the value of articles, and when articles are updated to include information from Comments, the forum member who had posted that source comment will be added to the list of article contributors.
Article attribution, Topic nomination and Comments are just the beginning of Toshiba Forums community involvement in the community KB. We would like for the Toshiba Forums Knowledge Base to become a wiki-like resource that is frequently and easily updated by any knowledgeable community members, so we are interested in involving those interested in the Authoring and Editing roles of the KB.
In the weeks ahead we will be enabling select groups to begin authoring articles, based on participation criteria defined by the Toshiba Forums automated user ranking system. For now, please feel free to explore the Toshiba Forums Knowledge Base at http://forums.toshiba.com/t5/tkb/communitypage or jump to topical areas of the KB by selecting the following icon from any message board list screen:
Jim
