Today, a question to those using Wikidot for ongoing projects. Do you make a distinction between discussions written in sand, and those written in stone? And if so, how do you make this distinction using Wikidot?
In a classic (well-organised) project, we'll set-up some email lists and a wiki. The email lists are used for chatter, events, things that happen. That's the sand. The wiki gets used for knowledge, analyses, stories, reports, bookmarks. That's the stone. Well, it's soft stone but eventually it sets hard. We could use forums but these don't usually send out emails, so lack the 'eventing' that makes life easy. Checking fifty forums for updates every morning is… painful.
Some people try to use the email lists for knowledge, "here is my report of such and such an event" and get politely asked to put it on the wiki. Searching email is not fun unless it's for very specific things like that e-ticket to San Francisco. But a well-built wiki can be a treasure box of valuable knowledge.
You'll have noticed that we're pushing Wikidot to become a kind of integrated communications tool, and notifications on wiki pages can start to replace email lists and forums. It's early days, there are still chunks missing (like a notification when someone watches or unwatches a page, and like a lot fewer edit notifications), but our goal is really to make this capable of replacing email lists. Much simpler, but as useful.
So my question. Well, questions… How do we separate the sand from the stone? How do you allow chatter to happen in one space, and knowledge to be published in another. How do you do this on your wikis today? Do you use different categories? Do you use separate wikis? And what is still missing from Wikidot to make this work neatly?
I'd imagine that a lot of people with wikis already have a yahoo or google group associated with it. In many cases the group probably predates the wiki, and as people get pretty set in their ways, it will be a struggle to get them to use wikidot for this purpose even if you build the functionality into it.
I think what would catch peoples imagination is integrating google wave with a wiki site. If Wikidot becomes the first wikifarm to have wave based forums it would put it ahead of the pack.
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
I have two (three) wikis. The big and beautiful one, and the invisible one, where all the cooking is done… Whenthe cake is ready to see the world, it comes out to the big wiki… As far as a design of the big wiki, I have another one, that is visible and accessible to all wikidot users, so everyone can contribute if I fail to understand the explanations… When I achieve what I want, I simply pass the code to a main one….
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. - Paul McCartney
I'm so glad Wikidot is considering this.
I agree with how you've answered your own question. Pages contain the more durable information. Comments are more informal — they belong to someone, they're ephemeral, they're chronological, and they fit within the framework of a discussion.
Our forum is where most neighbors participate. When the forum fails, it's because it lacks that "eventing", to use your term. For most users, there isn't a simple way to keep track of discussions.
Wikidot users should be able to flag discussions and get emails or daily digests when they update. Even better, there could be a count (or a list?) of users who are tracking on certain discussions. It might be a good gauge of whether anyone's paying attention.
For pages, a cool feature might be to easily message all members who watch a page — to have that informal discussion without necessarily updating the page content.
So far, our neighborhood project has blurred the boundaries between email groups, the wiki, and facebook. That's possible because so many local networks interconnect. I'd like it if Wikidot would make better use of profiles, so it's easier to take stock of users, communicate with them, and work together in groups.
A well-built wiki can be a treasure box of valuable knowledge, indeed, but it is not capable of replacing email lists: ll the lists i know that have moved to forums have died. Forums work, just not like email lists.
I think email lists are for generally-interested people: they want to get all the chatter about their favorite object
Forums are for interested people - but perhaps with just a specific interest (in posting or answering a post)
Wikis are for storing knowledge, lists, plans…
Often where forums stop and wikis start, is in collecting a final view on a topic.
A wiki is like a forum where the current page is an intelligent summary of all contributions.
A blog… well. It's one person or small group pushing info out, and getting back comments. So it's like an email list, where people are interested, but feel like listeners, not contributors, and where their interest is somewhat fragile.
I think wikis are bad places for sand.
Better to think of it as a place for carving stone
Questions;
It's a massive market, so worth exploring.
In that vein, something that lots of organizations would like is a template-able event scheduling system.
If users could create pages easily, which became events (so each page would need start, finish, duration, location fields (like pages currently are allowed to have tags, they would have "times", and "places")), then these could be flexibly viewed filtering on date, and tags, contact, speaker, location, etc.