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.

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….

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;

1. How do you allow chatter to happen in one space, and knowledge to be published in another.
   • Have IRC, email lists, blogs, forums for chatter. And publish knowledge in a wiki :-)
2. How do you do this on your wikis today?
   • As above.
3. Do you use different categories?
   • The closest I get is using a link to a "ToDo" page for collecting things that need doing.
4. Do you use separate wikis?
   • That would not be helpful, I think. The work in getting from Chat to knowledge is actual hard intellectual and integrative work…two wikis won't get the work done.
5. And what is still missing from Wikidot to make this work neatly?
   • I think that wikidot would most valuably be improved in this direction by adding GTD-type features. That would involve adding built in support, perhaps hanging off tags, for Projects, Contexts, Tasks, Delegated helpers, and time/iCal scheduling.

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.