After visiting straightrazorplace, I was thinking hammock forums users would benefit greatly from having a wiki to store our distilled wisdom.
The forums are great for discussions and generating innovative ideas, but they are rather difficult to use to find out what the consensus was at the end of said discussion. Every great new innovative thread turns up being 1000 posts long and clear as mud for someone who wasn't in on the discussion from the beginning. We have the articles section to handle this to some degree, but it's not quite going far enough in my opinion.
While the articles are categorized a bit, they are not automatically cross referencing each other as they could be with a wiki. It's up to each individual author to provide links to reference material, which again, usually ends up being more 1000 post long threads that are less than desirable. Moreover, only moderators and the original author can update the article which makes keeping the article up to date more difficult than it could be.
The articles *could* make a great seed for the content of a wiki though.
Of course, adding any new functionality obviously make for more work from the site maintainers, but I think if we can work out detail like who can edit the wiki, who can create new topics, who's moderating them, etc. it would be a boon for all of the users. Having direct access to the distilled knowledge of community instead of each person having to re-distill it would be worth the administrative effort.
I would hope it would also cut down on the number of posts asking what a whoopie sling is. At least the answer would always be the same: "here's the wiki page on whoopies..."
The forums are great for discussions and generating innovative ideas, but they are rather difficult to use to find out what the consensus was at the end of said discussion. Every great new innovative thread turns up being 1000 posts long and clear as mud for someone who wasn't in on the discussion from the beginning. We have the articles section to handle this to some degree, but it's not quite going far enough in my opinion.
While the articles are categorized a bit, they are not automatically cross referencing each other as they could be with a wiki. It's up to each individual author to provide links to reference material, which again, usually ends up being more 1000 post long threads that are less than desirable. Moreover, only moderators and the original author can update the article which makes keeping the article up to date more difficult than it could be.
The articles *could* make a great seed for the content of a wiki though.
Of course, adding any new functionality obviously make for more work from the site maintainers, but I think if we can work out detail like who can edit the wiki, who can create new topics, who's moderating them, etc. it would be a boon for all of the users. Having direct access to the distilled knowledge of community instead of each person having to re-distill it would be worth the administrative effort.
I would hope it would also cut down on the number of posts asking what a whoopie sling is. At least the answer would always be the same: "here's the wiki page on whoopies..."
Bwtruitt
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Socorro, NM
Hammock: HH Expedition ASym
Insulation: Lost River UQ w/IX
Suspension: Whoopie Slings
Posts: 31
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