Hey everyone,
For the purposes of this thread, this is entirely speculative. If I was serious about it I would have put the thread in SF but I can guess there will be big technical issues with the idea.
What I thought was RF could intergrate a "wiki" onto the forum software to actas a special area for creating wiki pages that any registered member can read, share and edit. In an ideal world it could act as a source of quick reference for topics that get debated on RF, beliefs systems or creating pages about the forum community or its members. It acts as a common store of all the knowledge and ideas we have on the forum which anyone can use and can slowly accumulate over time. That way all our discussions actually contribute to something. The best bit is that obscure information coming from members with either specialised knowledge or unusal beliefs has a chance of surviving perhaps years after they are inactive and creates a sort of "living history" of the forums.
After we do a thread, it basically goes inactive and dissappears. It is possible to search for something you have in mind or dig through to find individual threads (if like me you want to know something about RF's history). So essentially the forum becomes like "landfill" in which we create huge numbers of threads and topics that then are read rarely-if at all- years later. There's over 12 years worth of stuff on here but They aren't linked to anything so even if you dramatically improved the search features on the forum, it still wouldn't "connect the dots" in a way that makes the 170,000+ threads intelligable or even know what is useful.
The wiki could act as a way of "recycling" discussions by creating a way to organise or index them by linking to them. Old topics can be re-used and the information circulates better as if the forum were a living, breathing ecosystem: the "old" material can be built up and improved or replaced by the "new" material. Rather than just get buried old discussions may have a sort of afterlife as reference material and each thread, post and member therefore "adds" to a big picture that keeps developing as new members join and old members leave. So in five/ten years time, the discussions we are having now act like "compost" in which people can pull out old discussions or act as a basis for new ones in which the "seed" of new ideas and discussions can grow. It also would perhaps give RF a much more distinctive sense of its identity, culture and history as a community.
It doesn't take much imagination to see that this is open to abuse and is a moderation nightmare given its created by members for members of members ideas, but as a possible way of building RF as a community and making unused threads "useful" or "relevant" rather than just sink almost without trace it sounded worth floating.
For the purposes of this thread, this is entirely speculative. If I was serious about it I would have put the thread in SF but I can guess there will be big technical issues with the idea.
What I thought was RF could intergrate a "wiki" onto the forum software to actas a special area for creating wiki pages that any registered member can read, share and edit. In an ideal world it could act as a source of quick reference for topics that get debated on RF, beliefs systems or creating pages about the forum community or its members. It acts as a common store of all the knowledge and ideas we have on the forum which anyone can use and can slowly accumulate over time. That way all our discussions actually contribute to something. The best bit is that obscure information coming from members with either specialised knowledge or unusal beliefs has a chance of surviving perhaps years after they are inactive and creates a sort of "living history" of the forums.
After we do a thread, it basically goes inactive and dissappears. It is possible to search for something you have in mind or dig through to find individual threads (if like me you want to know something about RF's history). So essentially the forum becomes like "landfill" in which we create huge numbers of threads and topics that then are read rarely-if at all- years later. There's over 12 years worth of stuff on here but They aren't linked to anything so even if you dramatically improved the search features on the forum, it still wouldn't "connect the dots" in a way that makes the 170,000+ threads intelligable or even know what is useful.
The wiki could act as a way of "recycling" discussions by creating a way to organise or index them by linking to them. Old topics can be re-used and the information circulates better as if the forum were a living, breathing ecosystem: the "old" material can be built up and improved or replaced by the "new" material. Rather than just get buried old discussions may have a sort of afterlife as reference material and each thread, post and member therefore "adds" to a big picture that keeps developing as new members join and old members leave. So in five/ten years time, the discussions we are having now act like "compost" in which people can pull out old discussions or act as a basis for new ones in which the "seed" of new ideas and discussions can grow. It also would perhaps give RF a much more distinctive sense of its identity, culture and history as a community.
It doesn't take much imagination to see that this is open to abuse and is a moderation nightmare given its created by members for members of members ideas, but as a possible way of building RF as a community and making unused threads "useful" or "relevant" rather than just sink almost without trace it sounded worth floating.
