It has been brought up that the site should include a wiki. I'm not going to get into what a wiki is here. There are tons of articles out there on teh interwebz, Google is your friend here. Why we are using a library vs. a wiki: The software for the site is vBulletin and the main reason we are not using a wiki is purely technical in nature. There exists at this time no good solution for blending the two. There are multiple issues including: Sharing of the user permissions - The one hack available does a poor job with it limited support for special characters and spaces. All user names would have to be reviewed and any with special characters or spaces would need to be changed. Group Management - User groups are not preserved across the two products. All user groups would need to be duplicated for the wiki. Ease of Editing - The wiki uses different tags and syntax for text and images format and placement. That in its self is a larger barrier. Users would have to learn a second way of posting. Skin Integration - This is also handled poorly. It may be a little vain of me but I'd want it all to have the same look and feel. Whats in the future: vBulletin 4, due in 3rd qtr 09 is said to have a wiki feature available at an extra cost. Unlike other version of vBulletin 4.0 will not have a public beta period but will released after a 2 week beta by 50 of the largest forum operators. Given that Internet Brands owns JelSoft, the company that writes all the vBulletin code, the collective community is not jumping at moving to 4.0 very quickly. There is quite the community of developers around 3.x versions and without time to work on 4.0 there will be a void between the release and when additional features that this and many other site rely on. As I do vBulletin development on the 3.6+ platform for a day job you be sure I'll be digging into 4.0 in a test environment when it is released.
All your concerns are excellent and well considered Nathan. I was simply (and I mean naively) noting that the race seat swap thread was looking more like a wiki entry as it progressed. Wikis (as in Wikipedia) has one great feature that I appreciate (being an academic) and that is peer review. Wikipedia demands references and foundation for statements. Academics live (and die) by their ability to back up their claims against challenges from others. Essentially this is the model that Wikipedia has used--you can post anything on WP you want, but be prepared to be challenged and have to prove you're right and they're wrong. Otherwise, your assertion gets removed. If someone says you need a 4ohm resistor to fool the computer that there's a seat air bag present, and someone else says 2ohms, then a Wiki will eventually figure out and report that the required resistor value varies depending on certain parameters that can be measured and will provide a way of measuring those parameters and an algorithm for determining the proper value for your application. I like wikis, but if we can't have one, I'm not going to lose sleep over it. thanks, as always, Nathan, for all your hard work here.
Ya'll brought up a valid question. The first time I PM'ed the person but when others brought it up as well I figured I'd share the reasoning in the choices made for the site. I'm always up for suggestions on a better way...so keep those ideas coming please.
DrPhil... that IS a really good idea.... it would be really interesting to see a process where how-to threads "evolve" into wiki's over time... knowing that most threads start out as (and remain) Q&A or "banter"... but a small percentage (hopefully a larger percentage on this forum) become legitimate technical discussions of how-to and best practices... once they get that way, have a mechanism to push the relevant content into a wiki format and collectively go at it... eventually perhaps yielding something worthy of being a library article.... Nathan - I understand the limitations... just dreaming here... but WOULD be cool someday...
Note: I had a long post here detailing my background and experience, but it was dull, dry, and boring, so I'll just post the summary for now Two words: Google Wave. It is going to be the next "killer app" on the Internet. They are using the exact same technologies that I have been using for the past few years to build collaboration apps, but they are light years ahead of my stuff, and they are open source, which I just can't afford to do. It's that whole food and house addiction I've got . I just want a cookie for having the idea a couple of years before their guys, and maybe a spare million or two out of their petty cash drawer I'm scrambling now to find a client or two willing to fund development as early adopters so that I can have something ready to deploy when it goes live at the end of this year.
So I sought out Google Wave and watched the majority of the 1.5 hour video, read the few posts on the Wave forums and it looks promising. I came away with the notion that Google is pushing this as a replacement to the "normal" email model by adding in all kinds of functionality. They touched on some Wiki stuff but I didn't really see how Wave would turn a email thread into a Wiki item that is searchable and available to anyone outside of the Wave users that have been brought into the "conversation". Granted this is a very new product and very early in the public beta stage so I'd imagine once more people outside of the initial dev group get their hands on it we'll see more. Terryg, you want to expound more on this? I can't afford dev funding but I'd be willing to work with you in seeing how we could tie something like Wave into a traditional forum.
The few people I've talked with about Wave all have a completely different response about what they think it will replace. That is one of the reasons I know it is going to be huge The first things I thought of that were in trouble were Sharepoint and source code control systems However, I don't think it will immediately replace any of the current ways we interact with live documents. My guess is that people will begin using it by replacing the underlying data stores on the interfaces they are already using. Blogs will start feeding from waves, then forums and chatrooms, but things like twitter, facebook, and e-mail will have gadgets to act as interchanges so that they can sync with waves. Eventually though, I believe those native interfaces will become a secondary way to view the data, in much the same way that the browser and HTML replaced gopher and BBS's and all the other ways we used to exchange rich information. Right now functionality like authentication, authorization, version control, and persistence has to be reinvented for every single one of the data silos we interface with. And for every interface, there is a dozen different non-compatible approaches. That is the sweet spot for Wave. My guess is that a LOT of people are going to be focusing on building forum faces over Wave. We're going to be focusing more on the corporate applications for the technology, but I would love to work on ANY solutions built around Wave.
I may have found a wiki product to use. Unfortunately with many vBulletin add-on's there is not a try before you buy feature. I have contacted the author to convince him to let me try the product in a protected test environment I use. The feature set is quite interesting and it does not require the use of a different set of tags to create rich content. From the looks of it there is a very good tie in with vBulletin, which is the underlying software this site is built upon.