Plus, it would make a great tool for anybody who likes the idea of either a forum or wiki. If it was free, that would be even better.
Current solutions require some fine tuning of the systems to use a single log in, and are available to those who can find them. An example that I might start out with is the media wiki extension for PHPBB forums. This is not what I want.
I want a true combination of forum and wiki features.
1) Wiki Posts on Forums:
Having a post where it is a publicly editable post would be great for discussion and submission threads, where making sure the first post is up-to-date is very important.
Perhaps it isn't a realistic goal, but having a post that shows a wiki page is definitely possible. In that way, editing the post is editing the page, or at least gives the links to editing the page.
2) Templates on Forums:
It would be great to have the normal uses of templates on wikis for creating posts and moderating forums. Be easy to add an infobox to your posts, or maybe combine the wiki post and template idea to easily add the infobox from a wiki page.
3) Special & Category Pages about Threads:
Yes there is moderating, but there is also organizing discussions. For instance on Project Top Secret, the main form of communication for the design team is a forum board. If we could look at a special page, or category page and see all the open tasks, it would be really useful. We have a thread specifically for that, but the thread isn't always up-to-date. However, categories and special pages would be easier to keep up-to-date, because the special and category inclusions could be edited at the same time as the thread is locked.
Wiki Posts are similar, but not quite the same. While that example could be a wiki post, it would also be great for groups of threads that are similar. In a guild, you might have your own sub-forum, but how do you find all threads made by/for the guild? If you could go to a category page, it would be easy. A category page for category pages would be easy to make, and keep organized.
The implications get more interesting when we start talking sub-forums. What if the sub-forums worked like category pages, only organized like a forum page? We'd have a page of threads that were put in the sub-forum due to relevance, that could be in other sub-forums, organized by the last time it was updated posted in. Instead of multiple threads for each sub-forum, one thread could be in all relevant sub-forums.
4) Sub-Forum of Wiki Pages and Categories:
It would be nice to have pages organized by either the wiki standard, alphabetized, or forum standard, reverse chronological order by last change. Periodicals, features, announcements and more could all benefit from this kind of organization.
5) Permission Settings:
As stated with the wiki post idea, having publicly editable posts could be useful, but so could a permission setting for a wiki page that only the creator, mods and admins can edit.
6) Unified Tag Code:
One of the barriers to contributing is knowing how to format your contributions, but if both phpBB code and wiki mark-up works, the barrier would be dramatically lower.
Another possibility is to combine the code and choose the best code for each use. For instance, making text bold with [b][/b] tags makes more sense to me than 3 ' before and after the bold text. However, I would prefer keeping all the codes that aren't going to be used in normal text and posts. A colon (:) indenting text really wouldn't make much sense unless they have to be at the start of a new line to count as code.
There are probably more good ideas for combining a forum and wiki, and some of these are parts of others, but these are what come to my mind. Unfortunately I don't have the time or skill needed to make what I envision. Maybe somebody else will.
Have fun, spread the word and tell me what you think,
Igen Oukan
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