Making forum information more accessible?

[SeaSpark]

Boatdesign.net contains a huge amount of information for designers and people interested in boating in general.

Due to forum nature not all this information is easily accessible. Valuable information is contained in threads with inappropriate titles. Many thread exist on the same subject containing many inappropriate replies and some valuable answers scattered over those threads.

How can we make all the valuable data more accessible?

One way to go could be creating a wiki containing subjects like stability, surface drives, strip planking, kite propulsion, submarines etc. Forum members are allowed to add subjects and link threads or specific posts from the forum to the subjects in the wiki. In this way all the forum members can help bringing more structure to the information, a huge task with thousands of threads.

Another way is using a "tag" system, this allows you to tag threads and posts and link them to a subject. Linuxquestions.org has been using this system for some time but somehow it does not seem to work there. A link to their explanation about the tagging system:


http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...st#faq_tagging


More suggestions very welcome, please help to untie the knot!

[SeaSpark]

It has been a while since i posted this thread and so far there are no replies.

Understanding that my language can be a bit odd sometimes, i'm dutch, and that what what i was trying to explain and ask could have been a bit foggy i am still wondering why nobody has an opinon on this subject or why anyone opinianated did not reply.

If my first post needs clarifying, please do not hesitate!

[Figgy]

No, it was clear enough on your first post, and I agree. It just seems like an awful lot of work(not that I'm lazy) to try to bring everyone to contribute. I would help as muck as I can tho'. would it be like a sub-fourm?
As per opinianated people not posting, this section of the fourm doesnt seem to get the traffic other sections get.
-Figgy

[westlawn5554X]

Suggestion such as this should have a poll so people can vote without posting comment and you get yoyur support

Student

[hansp77]

Jeroen,
I have been thinking about this a lot lately,
but my ideas have been a little less advanced than yours.

I was thinking of simply starting a new thread that was sort of like a index thread.

People could post a topic name like "wooden boat restoration"
and then underneath a list of thread links with descriptions of each.
Adding info and links to this would be the problem, as it would be a big ask for one person to remember or locate every valuable thread. So then other people might post another "wooden boat restoration" thread- this would get messy and confusing.
Same problem.

Thus, I think your idea of a Wiki would be the best.
(for those that might need a little explanation of exactly what this entails- like me- here is a link)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

I guess that the wiki has the advantage that it can be mostly designed and maintained by members, rather than creating a larger workload for admin.
But I am not too sure how these things work.

If this all got developed and worked properly, then I would think it would considerably reduce the amount of posting and activity here.
Certainly it would nearly completely cut down on the repetitive newbie threads.

I think it is a great idea.

I guess this will largely be up to Jeff.

Jeff- are you happy with things the way they are now?
what are your thoughts on developing a system to make the considerable amount of info here more accessible?

Hans.

[SeaSpark]

Thanks for your replies,

Don't think creating a wiki would considerably reduce the amount of posting here, it would only be more easy to point the newbie's in the right direction of the information they are looking for. Posting questions in the wiki would not be possible, never found a question in wikipedia, only answers. The wiki and forum could have a positive feedback on each other, perhaps this would increase traffic.

About the amount of work involved, i agree it is a huge task but the wiki can grow slowly just like the original wikipedia.org and look where they got! A recent article in a national Dutch newspaper stated they found more incorrect information in the Encyclopedia Britannica than on wikipedia. Don't now how biased this investigation was though. If some forum members collect the links to their favorite topics it would be a good start.

Technically, creating a wiki is not that difficult, the software is for free. The boatdesign wiki could also be a part of wikipedia.org though i feel more for a wiki where only registered boatdesign.net members are able to contibute. Not to sure about my last statement, wikipedia.org works fine without any registration procedure.

Formally i don't think we need Jeff's approval for starting a wiki but i would never do anything like this without his approval.

Jeff, i'm very curious about your comments and suggestions!

[Frosty]

I agree that it does seem to be such a waste of information, but what I am afraid of is things getting too complicated and making navigation of the site difficult. I am including myself in this.

All said though would it not help if the forums search engine was a bit more .--- well searching. i dont get much luck from it.

[hansp77]

I think the addition of the Wiki would probably change very little if you decided not to use the Wiki- threads and posts would just go on.
The Wiki would probably just be there if you wanted to use it.

The search capacity here does seem to be a little random to say the least!

Thing is, it might be a lot easier to construct a Wiki, than to programme a better search engine.
But then, I really don't know what is involved in programming a search engine.

[hansp77]

A note for searching,
and it is a roundabout way,
but as I said somewhere else,
I have had better luck searching from google than from here.

Just go to advanced search, then in the Domain field, ask it to only return results from boatdesign.net

go nuts.
100 results per page (if you want)
exact phrases, etc..
and a decent little example of each result!

[Jeff]

Showing results as posts instead of threads tends to work a bit better for me (on the bottom of the search page.) I agree - I wish we could make the built-in search function more google-like. In the meantime a plugin has been added to provide a daily feed so the new threads get indexed faster.

I suppose there are also simple things that could be done to improve the findability of information later on -- editing thread titles to make them more descriptive, and categorizing all the old threads.

Jeff, i'm very curious about your comments and suggestions!

Very sorry for the very slow response. This is definitely one of the most interesting suggestions to date.
I've been looking at a two different vb-wiki integration mods, one of which was posted on 8/7 and under development. (For 4 years now there's also been talk of a vb-created cms add-on that was partially coded that could fill the role nicely, but it appears this was shelved at some point and not under active development any longer.)

This seems like a very good idea. Is http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki the best rater than a fork?

[SeaSpark]

If we want to further develop the Wiki idea using MediaWiki software seems the right choice. There are alternatives(some good) and forks but i hope the popularity of wikipedia will ensure future development and continuing support for MediaWiki.

[Jeff]

A long time coming, I know, but finally the MediaWiki software has been installed with a username database shared with the forums:
http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/sho...188#post126188