Wiki Bitches

The wiki does not appear to be thriving. I do not wish to denigrate the contributors or Jeff’s work but it’s just another forum. It’s not organized; if it grows then tapping into its information will become almost as difficult as the other fora; but it’s not growing - it has only 21 threads so far many of which have 3 or less posts.


The sad fact is, there’s a huge amount of great information already in the boating forum; stuff such as Eric Sponberg's posts in http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/boat-design/center-flotation-calculation-implications-30857.html


The problem is finding what you need; the search tool doesn’t help much. It would be great if useful posts such as Eric’s could be accessed quickly through some kind of alphabetically-organized subject index. I believe that’s what the wiki should become.


My first suggestion is to organize the wiki alphabetically, just the titles. Listing wiki threads by date with the name of the originator seems pointless in a wiki. It would help if we had some discipline over subject headings to facilitate searching by title, with the most important word first; perhaps a guideline could be provided.

My second suggestion is to make it easy for members to add a wiki link to a helpful post found in another forum; maybe a new forum tool “add to wiki”.

Just to illustrate how that might work, let’s say you are reading a post and think it would make a good wiki article. So you click on “add to wiki” - either it’s already done or you get a listing of wiki topics with an option to add another. Click one of those and go on with your life. The opening post in the selected wiki thread now has a link to that post, or a new thread is created. Keeping the links in the first post of the thread gets them all into one place, but other posts can be added to expand on the subject as needed.

Let’s imagine you are in the wiki forum. Everything is listed alphabetically with crisp descriptive titles like “hull design”, “hull repair”, “hull speed” etc. It would be nice if you select a thread and got a list of the post titles, also alphanumeric, but at least the first post is all links to related posts.

 

You mean, something like This?

Wikis really need designers to develop sections and portal pages. Or at the very least they need well written introduction pages that details the reason for the wiki to exist, and the intended method of use for it.

One of the things the designer needs to do is begin creating pages for subjects that need to be filled in, and link those subject pages to other related pages. (Go look at any major Wikipedia page. At the bottom most have boxes that you can show/hide that link to other directly related content.)

Wikis tend to fail and flounder without someone who knows enough about the subject to build the frame work. Without the framework you get a random pile of pages that isn't much more useful than a common forum.

Writing wikis should be treated as writing a book. Before you write you need to think about what is going into it, and what the goals are. Being able to directly add random forum posts is Not a good thing. A method of adding a 'tab' at the top of the page, next to the 'talk' tab, and be able to link to "Related Forum Threads" would be far better than an instant "copy post to page" button.



Ideally a wiki such as this would have a group of overseers who are experienced professionals, and each page would get a 'stamp' from at least two of them. The stamp then goes away if anyone edits the page, or the stamp is at least replaced with a flagged stamp to say the page has been edited since the last stamping, and offer a quick link back to the last stamped version of the page. This keeps it from becoming just yet another Wikipedia where any idiot can write whatever they want, and it gets accepted as fact if they're smart enough to write in a believable fashion.

 

Ah! It was so simple.

All I had to do to get there from the forum's main page http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/
was go to http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/wiki/
and from there to http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/wiki/main-page-16048.html
where finally I get a link to http://boatdesign.net/wiki/Main_Page
which contains the link that you provided to http://www.boatdesign.net/wiki/Special:Allpages

- I must be a bit slow today.

Now I can take a look at the real wiki as opposed to the false trails that I seem to have been following before I comment any further. It will have to wait as I am exhausted and confused; I have Gawd only knows how many instances of Internet Explorer open in order to unravel all of this and I doubt I will ever find it again on my own so I will add the link to my favorites for when I have gathered enough strength. No doubt there is a really sound reason why that page cannot be accessed via a direct link in the forum's main page for the benefit of the intellectually underprivileged such as myself. After all, it's the dummies that really need it the most!

 

How to Add an Article to Wiki

For my own purposes and for others who - like me - need the steps for creating a new article spelled out in really short, simple words:

1) search for your proposed title in any Wiki page, such as http://www.boatdesign.net/wiki/Special:Allpages

2) when the software says it cannot find the article, click on create this page to open an editing form for a new article, complete it then scroll down and click on Save Page

3) note that Wiki software requires any links to be in square brackets []

4) There are some other clues in the Main Page thread.

5) to get a discussion thread going just click the Discussion tab

 

Wiki Discussion threads should stay open

Although I can still change an old wiki article its Discussion thread closes after a while, which prevents me from informing Wiki users the change I have made.

Wiki threads should never grow old!