Community Commons and forums

I've created two pages on the wiki:

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/LinuxQuestions.org_Wiki:Community_Commons

and

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/LinuxQuestions.org_Wiki:Forums

These pages are currently prototypes and will need a bit of work still 
before they are ready for prime time.

The Community Commons page, like I said in its intro, is intended to 
give a glimpse behind the scenes and foster a feeling of community 
between the contributors to this wiki. I'd like for it to be linked to 
from the main page, but left unlocked for a week or two to see if 
anybody else has any changes they want to make. I'm aware that some of 
the suggestions I made there will take a bit of work to implement, but I 
think it'll be worth the effort. Keep in mind that my suggestions are 
just that, and that it's perfectly alright if they're "under 
construction" for a good long while.

The Forums page is basically ready to go. All that needs to be done is 
for the intro section to be locked down, the discuss page link removed 
(seems a bit redundant some how), and maybe a "start new topic" script 
added. The main question in my mind is if we shouldn't have an actual 
forum instead of a thread-mode wiki. How much more system resources 
(including admin time!) would a forum entail? My impression from the 
wikipedia is that the sole reason that the Village Pump and the various 
mods' talk pages are as orderly as they are is because they have a high 
turnover rate in threads. Inactive threads are deleted, and some threads 
are moved to different pages. Thread-mode wikis are only forum-like as 
long as the users stick by the conventions. As soon as noobs, who don't 
know the conventions, or griefers, who don't care about the conventions, 
hit the stage, things go haywire. People post in the middle of other 
posts, edit or delete other people's posts, forget to sign. Signatures 
can be forged trivially (although this can be checked from the page 
histories - but who would?) In an ordinary forum, all this is handled 
automatically. If additional moderation is needed, tools exist to help.

Ideally, we could have a regular forum adapted to wiki-based needs. This 
would include limited wiki-markup support in posts (we wouldn't need 
sectioning markup for one) and linking to articles in the wiki, which 
would bring up the edit page if the article doesn't exist yet. Also, it 
would be nice to have the ability to archive certain threads as wikis. 
Developing this would be a lot of work, but would be a boon to wikis 
everywhere. But I'm just brainstorming here. Basically I think we could 
have a thread-mode wiki until a regular forum is ready, then move from 
the regular forum to the wikified forum when that's ready. But I'm not 
the one doing the work :-p

One thing that I've had brought to my attention is that linux questions 
will be asked in this forum, even though the LinuxQuestions.org forums 
are a better place for that. We can put up all the signs we want, but 
they are still going to be asked. I think we ought to have the 
convention that the askers will be reminded to ask those questions at 
the LQ forums, and then do our best to answer the question anyway, with 
links to wiki articles as needed.

Also, the forums are not intended to replace this mailing list as a 
place to discuss policy. I'm sure policy will be discussed, but it won't 
be offical until it hits this list!