Re: Community Commons and forums

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Dan Marshall wrote:

> 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.

	I'd like to get a consensus that this is something that 1) people 
want this and 2) it will remain maintained before I add it to the 
homepage.  I'd like to get peoples feedback on this as I think the page 
has some potential.
 
> 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.

	As was pointed out on the wiki, one problem would be that the 
forum would require the user to signup for an additional account (if we 
used the LQ forum).  The alternative would be to custom program a forum to 
authenticate against the LQ Wiki database, but we definitely don't have 
the resources or time for that.  For "official" communications, this 
mailing list is going to be the approved channel, but for general 
community building discussions and banter, I don't have a problem with the 
page you have setup.

> 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.

	I would *really* prefer that Linux questions not be answered in 
that forum.  It would be a bit counter productive IMHO and a big 
duplication of effort.

> 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!

	Agreed.

--jeremy