A TiddlyWiki For The Yamaha Super Ténéré Forum?

[hoak]

This forum has an enormous amount of excellent, valuable reference and how to information, as well as long term guidance, and sound advice; unfortunately it's an equally enormous amount of work to organize, searches will often not turn up a helpful result if the Searcher is uninformed, as the forum grows searches will get slower, and with time more information, excellent posts and entire threads will get buried.

One approach some forums and websites have used is to organize 'best of' and reference information is with a TiddlyWiki, also see the Wikipedia entry for TiddlyWiki, and the Gentle Guide to TiddlyWiki section on the main TiddlyWiki page.

While integrating TiddlyWiki into a forum (there are plugins to make this easier) might be more initial work then just doing maintenance and organization of the forum, once done the forum has a powerful tool for organizing information, from just indexing threads, links, images, sites and posts, to actually containing content, and anyone can add, edit, or post edit articles to the Wiki itself giving it it's own structure.

The range of directions this can take is enormous, from a Single Source Subject Encyclopedia & Reference, to just indexing and linking, to a casual tool just to help people find information faster with it's indexing and faster search capability then what a forum can achieve. As well there are powerful plug-ins, extensions and projects for TiddlyWiki that make it very easy to use with drag and drop, search and paste, and even auto-search and populate.

As anyone can also run TiddlyWiki locally on their desktop; and there are also import and export features -- once implemented on a site or forum many are attracted to what a TiddlyWiki can do and start their own documentation projects on related but highly specific subjects that can then later be imported to the site for everyone, and it can function as a powerful decentralized back-up tool for critical information...

Just a thought...

:lamp:

 

[Checkswrecks]

Good thoughts Hoak, and pretty close to what just began with the new tires/wheels/discs sub-board.


For more info see post #33 in the sticky about breaking the Technical board into sub-boards, here:
http://www.yamahasupertenere.com/index.php?topic=4284.30

 

[hoak]

Yes, this is exactly what inspired me to make this thread; while adding hierarchy adds organization to a forum, too much will have negative impacts as well; fragmenting discussion, adds a lot of scrolling to use and moderate the forum, additional overhead for Moderators & Admins to keep things 'tidy' -- and you still end up with a lot of buried treasure. Eleven years of experience as Moderator here, just say'n things like TiddlyWiki and/or forum indexing plugins (if they exist for the forum software used here) can get forum Members to do some of the heavy lifting, and even automate it to an extent.

 

[Checkswrecks]

First off, thank you Hoak. Never heard about TiddlyWiki till now, but as a long-time user of Evernote, I'm going to look at Tiddly closer for my own use.


I'll get with Venture and AvGeek behind the scenes to see what they think. Meanwhile, does anybody else have any opinions either way about this?

 

[hoak]

Not familiar with your forum software, but many forums like phbb and vBulliten et al. have some indexing, contents or outlining plugins that can do some of these things.

The cool thing about a TiddlyWiki, is forum members can also have a local, full boat, off-line version they can add to, sync, and update, sort of like an Encyclopedia of all things Super Ténéré.

And some people really tear into this sort of thing -- get the obsessive compulsive urge to add/update and organize and can add amazing content, or impressive refinement to organization...

Depending on how it's implemented it can be a constant thing in motion, or have version features, where forum members see alpha updates, but Admins do final official version commits.

 

[Checkswrecks]

We've played around with this and discussed how regular members would fare with it. If starting from scratch, we have some power users who would really like it and we really do still have people with absolute minimal skills who still access the site on dial-up. Most members stop into the site briefly (the regulars get on several times a day) and our guess is that the members who would appreciate TW and learn to use it would be out-numbered by those who "don't get" something different or new.


We have structural problems with TW too. We are already broken into sub-forums and continually move threads, because so many people just blast their posts into the top board, since it is what opens on default. It's a basic structure of YST, we have accumulated a LOT of threads over the last 4 years, and the forum software requires moving threads individually, so to consolidate for a Tiddliwiki app there are too many threads to move what we already have. We even thought about a compromise work-around, setting up a Tiddliwiki for each major board. Unfortunately, then moving a thread to a different board means that people with Tiddliwiki would "lose" an accumulating number of threads over time.


There is also at least one way in which people get into the forum from mobile devices that we can't find comments regarding successful use, so we think that those folks may be cut off by Tiddlywiki. There very well may be an answer to this one, but we haven't found it.


We really do appreciate the suggestion and trying to make the place run better. Hope you can see that we really have looked into this and why for now at least, we've decided to continue with the old fashioned format that everybody knows.

 

[sjh]

Hiya,

Found this thread by searching for "Wiki",

While i'm waiting on my new bike I'm killing time by researching the various bolt-on bits I'm going to miss from my v-strom.

When I did this for my v-strom the wiki's out there - e.g v-strom.wikispaces.com & stromtrooper.wikispaces.com/ - were a real help. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent Tenere wiki out there.

It wouldn't be much work to collect things into a wiki as I go, so rather than setting out to be a wiki'd version of info postedhere it'd be lists of parts e.g. panniers and compatibility info/prices/manufacturer/shop links etc

Any objection/interest in that?

 

[Checkswrecks]

pm AvGeek and I so we can talk offline.