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:
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: