It’s My Life, Don’t You Forget
For those of you old enough, you might be humming a tune in your head right now, one of the more pop-flavored releases by the 80’s band “Talk Talk”. And now my abrupt segue into Talking.
We like to talk. Online communities thrive when people of similar interests find ways to talk to one another effectively. Discussion forums are a natural product of that desire. This is great in situations where conversations are the best way to communicate the information we desire.
But at times there’s a need for greater structure, something more akin to a reference, but still one that grows from the vast knowledge of people with similar interests and varying levels of skill. Hence, the wiki model. Wikipedia is so successful (in terms of contribution anyway) because people who are deeply interested in a topic are given a sense of ownership of the content, and strive to make it the best it can be. But wikis do a poor job with the former type of communicating, the conversational variety. And as a glance at any of the Wikipedia discussion pages shows, there is a close tie to the quality of the content with the participation in the discussions. But blech, it’s just another article, editable by anyone, cleverly disguised as a discussion with headings, indenting, and a table of contents. Why don’t wikis let us talk with the sophistication of a discussion forum? Thanks to ExpressionEngine’s extensible nature, the wiki and forum modules can talk, and now, so can you.
We used to run traditional “Talk” pages, with a wiki namespace, and clever though it may be, it just never caught on. I bet if Wikipedia had a discussion forum that was as popular as their wiki, their discussion pages never would have caught on either, but without options, people make do. I had previously been a nay-sayer of the idea of using a discussion forum for talk pages, primarily from looking at some of Wikipedia’s discussion pages; it seemed like something that could get rather unwieldy and disjointed in a single forum thread.
However, a conversation this weekend with Benoît Marchal made me realize that that is largely due to the specific culture and software being used at Wikipedia, not a property of wikis in general. His wiki for instance is very focused, a repository of information about photography. Ours is no less focused, articles dealing with specific things you can do with ExpressionEngine. Other wikis in the wild are much more similar to these two examples than they are Wikipedia. A single forum thread is not only all that is required, but it may actually be better than the unfocused discussions that a “Talk” page encourages, keeping people on point, and the record clear about who said what and when, without having to remember any cryptic syntax to date and sign your name.
So I wrote and added to our site a Wiki Forum Talk extension that bridges the two modules. The implementation requires a minor theme modification to both the wiki and the forum, but it’s all very straightforward. If a wiki article already has a forum thread, the discussion link goes there. If it doesn’t, it goes to a new topic form with the topic pre-filled with the article’s name. The relationships are established via the database, and while sound, there are certain forum operations that are inappropriate in this context, such as merging threads. As such, moderators of our Wiki Discussion forums are not allowed to perform those actions, so as to not accidentally disrupt the relationships.
Deleting is fine, of course; if a thread is deleted, the wiki article will allow you to create a new one. If an article is deleted, the forum thread relationship is gone, but the thread remains, so that discussion can continue, perhaps as to why the article was deleted, or what it should become in its next iteration. You are encouraged to take the same approach, but it’s really up to you.
And yes, it works with multiple wikis and multiple forum boards. CodeIgniter users are getting the same love for their wiki as ExpressionEngine users are for theirs. Go ahead, what are you waiting for? Download it and try it out!
