Forki
Posted at September 1, 2005 12:21 PM - Category: Ideas
I haven't used this Ideas category yet, so I figured I should get something in here to fill that gap.
Two particular website formats I really like are forums and wikis. Both are intended serve their own unique purpose. Forums are for discussion and debate, by a which a community almost always forms. Wikis are for presenting information and exploration of that information. I've spent quite some time just clicking around linked articles on Wikipedia going from Mozart to Portland cement.
However, as I'm sure anyone who has used a search engine more than twice knows, forums also serve as a great information resource, as well. In almost all discussion topics, information is exchanged and absorbed by everyone that reason. Unfortunately, there is often a lot of filtering that must be done to skip over useless posts and to determine which information is correct. On topics with several pages, this becomes a rather daunting task.
So, I propose this: Forums + Wiki = Forki
I don't have all the answers and a perfect idea of how this would work (this is the Ideas category, not Solutions), but here are some general thoughts:
- We'd be combining the linking pages setup of a Wiki with the discussion topic nature of a forum. Posts would be linked together by topic and by linked keywords.
- A topic would include a header section that contains all the useful information for a topic. The decision of what is useful is determined by the readers. There can be a button next to each post or paragraph that can be used to elect information to be included in the header section.
- A minimum number of votes would be needed to elect information, to avoid spammers and stupid people.
- Information can be voted off the header section after a certain number of negative votes.
- There can also be a threshold for making information "debated". So, if there are 20 votes for the usefulness of a particular piece of information and 15 against, it would get a debated status so that other readers know the reliability of information.
It's sort of a wiki with comments, but the information comes from those comments, not direct edits. The header doesn't necessarily have to be above the first post, it could easily be a sidebar next to the discussion comments. You could also work up a system where posters who have more useful information get weighted upwards when they post information that is voted up.
It's a skeleton of an idea, really, but I think it would be cool to see someone implement something like this.
