Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

Below is a copy of an email I sent to Wordpress Pro mailing list addressing the dynamic between information stored in a wiki and knowledge spurred on by conversations in a forum. In it I make recommendations as to why and how to link the two assuming that the community won’t shift to a pure wiki platform.

> > On the Wordpress professional developer’s forum, Skaneateles Design said:
> > Working with and customizing WordPress MU requires quite a bit of
> > integrative skill, since the development docs are limited for the
> > program (often, the code itself is the documentation!), and the system is not trivial.
> >
> I wrote:
> Please excuse the off-topic, but just to let everyone know, there is an
> (underloved) section on Codex wiki for wpmu, at
> http://codex.wordpress.org/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&target=Category:WPMU&hideminor=0&days=180&limit=50
>
> And… until someone revamps the forums to make the wiki prominent, the
> documentation will likely remain just as fragmented and limited.

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 11:33 PM, kingler wrote:

Are you suggesting a better WPMU codex page with INDEX? Maybe it is time to start a new maillist for WPMU users and developers as well?

Hi Liang,

The http://codex.wordpress.org/Category:WPMU page is a reasonable start page. What is lacking is the wiki’s prominence in the mu forums. As the majority of people only use the forums the bulk of the most recent information is in the forums, and the pages on the wiki are not very useful.

Although a wiki provides the means to refine and os to accomplish terseness and high relevancy, blogs and in particular, forums, generate sprawl and disconnectedness. (See http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/28/wikis-compared-to-email-discussion-groups-and-blogs/ and maybe http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/06/blogs-are-like-plastics-wikis-are-like-leaves/ )

Now, forums have their place for conversation but they are not the means for generating reference material. (People do summarise in forums, but these summaries also get swept away in the flow of conversation). We need both, conversation and reference, and we need the means to harness the people’s efforts appropriately.

Given that most content is already in the forums, we need to find ways to link the forums to the wiki, and indeed, the wiki to the forums.

Our audience has barely embraced the Codex wiki so there’s little mu-specific information useful to them (although the single user wordpress information is pretty reasonable). To make Codex appealing to mu-users and to keep it front of mind, I think we need to automate the linkage between forum and wiki. This will help the community navigate from knowledge socialised in a particular conversation, to information definitively documented in the wiki, and back again, so viewing the wiki shows conversations discussing the concepts of the wiki.

If this linkage can be made convenient and appealing enough for users to traverse, they will iteratively travel the conversation (forum)-documentation (wiki) pathway, pulling the concepts they have just internalised from the new conversations into the reference documentation. Then, the user editing the shared reference has the opportunity to consolidate their new insight or understanding into the logic shared with everyone else. The reference information, being the product of the many, is comprehensive (rather than the conversation, which will typically address only a few points).

Comparing an idea or notion proposed in conversation to the comprehensive helps the editor think through the idea inside constraining context of the knowledge already known. When a user edits the reference she align herselves with the masses, and begins to engage with all the factors needed to pull the masses toward her idea.

In a forum talking in one thread provides little or no exposure to users not following that thread. A mailing list has the same issue. The lack of exposure means good seed ideas can miss growing up, and that bad ideas get pursued for too long because their authors miss a constraint that is known somewhere. A wiki, with a community properly engaged on it, will factor seeds of ideas into pages where the idea can grow, be pruned and cared for. Ideas placed on forums and mailing lists can too easily get lost.

While some communities get away with hosting conversation on the wiki itself (and there are advantages to doing so - my favourite being that the conversation can be pruned of overly verbose, poorly written or just plain wrong information), the simple fact today is that many communities do have that separate forum that the community likes, so the question is not how to eliminate the forum but how to create the relationship between the wiki and the forum.

At mu forums, what I’d like to see is this:

1. On the front page it shows the list of mu-recent-changes as well as the category entry point. This continuously informs people what reference information is being built.
2. At the bottom of every forum post show content from wiki pages. This linkage could be implied from the tags on the post in view, or via a tag generation method.

On Codex, I’d like to see:

1. a method whereby users can expand a twisty or something and get all relevant conversation items
2. the menu bar shows the mu entry points: mu-recent-changes as well as the category entry point

This method could work for both multi- and single- user versions of wordpress. Indeed, I believe for many communities today it would improve the knowledge-information (SECI) flow.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under wordpress, wpmu, Wiki, Collaboration, Web 2.0, Organizational Alignment, Knowledge Management, Open Source, Knowledge Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.