Merge Between Wiki And Forum

I have been thinking about this for a while.

Everybody builds a wiki for fun, and I suppose some people have tried to make it better, but what they build is still... a wiki.

I've come to realize that there are two properties of wiki that I like: The "document" way in which the core of the information is presented, and the "live" nature of the information. This is something that I would like to keep. However, I feel that it's very difficult to track the activity on a wiki (unless you're a RecentChangesJunkie).

Another way of describing this is that when writing something on a wiki, you do so for the purpose of publishing information from others, you don't do it in order to receive information from others. That's what a forum is for. The problem with a forum is that after all that good information has come up in the course of a discussion, it disappears in the history of millions of pointless threads (most of which probably end up in a flame war :-) ).

I have this idea to build a combination of a wiki and a discussion forum with the following properties:

Complete history being saved, probably in a format similar to CVS so that it can be accessed if need be.
Ability to log in and thus prove that you wrote a certain piece of text. Completely optional of course. See also http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?AuthorshipCredit.
Link a discussion thread to each wiki-style document. The thread will work just like any other forum. You can view it as a discussion-style annotation for the page. The wiki page will therefore be more focused on the relevant text itself.
Ability to subscribe to pages (and thus threads) in order to be able to be notified whenever some page you are interested in has changed.

Before I actually sit down and do this, I would like to get some feedback from the regulars on this wiki. I'm sure I'm not the only one with the same ideas. Probably someone else already did the same thing and have some experiences to share.

-- EliasMartenson?

I have thought about this too. But I do not think, that associated Threads are necessary. But I miss some notification mechanism, that e.g. sends me an email, when a page I'm interested in changes. I think it could be done with a link on every page, that allows to (un)subscribe that page. -- GunnarZarncke

See WhyClublet for a good example of a wiki with completely accessible (but not editable, of course) history. Notice also that paging back skips consecutive edits by the same editor, so you only see changes by different editors.

As I see it, the history is mostly necessary to protect against WikiWiper? type of people, and perhaps also as an interesting look back as to how the page has evolved. What I'm curious about is in what way the wiki history is being used, when it is available.

I'm also thinking about some feature similar to the CVS annotation, where each line is prefixed with the version number and who last edited this line.

-- EliasMartenson?

TyberiusPrime?: Well, I've been experimenting with this quite a bit for the OzoneAsylum. We had a Wiki for the FAQ, but the main community is still centered around the board... So I started developing a hybrid, the differences between the wiki and the board are still very livid, but you can easily link from one to the other and I've also started to implement 'linkwords' (a bit like WikiWords) for every page, ie. even in people's posts. Beta is at http://grail.coonabibba.de, if anyone wants to give it a try.

See BloggedWiki WikiBlog