Starting new topics vs writing articles
democrates | Actually I find the same | Tue, 2008-02-26 10:20
Actually I find the same thing, and I bet it's pretty common. That always signals to me that there is an oppertunity for a better way lurking somewhere.
Could articles be integrated into the discussion? Wikipedia has a 'discuss this article' facility, but it's on a seperate tab.
Maybe what could work better is having a draft article always at the top and the discussion below? As points are made, any taken on board by the editor can be integrated into the article while the attention and energy are focussed.
Some draft articles will inevitably stagnate, but if it gets to a satisfactory maturity it can then be upgraded for syndication.
libervisco | Actually, there are comments | Tue, 2008-02-26 16:59
Actually, there are comments below articles just like there are replies to an original topic. Technically there's not much difference and capabilities are the same. It's the form or style of writing that makes a difference between an article and a forum topic. Articles are more structured for a coherent flow, having some sort of an introduction, the body and the conclusion, depending on the exact form used.
So articles are then put in a special section of the site, currently called essays and published most visibly on homepage with a teaser.
About the draft article idea.. that wouldn't require practically any modifications to existing modules, just a special "drafts" category for works in progress.. We could have a multiple of editors given right to make modifications. I guess it'd be like a limited wiki with comments with an advantage of being integrated right here instead of on a separate installation.
It's a cool idea actually.. with some fine tuning it may be a nice way to re-energize our cooperative article writing we used to do on the wiki for a while long ago..
democrates | That's it, I can see the | Wed, 2008-02-27 09:04
That's it, I can see the drafts section becoming like a sort of community to-do. Would priority levels and target dates be a plus or a minus I wonder?
The wiki has a weakness for me, maybe I'm a control freak and not as open as I should be, but the fact that anyone can edit the current article means the editor has to roll back any changes that don't fit for whatever reason. That level of privilege may artificially raise expectations beyond what they should be, and set contributors up for feeling snubbed when their changes are changed back.
Take the FAQ discussion thread as an example. If that were done in the wiki, I wouldn't have the audacity to interfere with your original work by changing its meaning. I felt comfortable making suggestions in a discussion though, finding it more acceptable to offer than to try to impose.
Now I'm starting to think that I have too much of a "don't touch my stuff" approach that isn't robust enough for the cut and thrust of collaboration. Maybe my ego plays a bigger role than I thought in framing co-operation as a competition of ideas, I'll have to think more about this issue, I sense yet another oppertunity for personal development 
libervisco |
democrates wrote:
That's | Wed, 2008-02-27 16:30
That's it, I can see the drafts section becoming like a sort of community to-do. Would priority levels and target dates be a plus or a minus I wonder?
Depends on how much people would be collaborating on it and how active would we be about it. I suppose we can try it either way and see how it goes.
Now I'm starting to think that I have too much of a "don't touch my stuff" approach that isn't robust enough for the cut and thrust of collaboration. Maybe my ego plays a bigger role than I thought in framing co-operation as a competition of ideas, I'll have to think more about this issue, I sense yet another oppertunity for personal development
Actually I think this is a breath of fresh air. Wikis aren't exactly a new and revolutionary thing anymore so we don't have to act as if cooperative writing must equal the use of wikis, just because "everyone does it". Really, it may be akin to taking a step out of that box to see when something else would actually work better.
That said you make good points about disadvantages of wikis. Egos or not (if it were egos than in a non-wiki system like this it would be everyone's egos which would be preserved ), I think this approach is actually closer to natural collaboration. If we were to come together offline in a room and set out a goal to write an article we would probably have a facilitator writing things on the board and people expressing their ideas and suggestions. The board is the article and what they are saying are posts commenting on how could the article further be developed.
A real world parallel to wikis is something that I think is done less often.. there is no facilitator, just a bunch of people each carrying their own "brick" and putting it into that frankensten looking wall until everyone suddenly decides it needs some polish. 
It reminds me of what we did on the Open Translation Tools 2007 conference, writing topics we wanted to talk about on post its and then sticking them on the board and then, like a swarm of bees, reorganizing them into categories.
So.. I guess different ways of collaborating work in different situations. Neither should be considered as intrinsically better than the others.
So for our collaborative article writing, cooperating by debating, competing with ideas, might be the way it would work best for us.
I thought it may be worth revisiting this topic, prior to pending site revisions. I'd start with my example, and if it happens to me chances are many other potential writers for Libervis.com could be experiencing the same issue.
When I get a new idea for a topic it can often be elaborate enough to write an article about, but what I most often do instead is just post a forum topic, which does actually end up often quite lengthy. The difference, however, is in that a forum topic doesn't require much in terms of form so it can be written directly from the mind, quite free flowing.. and this lack of restriction is what attracts me to starting topics instead of articles in the first place. Sometimes it means an initial topic post seems like a "rant" though.
While this results, certainly, in new content on Libervis.com, which is a good thing (and we even have new topics pop up quite visibly on the homepage), articles are the ones which we can promote most directly and hence get more visitors and potential community members from - they are the ones we can actually submit through other sites. I suppose we can do the same for forum topics, but the form makes it a bit more difficult to get them around.
So.. how to reconcile this issue?
We could, I suppose, generate new articles based on the material provided in the topic, but once everything has already been expressed there's little fuel left that would motivate writing an article. It's like talking on IRC and expressing all ideas there about something you would otherwise write an article about and then finding yourself unmotivated to express it again in an article form.
I guess it could be called laziness.. On the other hand, writing when not sufficiently motivated doesn't seem to be a very good way to create a really engaging writing.
In some sense, I'm actually finding this topic dubious.
I guess it could be ended by just saying "well, go that extra mile and instead of writing a topic, write an article".. but still, it's out.. let's see what others think of the issue. Who knows what kind of creative ideas might emerge to solve this little predicament. 
Cheers
Life's not read-only. So.. I keep writing.