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On the Changing Role of Online Forums?
RighteousRaven asks: "I am doing a study on online forums and their place in a changing Internet environment. For the purpose of this study, I am considering that a forum has two roles: a social hub for people with some commonality, and a repository of information related to that commonality. Previously, forums were the best sources of information on the internet, from motorcycle maintenance to videogame modding, you could learn a lot from a forum. However, with Wikis dominating the internet as dense and highly-searchable information repositories, forums are becoming purely social with no utility beyond personal expression or companionship. Can forums exist on a purely social level? What shortcomings endanger the forum's future, and what characteristics have allowed it to survive so far? Why do we need forums in the first place?"
The "purely social" aspect you're referring to is known as "collaboration" and "discussion". It's how the information that ends up in a wiki is developed. Without forums, wikis wouldn't exist. And without wikis, forums slowly lose their potency under a mountain of repeated questions and discussions.
:)
It's a symbiotic relationship, not an either/or.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Another difference between forums and wikis is that in forums it always remains clear who contributed what, and who has a certain expertise on a certain area. This gives a larger sense of community. As it's rather difficult to browse the history of a wiki, you'll hardly ever find out any personal approach/speciality for a certain wiki-user. Furthermore, chit-chatting in a wiki is difficult as well, and it's too easy for someone to pull a prank on someone else. I have a bit of a bias to forums on this point, though (as moderator in a reasonably large DSL forum).
I'd say, let wikis and forums live side by side, happily ever after.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
There's always going to be a place for forums and wikis, even if the introduction of the latter makes aspects of the former somewhat redundant.
Forums are important because it provides a way of gleaning multiple opinions from distinct individuals, in direct response to a particular issue. Wikis are good at giving a group consensus opinion, but they're a poor way of showing someone all sides of an issue. The false "NPOV" perspective that an author has to take when writing a wiki is the same problem faced when you're reading a paper written by a committee; it's entirely possible that fallacious or spurious arguments get given improper weight because of efforts to appear 'neutral,' or that good but unpopular viewpoints are left out because of groupthink and self-censorship.
These problems may still happen in forums, but it's a lot easier when people can respond individually and don't have edit rights on each others work to give dissenting opinions. It's also easier to ask a particular question and get a particular answer; wikis are great for developing generalized reference, but they're a poor way to answer questions in a back-and-forth format. I've always felt that forums (aka Wikipedia's discussion pages) done through Wikis feel like a hack. With a forum, you can ask one question and get a dozen answers from a dozen distinct individuals; with a wiki you may not have an opportunity to ask a particular question, and instead you really have "one answer" (the entire document) which might or might not answer a lot of questions.
Thus I think they'll always be a place for both. Where Wikis may take over (and rightly so) are places where forums are being used as document repositories, for collective opinions. E.g., the "sticky" posts you see at the top of many forums, giving answers to frequently asked questions.
I'm still waiting for someone to develop a true combination of wiki and forum; maybe it's out there and I just haven't seen it yet, but I think neither extreme really does the job of the other well. A combination, maybe of wiki-type pages with attached discussion forums, would be best, and the two are really complementary, not exclusive.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There are many many forums that are basically the "center" of a community that revolves around a piece or collection of software. Often the forums are very active, and most questions are answered very quickly. These places are a great resource, and definately a nicer interface than mailing lists (and their archives) for essentially the same type of thing.
The problem with forums is once they get 'big', it becomes incredibly hard to keep things organized, and as a user - especially a new user - hard to make sense of it. Often when you ask questions, you'll be pointed to another thread that has the solution. These threads can often be several pages long, with the original question at the top of page 1, an initial solution on page 2, some follow-up problems on page 3, and more solutions to those as you read through. The result is that instead of being able to go and get the full (and current) solution to the problem, you end up having to spend a great deal of time reading through the steps everyone else took when the thread was active, as well as all the off-shoot discussion that takes place around it ("Yeah, I have the same problem.." "My error message is different, I see...."). No one from the original thread bothers to summarize the steps at the end (since for them, it's all fresh in their mind as they've spent the last few days or whatever posting to the thread), and in fact, to do so would probably be considered annoying.
Wikis can provide that initial solution, then mould it over time into a fully working solution, while still maintaining a history of changes - if you want to see it. As a user, wikis are virtually always easier to find information in than a forum.
What I haven't seen is a wiki that has a really good forum built-in, especially something that would post the changes to the wiki in the thread as it was changed (so when you look at it later on, you see a couple posts, then the wiki modification, with links to that revision, as well as a diff from the previous revision).
Speak before you think
The irony here is just too thick. If you really have these sort of doubts, why "Ask Slashdot"?
Why not put up a wiki to let people thrash out the answer there? Or ask your dentist? Or toss some yarrow? But no, of all the possible ways you could have approached the question, the one you decided on was submitting it to a web forum.
On the plus side, I doubt if you're going to get any "google is your friend" responses with this one.
--MarkusQ
Forum, Noun:
* a public meeting or assembly for open discussion
* assembly, meeting place (a public facility to meet for open discussion)
I'd say, from the definition, that a forum appears to be a public meeting place for open discussion, not an archive of knowledge.. just coz it's online, doesn't make it any different.
An online forum as a repository of knowledge is a side-effect of searchable online content, not the main purpose of a forum.
If forums would bloom into their next generation, you would be amazed. Firstly everyone needs to label their group: Political Party, Religion, Sex, Prolife/choice and all the things that divide us. Secondly the moderation system similar to Slashdot be used, but with no cap on the high or low the piece to be moderated. Now when you browse the moderated forum, you can see the highs for your demographic, instead of the general populace! In fact, you'll be able to find popular authors as they'll be modded up often. These authors could be the next leaders in various fields such as politics if the forums become large enough. Of course someone would have to code forums like that, and they'd have to become popular first before people start trying to build an image on them. I went over next generation forums very briefly here, I hope I don't confuse too many people.
God spoke to me.
Forums is some sort of a middle ground. It provides social interaction between multiple entities and at the same time retain that information. Other types of collaboration and information sharing exists to provide more of the other sides of the middle ground. If you want slow changing, reliable information, we have the wikis/encyclopedias. If you want fast pure communication, we have a number of chat services. But those other types of collaboration and information sharing answers their respective sides only while forums combine the best of both worlds.
Forums will live on, I can't imagine how the web came to be if there are no forums and I don't think it would die that easily. Would it live on the "social" factor alone? I believe so.
[imo]
A number of practical applications of forums for me: getting support/programming help/references, checking what my "alliance" did in the game for the past day, debating on pink ponies, looking on how to tie my shoelaces, and stealing signatures.
I've administered a music oriented forum which has been working since 1999 (watmm.com, used to be joyrex.com, not linked, not my intention to spam, but if you really must visit be my guest) and the purpose of the forum certainly has changed many times over that period. For the first few years it was pretty much on-subject matter (it started out as a fan site for Richard D James) picked up a lot of members during the first couple of years, faced competition from similar fan sites, engaged in site wars for a while. The content of the site, news, releases, discography, images, audio and video has fluctuated in size. We have a central forum area where a lot of general chit-chat takes place, then generally smaller forums for on-topic discussions. We're currently on our 7th 'refresh' of forums, mainly due to changing forum software several times or changing service providers and not having time to restore the data properly.
Funnily enough, the members don't mind the refreshes, they gripe for a little while, but then it's soon forgotten and things return to normal. We learn't early on that a good set of rules really helps control what's going on, then finding a set of reliable moderators who are spread evenly around the planet to ensure at least one will be reading the forum within a certain time frame.
Right now, we are low on content because of a recent service provider move and a site re-design, but our members are still very active. We don't have a wiki on any part of the site. I can't honestly see a firm reason why we would need one at this stage. If we were to install one, the information would probably be covered by wikipedia anyway. A lot of our special permission material, things we've been allowed to show on our site only wouldn't fit the copyright rules on wikipedia.
I would have to say that above the social interaction of members, there tends to be a grouping of mindset within the community. I find this is very evident in humor on the site. It's very light hearted, very on topic, and very geeky. Although this may seem insignificant, passing on-topic jokes can contain valuable information. Especially to new people on the forum, older members make a joke about what is deemed commonly known information, but it may not be talked about in great detail at this point in time.
I guess an example would be a joke passed around about the on stage Vodka consumption of Squarepusher (a manic bass player), this was common information talked about a few years ago, seemingly forgotten about now, not really documented on our site. A few new guys were a bit surprised, but now they know.
Task Mangler
Remarkably even the Wikis have a discussion page which is basically a forum for the article. Also if you had a specific tech support question which isn't dealt with in the instructions (which you could have on your wiki page) then you are going to have to resort to a forum.
The above is true even if the forums in question don't have a social aspect.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Thats not true, Slashdot doesn't have a wiki and I still laugh when I see repeated jokes about
information.
We need both.
Blogging because I can...
I decided to use a wiki instead.
Why does it seem like most open-source projects have abandoned the idea of documentation for a wiki? Is it just because we developers are lazy and figure if we put up a wiki, we won't have to do any documentation because we think users will write the documentation for us? Or did I miss some great open-source revelation that thou shalt use wiki? Maybe I just misplaced that memo.
I don't think this is the case -- I think it's natural evolution. Wikis are essentially "open source documentation." I think generally maintainers used to accept patches to their documentation, but have recently moved to putting that stuff up on a wiki. And this is understandable -- it's much easier for the maintainer to let people simply edit the wiki than to accept patches. (On the other hand, people still generally accept patches for code, because it's much more dangerous to let people commit code willy-nilly than to let them write documentation).
A responsible maintainer will spend the same amount of effort on wiki documentation that he would have spent on other forms of documentation -- or perhaps less, since the wiki provides a more convenient framework for formatting and hyperlinking than many other forms of documentation. When a project has little documentation on their site but somebody put up a wiki, I tend to think the maintainer probably wasn't inclined to write any documentation in the first place, wiki or no. I guess the point is that wikis are just a framework for writing and storing documentation and nobody intended them to be a replacement.
The responses thus far have been very helpful, so thank you. I'd like to do a bit of a summary and try to focus some of the discussion:
It seems that wikis are the prefered source of information (with some exceptions), but at the same time most people feel that wikis are not competing with forums at all. This seems to be related to the fact that wikis are predictive while forums are responsive. Forums are where the information is created, but the created information is in an inconvenient format for consumption... so Wikis are preferred (though not necessary) as a more permanent storehouse of useful information.
One issue that was lightly touched on was that forums are not easily scaled. This leads to admins having to repeatedly re-organize a forum to keep it from becoming over-populated or under-populated. One piece of interesting feedback is that "members dont mind the refreshes", which I find very surprising.
Related to forums' lack of scalability is the rigid heirarchical structure of information in a forum, which is in contrast with a wiki's network-link structure. Naturally, there are many ways to heirarchically structure the same information (by topic, by geography, by time), but a forum is forced to commit to only one.
Does anyone have any experience or opinions related to these perceived shortcomings? Anecdotes pertaining to these would be especially helpful.
It's about herpes simplex. The forum operates at several levels and, in my opinion, is not replaced by a wiki in any significant way. People find us for two main reasons. One is that they are looking for information and the other is that they are looking for support. The result is a true virtual community with a few current members dating back to 1995 or early 1996 when the forum went "on the air". People confronting a health issue like this often feel alone due to the extremely unfair stigma attached to this most common virus. IMO the single most valuable service we provide is that a new person discovers that they are not alone and that there are lots of people out there, just like them, that are dealing with the same situation. For the record, the infection rate for the virus "below the belt" is about 25%. Overall, including cold sores, the same virus, the percentage rises to around 80% by adulthood.
To answer the questions, "Can forums exist on a purely social level?"
Absolutely. I participate in a couple of other forums that are entirely social. We discuss almost everything about our lives from sex to automobile repair. People come and go, but overall it's been a relatively stable group of diverse people from across the US, Canada, Australia and Korea, with a couple other countries represented from time to time. The ages represented range from early 20's to several folks around my age.. 50s and 60s. I really enjoy that it brings demographically, geographically and economically diverse people together in a way that would probably not happen in real life.
What shortcomings endanger the forum's future, and what characteristics have allowed it to survive so far?
I'm not sure that it's endangered at all. One possible trend that I see is that younger people seem to prefer more fast moving modes such as Instant Messaging and Chat rooms. I guess I'm an old fuddy-duddy at age 60 and much prefer the more deliberate pace of the forum format so that I can focus on my messages or replies and make them more elaborate than a quick burst of typing. I like, too, that forums don't require the seeming immediate attention that chats or IMs do. I can take time to do some research for a reply if needed. Similarly I don't have to be time-coincident with another party as would be the case in a chat or IM. That helps a lot when some of the participants are half way around the world.
The characteristic that allows it to survive so far is that it seems to meet a need for this sort of interaction with other individuals regardless of geography or timing.
Why do we need forums in the first place?" Need? We don't really need them, but then we don't "need" a lot of other things that we find enjoyable or useful. Forums have provided thousands of us a way to interact in a way that allows us to form a virtual community. If it's purpose is to provide information, then it's not much different than gathering at the general store and asking someone a question about, say, "What kind of barn paint was that you used, Jake, that held up so well?" It's just that you can do it when it's convenient and can often tap into a much larger collective intellect than at the general store down at the junction.
No, I'm not going to post the URL for the herpes site. I'm not looking to be slashdotted. If you have need of us and look, you'll eventually find us.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
This may be the best, simplest answer to the whole question. As fluid as a Wiki's content is, the basic idea is still you sucking down info from a site. Forums are a multidirectional exchange of info with other human beings.
There is also the purely social aspect of a forum will never be replaced by a Wiki, simply because you don't have to be trying to write a reference book when you post to a forum. You can post to a board for your favorite (TV show/scientist/actor/religion/historical period/political subgroup/flavor of pudding) with something like "Wow, how about that (last episode/recent theory/talk show interview/spiritual revelation/new textbook/recent speech/vanilla bean controversy)?" and start a fruitful discussion. Try that with nearly any Wiki community and you'll be tarred and feathered before they ban you.
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