Blogs vs wiki vs forums?

On 24/11/2005 9:06 AM, "deemery" <emerygrebyn.com> spake thus:

> I'm curious at people's views on wiki vs more traditional forum software vs
> blog hosting software. Pros & Cons? Any collective experience you'd like to
> share?

I've literally only just got into wikis after wondering for years what all
the fuss was about. Now I know :) I think half my problem was that I didn't
have a project for which a wiki would be useful and wasn't inclined to try
it just for the sake of it. However, a few weeks ago we started up a digital
repository project here with a group of people spread around the building,
and I put up a wiki on my machine (using MoinMoin) so that we would have a
central spot to put things.

The end result has been great, and I'm so impressed that I'm going to start
using wikis even for personal non-collaborative stuff (e.g., use one as
somewhere to dump all those miscellaneous snippets of things that I don't
really know what to do with). They're a great way to store notes or chunks
of text or whatever that might or might not be related.

I think wikis really shine when you have a more document-oriented model,
with several people working on these documents. I'm not so sure how well
they would work with the more conversational style of interaction that you
get in a discussion forum (although I have heard of them being used this
way). Blogs fall into yet another similar, but slightly different space.
(I've also heard of wikis being used as blogs --- MoinMoin has some features
that provide blog-like behaviour.)

In terms of software, I've looked at MoinMoin and MediaWiki (which underlies
WikiPedia). MediaWiki looks nicer out of the box, but MoinMoin seems more
functional overall.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://public.xdi.org/=nigel.stanger

>I'm curious at people's views on wiki vs more traditional forum
>software vs blog hosting software.

I've written a bit about this in a series of articles about document
collaboration (particularly the third one), though the articles are a
bit dated now.

http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1191

In short:

* Blogs are good for collective and cumulative documentation with one
or more people adding to the blog, and potentially commenting on each
other's posts.

* Wikis are best when you want multiple people to have full editing
capabilities on the documents in question. Wikipedia is of course the
best example of a good wiki use.

* Discussion forums are best for, well, discussion. They tend to be
bad for document collaboration of any sort, since it's difficult to
create anything definitive from a discussion.

Which tool you choose depends very much on what you're trying to do.

cheers... -Adam

--
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_____________________________________________________________________
Adam C. Engst: I publish TidBITS, write books, and make sure the
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