I’m sure it’s being done somewhere on the net. But it could be done more.
What if you could make a dynamic forum that’s kind of a hybrid between a forum and a wiki.
Most forums are a layer of conversation categories, followed by a layer of threads, followed by a layer of posts. Sometimes subthreads, or sometimes subcategories. They offer options like hyperlink, importing / referencing multimedia in a post, or in signatures, (which extends to the avatar, the title, statistics and so on). There are voting systems. This is all pretty clever, but it’s quite redundant.
What if a philosophy forum could, for example, have a sort of proposition wiki. Not like your conventional wiki of free editting, but more like individual questions that are floating around, and propositions matching the questions. As well as meta-propositions (justification), meta-questions (“define this”), or linking by relation.
You would navigate this somewhat like a wiki. Searches hunt down meta-tags and text or url content. Hyperlinks are made where thought appropriate. BUT the forum really boils down to navigating by questions and propositions. People offer summaries of questions, then explainations of questions, or summaries of answers, and so on. There are no linear conversations, even though you can respond to what people say just like in a conversation. People can reward posts in terms of relevance, so you might filter your search in such as “top 10 for relevance”
Here’s how you could imagine it . . .
Keep the categories. Maybe there’s like 7 categories, whatever you think is best. Then you have threads. But these threads don’t lead to one conversation. The user enters the site with a filter or browser that they modify to their liking on the fly (much like the way you program a person’s profile). The filter is what tells the server what it wants when you click on a thread. Maybe it pops up the 10 most relevant answers to the question (answers that were intended as direct answers to the question), or maybe it requests a mix of answers and questions.
Conversations are basically a chain or web, interlinked so that you could follow a link to a link until you end up where you started or eventually lead somewhere almost cmpletely unrelated. The filter or “site browser” might be temporarily commanded to only pop up related items based on the posters that intended them related. Other times commanded to pop up meta-tags that may not have been specifically related to the topic originally.
For example: I would enter the forum and tell my site browser to pop up the 10 most recent entries. I see a list of questions and statements. Then I tell it to give me 10 most recent summarized answers, intended directly for the question I pick, and click on a question. Then maybe I want to see the bulk of the answer when I click on it.
I know what I’m thinking would be good. But I couldn’t program it for the life of me, I doubt it’s really the direction I’ll take my learning. I could try to explain it better but I know it’s good.