User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-5076341-20121204155753/@comment-188432-20121205013912

I respectfully disagree with you, Kerry. The new forums are great for people who are trying to do serious, collaborative work. The very fact that the system now alerts you to changes in the threads you've been following means that conversations move more swiftly.

I've got two great case studies for you. Both represent discussions that had been happening under the traditional wiki forum extension.

Tardis:thread:117229 is the resurrection of a thread that attracted 4 correspondents in a day. That's the same number that had been attracted to it in one day under the old system. And this time we attracted someone who hadn't been in the original discussion at all, but had been an active editor at the time.

But it's gets better. At tardis:thread:117364, we had another conversation that had been ported over from the old forums. In this case we got 2 new opinions on the subject within 3 hours of me highlighting the thread. Highlighting is the fantastic feature of this new system. It alerts everyone who's logged in about changes in a particular thread. The old forum on this subject had basically died a coupla months ago. The new forum successfully reinvigorated interest. Granted they weren't big comments, but it's not the kind of discussion that requires big comments. It just requires people voice an opinion — and the new forums clearly helped in this case.

I also want to leave you with a truth of wiki administration. Even admin don't always read the old-style forums. There's no warning that anything has changed in discussions there, so it's quite common for people to drop by the old forums only on certain days, or once every two weeks or what have you. There have been plenty of cases of miscommunication on my wiki because changes have been clearly spelled out in the forum, but not every admin has read those changes. Thus when the changes got implemented, admin — not even regular users but admin — have complained that they weren't adequately warned or consulted. This new forum makes that sort of miscommunication significantly less likely.

Look, the new forums aren't perfect. This blog is littered with my own comments about a number of things that need to be fixed. But we're only in the earliest stages of deployment. The promise of this system for people who believe they're building an encyclopaedia is probably greater than for those who just use forums socially.

I for one am tired of presiding over discussions that end after the same three people circle around each other for a week. I think this system offers the chance for a lot of new blood to enter the decision-making process. The more people feel like they are part of that process, the more they will edit on your wiki, and the bigger it will become. And with encyclopaedias, bigger is definitionally better.