Knowledge Base

[GAZOO!]

OK so I am brainstorming a little here and I tend to have some idea's that seem a little out there at first blush. But do me a favor and chew on this a bit.

How about a Knowledge Base forum that consists of nothing but stickies. A forum member can write up a Wiki style piece on some topic of interest to them, lets say....the history of the knucklehead motor or something like that. He could put it up as a piece for review and a moderator can choose someone who has volunteered it to perform peer review on it. OK, I am an engineer and I do this kinda stuff all the time in my daily work life, so it is not like I am inventing any great new world order.

But over time we could have a repository of really neat information. Is this stuff available elsewhere on the web? Well sure, but that doesn't mean we would suffer from offering it here also. We would want to be careful to avoid plagarization, however as this is not a profit venture it is hard to do anything other than be annoyed that someone copied your work without cites. But anyone who has had a college level English 102 knows how to write a research paper.

I for one would enjoy producing some of these as writing comes easy to me and I enjoy researching.

Anyway, think about it. Not as cool as having a forum devoted to buns n boobs, but not a terrible idea either.

CBM

[BadgerOctane]

I think its a great idea. So the motion is made, and now it has a second.



Badger

[sfarson]

CBM... I have a special fondness for ideas for they are what make the world go round! As a matter of fact, I specialize in innovation at my company, so I'm always all ears for forward thinking suggestions.

Was trying to think where we would place a KB forum here at H-DF. Thought about maybe in the Technical Area... but maybe someone looking for exhaust help would go the exhaust section instead of a KB forum. Don't know. Thoughts? Would a "sticky" at the top of each technical forum, specific to that area be helpful? One where members populate it with their experiences and advice?

[GAZOO!]

The problem I see with that is as we see sometimes on VRF where the Stickies start taking up the whole first page of the forum. I would just start a Knowledge/Info/Research or whatever Main Group.

For example on VRF it took me a bit of time to find the Sticky on the EFI forum as I was new and really didn't know what I was looking for or where it would be. If there was a central repository for Stickies one would find it pretty quickly. On that note, the first Sticky should be Forums 101. It took me awhile to figure out that my pics uploaded also produced a IMG tag that I could just copy into my posts. A good primer would go a long ways for those of us who tend to mash buttons first and read instructions later.

[sfarson]

CBM... Agree, too many stickies can make things seem more like a static library versus a dynamic community. Has to be a balance. We'll do something. Let's let the community/forum grow here with a few more contributors, and then consider how we can make the expertise easily available to all.

Steve