Ticket #47 (closed note: wontfix)
Forum sugar to attract participation
| Reported by: | rselzler | Owned by: | sheep |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | Normal | Milestone: | |
| Component: | Hatta Wiki | Version: | unknown |
| Keywords: | Cc: |
Description
I'm having trouble enticing my audience to participate on the
"forum" pages for my pseis.org site. These geophysicist/programmer
geeks are accustom to discussing topics by subscribing to mail list.
I was hoping that providing a Wiki (Hatta) and telling them to click
"Edit" would attract their attention, but apparently not.
The "Edit" button is almost never clicked (based upon page hits).
Question: does anyone else have trouble getting participation?
Is there a "human nature" factor that I'm missing?
My wife suggested that the word "Edit" may be a turn-off
and that "Post comment" might be less intimidating.
Are mail lists better than a central "forum" page for discussion?
The content of my pages certainly leaves a lot to be desired,
but somehow I sense that something else is going on too.
Might it help if the pages with more formal content and an
"Edit" button were visibly distinct from the "forum" pages
with a "Post comment" button?
BTW congrats on the 1.4 Hatta release 8)
--Randy
In my experience a wiki is very different from a forum/message board/mailing list. If your users expect forum, then you should probably look for some forum software -- there are some communities that use both a forum (for discussions and socializing) and a wiki (for recording important, non-transient information).
On the other hand, it's a very hard work seeding a wiki, and getting the users cross "it's not mine, I'd better not touch it" barrier is difficult. You can find some advice at http://www.wikipatterns.com/ and http://meatballwiki.org/ though.