[IDEA + VIDEO] Half-questions and useless debates

I'm a strong believer in doing experiments, congealing what you learn, then making it easier for the next generation to discover. One of my ongoing frustrations is with the basic inadequacies of forum/bulletin board-style tools on the web: question-and-reply help is useful for the moment, but as compound nested quotes and unwieldy search have shown, there's an enormous gap between being a dumping ground for ideas and iterating that into an elegant document that can be enjoyed and improved upon by others — like a wiki page.

It doesn't help that popular wiki software like MediaWiki doesn't emphasize a simple way to have discussions. Talk pages are unnecessarily complex for newcomers, since they rely on the user's heavy concentration spent on formatting, instead of taking care of that for you as a "normal forum" as vBulletin does.

And within forums themselves, it's a shame to watch the same question come up week after week, month after month. Not just because of being a slacker, but because the search sucks, and there's no better automated way to summarize so many threads — then prompt someone to make a FAQ. Empower them to make a really beautiful help doc in a few minutes, not a slipshod collection of stale links. Allow others to contribute. (Some forums like SlickDeals' have added wiki-like functionality to collaborate when the original poster is absent.) I've seen some progress with tagging, but it's really got to be so seamless that if someone still falls into the same trap of asking what's already been answered for so many before, it's their own blatant laziness and not the tool's onus.

So there are these crazy gaps between tools —

making for a lot of friction between the initial discussion phase and the refinement stage. Really revolutionary tools approach this boldly, but they're so rare — I suspect Google Wave is going to make some, well, waves here. I haven't a practical clue until I've used it, however. On the audio front, which I'm intimately familiar with, Ableton Live destroyed the old fence between "sketchpad for jamming" and "sequencer for producing" in a way that's still fresh many years on (it's also interesting to note its bland-strength interface hasn't changed a lot in all that time).

All the above is a prelude to what I'm talking about here which gets joined with tools: the human half of the learning equation. Like when we're headed in the wrong direction because we started off wrong. Or only go midway to what we seek to learn.

Keep chopping the slop and seek to understand others before ignoring their dreams!