Forum or Wiki?

The CM Crossroads site features both a Wiki, and a 'Forum'. There is an obvious disagreement about which is appropriate to what.

Several participants of the forum, including Patrick, the administrator, have made statements like the following ones:

Maybe we should discuss it here and make sure that the content is created and updated on the wiki

The forums do provide a better back and forth discussion

When xxx has come to some sort of conclusion about the tool and process, I'd be willing to write something up on the situation

I fiercely disagree, on SCM grounds.

1. The 'forum' doesn't offer the same level of management as does the Wiki.
   • The granularity is potentially finer in the Wiki. Each page may specify one scope, map to a Configuration Item. In the forum, the grain is this of the thread, not of the message.
   • I wrote above potentially because this can easily be jeopardized, e.g. by using the Wiki in ThreadMode, or by just writing huge pages.
   • Postings to the forum are persistent only in theory: in practice the same things are written again and again, and soon forgotten.
   • Postings to the forum cannot be refined, enhanced, edited later on. They are read-only shared, i.e. not shared at all.
   • Note that the situation was not as bad with traditional NNTP newsgroups, as it is with web forums (in which there is no decoupling between the contents and the presentation, and in which changes in the Summary [ or Topic ] are in practice ignored).
2. Furthermore, most management is needed before any agreement is reached, in order to reach an agreement. Management is needed to achieve convergence (Share to manage, manage to share).
   • The idea of first achieving a certain status, and then 'putting under CM', is a common error. It introduces an artificial discontinuity, and ensures that the history of the changes is non-traceable.

-- MarcGirod - 18 Feb 2007

Marc I am in complete agreement with you on this. I think what I was referring to was maybe a perceived ease of use from the forums where people easily reply. But as we see here its just as easy to reply in the wiki.

-- PatrickEgan - 20 Feb 2007