So many ideas, so little organisation

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Eliza
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So many ideas, so little organisation

Postby Eliza » Thu Aug 04, 2016 10:47 am

First off, I love this forum. There are so many ideas and suggestions for input, learning techniques etc. But I am a bit at a loss when it comes to keeping track of all the good posts here on this forum. I know that we have a Wiki on the main page, but my interests are often rather specific and not of interest for a lot of people (learning techniques at a high level, available media in a certain language...). A lot of the good stuff is buried in 40-pages-threads like the "Fun, fresh media" thread or some language logs that also expand on several pages.

I stumbled upon TiddlyWiki the other day and was wondering if this could be useful for re-organizing information: http://tiddlywiki.com/
It is basically a very elaborated single file that allows full wiki functionality, including tags. It is also highly customizable with various plugins. I experimented a bit with tiddlywiki, and it is rather nice to store interesting information from other threads (and also to re-group answers on my language log, if I ever work up the courage to have one :D ). However, right now the import is rather tedious, and maybe it would be nice to see what other information other users store about their languages, maybe also from other sources.

A more "extreme" implementation would be to replace the logs by a tiddly wiki for each user who likes to have one. So instead of having a log of 35 pages where somewhere someone posted something helpful, a user could have a wiki where everyone is allowed to write and comment on the progress, and the user could tag the comments for easy retrieval. On the other hand, this could turn out as a problem for the forum dynamics.

Do you think this might be a viable solution? And how do you avoid to get lost in all the good ideas and media suggestions?
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Re: So many ideas, so little organisation

Postby Stefan » Wed Aug 10, 2016 8:27 am

Not sure if relevant but a few people from the old HTLAL forum created a wiki:

http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/ ... y_Language

The simple solution would probably be to treat parts of your language log as a wiki by using the first post as a intro and linking to your best posts. Then you can just add a new link whenever you make a high quality post such as "Polish resources". The forum allows you to edit posts indefinitely so every post basically becomes a wiki page. That's the method I'm considering if I start a log here.

French
French resources
French grammar

Polish
Polish resources
Polish grammar

Language learning
Learning grammar
Learning vocabulary
Course reviews
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Re: So many ideas, so little organisation

Postby Elenia » Wed Aug 10, 2016 1:23 pm

I have my old log backed up fully in One Note, which makes it fairly easy to search. But I don't post much of particular import. I use the forum's bookmark feature to keep an eye on topics that I might want to return to in the future, and I use my browsers bookmarks for single pages. Not particularly efficient, but good enough for me.
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Re: So many ideas, so little organisation

Postby Iversen » Sat Aug 13, 2016 7:11 pm

Stefan wrote:The simple solution would probably be to treat parts of your language log as a wiki by using the first post as a intro and linking to your best posts.


That's in fact what I have done: I have inserted links to my Language learning Guide and to my old monster log at HTLAL in the first message of my Multiconfused Log. The problem is that I doubt that anybody reads the first message in any log, and to boot, logs that lay dormant for more than a couple of days will disappear out of the first couple of pages of active threads - and then they have basically become invisible for the casual reader of this forum.

I did write about wordlists and a few other subjects in the wiki that was created as an offspin to HTLAL, but the kind of anonymous effort put down in a wiki isn't really my thing. I like to know exactly what I have written and where I wrote it - and not least what I didn't write!
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Re: So many ideas, so little organisation

Postby Stefan » Sat Aug 13, 2016 8:18 pm

Iversen wrote:The problem is that I doubt that anybody reads the first message in any log, and to boot, logs that lay dormant for more than a couple of days will disappear out of the first couple of pages of active threads - and then they have basically become invisible for the casual reader of this forum.


This is a good point. I think the best you can do is mentioning it in your signature and refer to it when you make new posts in the forum instead of rewriting parts every time it's a similar question.
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Re: So many ideas, so little organisation

Postby Iversen » Sun Aug 14, 2016 12:32 am

That would be a solution - and as you see I have done so in my profile (I do not use a signature line). Luckily the link to a whole thread will go directly to the first post in that thread, which is the most logical place for links to your top notch messages, but here in Language-Learners you can easily make links to any other specific post in any thread. In HTLAL this was possible, but very complicated. And you can edit any old message you have written to your heart's delight. In HTLAL that was only possible within a brief period (3 days or so).
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Re: So many ideas, so little organisation

Postby arthaey » Tue Aug 16, 2016 10:55 pm

Can mods insert new first posts into an existing thread? Asking for those of us who didn't think to leave ourselves. a placeholder post. ;)
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Re: So many ideas, so little organisation

Postby rdearman » Wed Aug 17, 2016 9:48 am

arthaey wrote:Can mods insert new first posts into an existing thread? Asking for those of us who didn't think to leave ourselves. a placeholder post. ;)

They system doesn't support inserts. However if you create a second topic the first topic can be merged underneath it. You'll have to talk to a moderator and give them the details of the two topics and which one you want at the top. But it could be done.
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Re: So many ideas, so little organisation

Postby Stefan » Wed Aug 17, 2016 12:38 pm

rdearman wrote:
arthaey wrote:Can mods insert new first posts into an existing thread? Asking for those of us who didn't think to leave ourselves. a placeholder post. ;)

They system doesn't support inserts. However if you create a second topic the first topic can be merged underneath it. You'll have to talk to a moderator and give them the details of the two topics and which one you want at the top. But it could be done.


How does it handle direct links to posts and subscriptions?
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Re: So many ideas, so little organisation

Postby rdearman » Wed Aug 17, 2016 12:48 pm

Stefan wrote:
rdearman wrote:
arthaey wrote:Can mods insert new first posts into an existing thread? Asking for those of us who didn't think to leave ourselves. a placeholder post. ;)

They system doesn't support inserts. However if you create a second topic the first topic can be merged underneath it. You'll have to talk to a moderator and give them the details of the two topics and which one you want at the top. But it could be done.


How does it handle direct links to posts and subscriptions?

I don't understand the question. You can put direct links into any post and you can subscribe to a thread.
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