[ataraxia]

One of the more subtle yet very significant advantages of the wiki linking concept is that makes it both very easy and even automatic for the average user to provide cross-linking.

In the current vB methology, if I wanted to provide a link in this message to a thread on, say, Nikita Kruschev, I would have to go off on a tangent to find that thread, copy its URL into my clipboard and then paste it here.

Unless the cross link is something particularly important to me as the author of this message, in most cases I would probably not bother to do it.

However, if wiki-style linking was available in vB, all I would have to do is type "NikitaKrushev" (as two capaitalized words smashed together) in my posting. IF a thread by that name already exists, the link would be immediately created! IF the thread does NOT already exist, a hyperlinked "?" would suffix the word. Clicking on it would take any user to a "Start New Thread" page with "NikitaKruschev" as the title. Once someone posts the first message in this new thread, the "?" would disappear from all occurences of NikitaKrushev throughout the entire message base and the word would universally become a hyperlink to that thread.

The important point here is that, as a poster, I do not even need to know if someone has already started a thread on Kruschev. All I need to do is type the name as a wikiword. If the thread exists, my word will be automatically linked to it. If it does not exist, an "invitation" is extended to all readers (including me) to create the thread now or at any time in the future. And, if the Kruschev thread does not exist today but someone else posts the first message in it, say, next week, the incidence of NikitaKruschev I wrote today (and all others) will become a hyperlink then.

The ultimate result will be messages which are richly crossreferenced and the creation of lots and lots of new message threads for which navigational links are automatically built-in.

It would seem that it might not be too difficult to dynamically generate an index and/or hierachical Table of Contents of all threads. For further organization, anyone creating a new thread (by posting the first message) could be asked by the system which main forum or sub-forum it should be placed in. Thus, we could have both wiki and traditional forms of navigation.

Further, I suggest that we modify the wiki philosophy of "anyone can edit anything" to "anyone can add their comments as a simple reply to any thread". I think this will allay a lot of fears that forums operators seem to have about wikis.

Adding WikiWord linking capabillities could be an e-n-o-r-m-o-u-s leap for vB. As message bases get larger, more hierachically complex and consequently harder to navigate, this may be one way to help our users from getting lost in the chaos.