i'm so tired of seeing the same old posts, over and over....
Forums are good for conversational collaboration. They're terrible for topical, referential encyclopedic information. A wiki excels at the later, while failing at the former.
The best of both worlds is a forum and wiki at the same domain, where authentication of both is shared, and rights to edit the wiki are tied to a ratio of "length of membership" and "number of posts" (to reduce spamming/defacing the wiki).
I hate to fault newbies for not searching the forum when they may not know what to search for. The real fault is all this encyclopedic information dispersed (with varying degrees of completeness) thoughout millions of threads.
IMO, the question is why we, the knowledge experts, don't create an encyclopedia of what exists as "streams of consciousness" among thousands of streams? In other words, if I were a newbie, I'd wonder why these guys who know so much can't distill repeated, recurring knowledge into a succinct, structured and community-driven resource.
That's the strength of sites like GrowWeedEasy. No community, but easily discoverable information. Forums have a community -- but don't capitalize upon that community to promote the community's knowledge into a knowledge base. It's just repeating "conversations" that are largely duplicative, but rarely exhaustive.
