It's a great site, but it's not a wiki. It's not user-editable, for one thing. It's a great hub and also to some extent an authority, for sure, just as this site is.

There are sites for educators to share lesson plans and worksheets, but the ones I've seen are not perfectly structured, and a great many are also pay sites. The wiki I'm thinking of could to some degree point to or contain content already existing at sites like this one and Hoagies, but could also have lots of other content too (like actual sample resources) and would be free and user-editable.

I would probably get it up and running and dump some content in, and then of course it would be up to the users. If it's not a great idea, I'm okay with that. But I don't see anything like that on the web right now.

I see a fair amount of user-created content shoehorned into discussion boards; I've shoehorned some of it myself. That's not a perfect solution because even if all of the good content-containing threads got stickied (certainly a rosy outcome), they would still be forced into the structure of stickied threads in a forum. In addition, even in a stickied thread here and elsewhere, you typically can't edit the original post after a certain amount of time. Hence even if a librarian type revisits her original post to update it with all the valuable content in the thread, that ability is lost eventually. Also, nobody but the originator can edit the original post at all.

For these reasons discussion boards are not great for containing user-created content; they're good for discussing things. Every time someone here hunts up an old, valuable thread and links to it, or shares a link to something else of value, it's a hint to me that a wiki would be useful. Instead of those users saving links to things, they could essentially collaborate in saving their structure of valuable gifted information as they see it, plus dump in whatever content they wished. Discussions on the content would be separated out and not obscure the content, cross-links and updates would be added in passing by user-editors, etc.


Striving to increase my rate of flow, and fight forum gloopiness. sick