Allow me a moment to get on a Soap Box...
For the past 11 years I have researched, started several companies and built software products to promote capturing and sharing of "information" and "experts". I have researched and implemented bulletin boards, discussion forums, instant messaging, live collaboration, and now, blogs and wikis. Each of these has its strengths and weaknesses and not one is appropriate for all situations.
Forums are a perfectly reasonable solution for discussion types of interactions but are not good at capturing "collective wisdom". Information can be gleaned from a discussion forum to improve content in a wiki.
Collective wisdom does not have to be "professionally" edited and moderated to make it useful and accurate. The community self moderates and contributes. Take a look at wikipedia - completely open, completely community moderated. Is there the occasional inaccuracy? Sure. Does an occasional spammer contribute garbage? Not very often. And wikipedia is huge - both in terms of #s of users and in terms of pages of content.
Wikis work because 1) communities are very effective at self policing and promoting the good (information) and removing the bad (information), 2) the content can evolve as new insight develops or refinements made - discussion forums are awful at this since you typically end up with multiple discussion threads that are frequently redundant and not connected, 3) the software is so easy to use that there are very low barriers for anyone to contribute. See a spelling mistake or have some clarifications to a procedure? Edit the wiki to include it - you are now a contributor. 4) finding information is much simpler. Wikis use a naming convention for pages - so if you want info on MFI, you browse to
www.wikipelican.com/mfi and there you are. And of course there is search and 5) wiki history can be retrieved. On most wiki products, each and every edit is versioned and can be retrieved. So the problem of someone coming in and trashing the wiki is lessened. Believe it or not, there are 1000s of completely open wikis with very large incohesive user populations that simply do not have this problem. With cohesive user populations like ours (all Porsche fanatics/lovers) the "problem" is even less likely to occur. Offensive users can be barred access as a final step.
So, my advice - and take it for what it is worth (!) - would be to leave the forums in place, add the wikipelican to augment the technical articles (which in and of themselves should probably be wiki-ized) and keep the wiki completely open as a "grand experiment". It would be a good idea to require user registration in order to contribute but all users/guests can view content (just like the forums). Wayne can always terminate or add layers or enforcement if this community - for some reason - deviates from how communities normally interact. I have confidence that it will work, better information will be captured and made much more accessible, and the community will greatly benefit overall.
Off Soap Box
Finally, expert "blogs" might be another interesting addition for this community. Not all experts like to blog but if any do, it can be a very effective way of sharing information.
Thanks for reading and especially for sharing your collective knowledge with me and my 2 Porsches!
Cheers,
Michael