Monahon, Peter B. wrote:
1 - More than one of my posts has bounced back because
either:
- the moderator thinks is inappropriate (to complex?);
- because a list auto-setting complains that my post is too big (to
complex?).
Hey, if I had simple problems ...
The maximum message body size is 40KB. The list is unmoderated.
2 - The list recently, at least, has taken w-a-y too
long to arrive for
me to depend on it for contemporaneous solutions. By the time the
digest arrives, it's not only bereft of responses, but it's w-a-y too
late, and I've moved on to other resources and other problems.
Then don't use digest delivery, use individual message delivery or
gmane.org. At least that way you wouldn't keep breaking the threading.
So, is this list MediaWiki-l dead or dying? Do we all
find each other
off list instead, and the l-o-n-g time between broadcasts is an
indication that this list has little or no function after all?
No it is not dead or dying. The digest frequency has no relation to the
quality of support it provides.
Is MediaWiki-l dysfunctional? What is it good for,
really?
It is good for answering a certain kind of question which is not too
hard and not too easy. This is my experience of all kinds of volunteer
question answering, both offline and online. If a question is too easy,
the reader would take no pride in answering it, and may consider it
insulting or patronising. If the question is too hard, there may be no
readers capable of answering it.
Your questions, e.g. "how do I install MediaWiki on Windows", seem to be
on the easy end of that scale. The best people for answering easy
questions are paid support staff, but Wikimedia doesn't have any of
them. I am paid, but I am a developer, not a support technician, and my
priority is to help Wikimedia users.
We do have a few volunteers here with a tremendous amount of patience
for answering tedious, easy questions, and I have a great deal of
respect for them. But you have to be nice to them if you want them to
help you.
Particularly time-consuming requests for help will hardly ever be met by
a volunteer, unless the volunteer shares your goals.
Why not setup a real ***wiki*** discussion right at
the
MediaWiki.org
home pages, and encourage the MediaWiki software to actually mature to
handle such support needs as ours, instead of using an old-fashioned
mailing list like this?
We do have a wiki. We also have IRC and a forum at
mwusers.com. But the
motives for volunteers there are exactly the same as here. So a question
that goes unanswered here may well go unanswered everywhere. Buying
commercial support is the obvious solution to this problem.
-- Tim Starling