Mailing lists are intended for whatever people intend
them for.
I'm suggesting we split our current one into a version that continues to
be a relatively open dialog ("wikien-open") and one that is heavily
edited by volunteer moderators ("wikien-forum"). Some threads would be
purely in the edited list. Interesting threads on the open list (or
wherever) could be summed up or excerpted to the edited list.
I don't think a mailing list is the best way to hold such discussions,
although I'm not sure of a better way. To be honest, I can't see the
basic concept working, for the reasons I gave.
How it actually develops would be determined by
moderator
experimentation and reader feedback, and I'm pretty open to what that
would be. The flavor I'd personally aim for is something between a
moderated panel discussion and a well-edited interview.
Both those have a key feature - the people talking are preselected by
some criteria (basically, that they have an interesting viewpoint).
You're never going to get that kind of flavour with a public mailing
list, even with heavy moderation. People watch panel discussions and
read interviews because they think the people involved might be
interesting. The same can't really be said for a public mailing list.
Panel discussions and interviews are done for the benefit of
spectators, mailing lists exist (in most cases) for the benefit of
participants.
That said, inviting a few interesting people from inside and outside
the enwiki community to take part in a panel discussion on an
interesting subject would be quite good fun. It would probably work
best on IRC (with published transcripts), rather than a mailing list,
though.
My theory here is that many people are interested in
the results of
discussions on this list, but very few care to read the long arguments,
the tit-for-tat replies, or the seven thousandth post on some issue that
we will never settle. So we take turns editing that out.
Probably true. I'd say the solution is summaries posted on wiki of
recent discussions - perhaps as a column in Signpost.
If you have an improvement or an alternate proposal,
please bring it up.
As Jussi-Ville Heiskanen pointed out, constructive comments are a lot
more useful than purely negative ones.
Purely negative comments can still be constructive, as long as they
point out specific problems and explain why they are problems.
Requiring people to have a solution before they can point out a
problem just means it takes longer to recognise problems.