Hi everyone,
We’ve received an interesting proposal that we want to run by you. The team working on Wikimedia Space https://space.wmflabs.org/ wants to start experimenting with mirroring mailing lists as a way to unify and improve movement communication. They have reached out to us about the possibility of mirroring this mailing list in Space. While an experiment like this seems to make sense to the admins of this list, we wanted to run the idea by you first.
Concretely, this would mean that:
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We would create an Education list subcategory in Discuss Space, and any emails sent to the mailing list would appear there as well. -
It would function like a web archive: users are able to read but no reply or start new topics. For that, they would need to use the mailing list exactly as it is done today. For the mailing list subscribers everything would stay the same. -
The topics mirrored in Space would appear in the Latest list on the Discuss main page and in the search results. -
Users can tag topics and "like" comments. If a subscriber of the mailing list is registered in Space with the same email address, they will earn the "likes" to their messages and this will help them build their trust in Space, without doing anything extra.
If you want to read about how this experiment fits into the larger picture of the development of movement communications, they’ve released a short blog post about the future of mailing lists and Wikimedia Space https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/testing-the-path-from-mailing-lists-to-wikimedia-space/1934. But again, for now this is just an experiment that we can start and stop at any time.
What do you all think? Are you interested in taking part in this experiment?
Best,
Nichole