To be clear, while your response is provocative, I'm asking a much more mundane question of, if I, for example, cite a Wikipedia message in a paper, how should I go about it, and unfortunately the software today is not very useful in that regard. But your email is interesting, so I respond on those thoughts as well :).
On Monday 27 June 2005 11:32, Sj wrote:
That is a very good question. I've been wondering the same, along the lines of "is it really necessary for wikiphiles to use off-wiki methods of communication? what are the pros and cons?"
I'm of the philosophy that one should use the right tool/media for the task. For example, I hate checking Web pages to see if something changed: events should be "broadcast" (or at least made available for a pull).
In a general sense, finding a way to provide a unified searchable corpus, and a unified wtchlist, across all non-transient forms of communication, would be a great help to community-building.
That would be handy.
Of course the advantages to wiki-style email is that you could easily retain two different IDs for each message; the core ID of a particular message, and the revision ID of the latest-updated version of it... With email discussions as with articles, there are both discussion messages and the rarer content messages; it would be likewise interesting to distinguish the two.
Not sure I'm following you here but it sounds as if you would like a thread-id?