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?" 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.
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.
SJ
On 6/27/05, Joseph Reagle joseph.2003@reagle.org wrote:
In writing about Wikipedia discourse I'm stuck with using the message-id if I happen to have that email in a mbox, or a URL if I happen to have a Web page, but from one I can not easily get the other, and I'm not confident that the URL will be stable in any case. (For example, will [2] always correspond to the message with the message-id "42BEC0EF.6070906@web.de"?)
Without a guarantee of stability, I suppose its best to use msg-id in citing WP discourse, but that makes finding that message problematic for the reader. I'd provide a hint if I could somehow obtain it myself, but the HTML page for a message in the archive has no indicatation of the msg-id. And even if I have the msg-id, I can't easily find the corresponding archive URL. Before sending this message, I thought there would be a search interface and I could write a script, but there doesn't appear to be one, and it doesn't work in Google (e.g., [3]).
What to do??
[1] http://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Devel [2] http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-June/040600.html [3] http://www.google.com/search?as_q=42BEC0EF.6070906%40web.de&num=10&h... ]]
-- Regards, http://reagle.org/joseph/ Joseph Reagle E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E