On 8/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I don't really know what that format would be. A forum? A wiki-style page (which there are plenty of on wikipedia)? A newsgroup (which is essentially the same thing as a mailinglist, see news://news.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english )? If you want real discussion, you can't try to limit what somebody is saying, and if you have as many members as wikiEN has, there are going to be a lot of posts and not always easy to follow the discussion. Threads and forks and subject renamings and funny posts are going to occur. The only way to limit it is to drastically cut down on the number of members ("Everyone with less than 2000 edits must DIE!!!"), and that's not an option that any of us wants.
Personally, I think the mailinglist/newsgroup (NNTP) way is by far the greatest way of conversing on the internet. Although, for shorter discussion that may take longer time (ie talkpages), the wiki-way is pretty awesome.
Since we're on the google thread already, google groups is kinda a newsgroup/mailing list hybrid. I haven't used it extensively, but it might be something to look at. It's not as open as what we're using now though, so there are some drawbacks. It also looks like it does push you to the webpage more than being email-only, which is probably unacceptable for many people.