On 8/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson(a)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.