Anthere wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Mark Pellegrini wrote:
Note, Angela asked me emphatically to make sure you fight it out there and not on the mailing list.
Ugh... it's nearly impossible to carry on a lengthy conversation on the wiki. Mailing lists are a lot better: I can organize subthreads, keep posts I find particularly interesting for later reference and delete others, and so on. Can't do any of that on a wiki unless you make a private copy of the discussion page and edit it yourself, and then keep your copy in sync with the original, which is a gigantic mess.
well, this is very unfortunate for you, because Angela and I will strongly favor use of multilingual meta over mailing lists.
And I, and quite a few others, will continue to favor the opposite. Posting stuff on the wiki is great; having actual discussion on it is tedious and nearly impossible to keep track of past a low volume of posts.
I do think we've had a vote on this on en:, which also contained about five pages of arguments back and forth on both sides, as it came up on the Village Pump about 5 or 6 separate times, but I can't seem to find where it got moved to. Links, anyone?
I really don't see why anyone would want to use such a terrible discussion medium though. Discussion media in the 1980s on bulletin boards at least supported threading and filtering; can't we at least use something as technologically advanced as 1980? If it must be a web-based system (despite the fact that email is better-suited to textual discussion), there are several software packages that support fully-threaded discussions, included Slashcode (used on slashdot.org) and Scoop (used on kuro5hin.org). The latter even keeps track of unread messages, a feature that is absolutely necessary to follow large-scale discussions.
-Mark