On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:04 AM, quiddity <pandiculation(a)gmail.com> wrote:
1. Given that the majority of Wikipedians are not
subscribed to this
mailing list (or at least don't post to it), having decisive
discussions here is not very practical.
I would think that fewer participants would make decisive discussions easier.
The mailing lists are good for
brainstorming, alerting, and sharing, (etc), amongst the small number
of participants; they are not good for establishing a consensus on the
"nature of Wikipedia".
Sorry, I couldn't resist plagiarizing Jimmy Wales and his widely
ignored principles from his user page.
2. Given that you infrequently participate on-wiki,*
and your historic
reticence to even communicate on-wiki,** I'm not surprised by this
suggestion.
Yes, I find wiki talk pages to be a terrible form of communication.
There's no push notification, no decent threading, post-hoc
censorship, a requirement to release everything you write under
CC-BY-SA, etc. And the silly memes regarding Wikipedia talk pages
don't even allow people to utilize the benefits of a wiki - non-signed
content, modification of content, multi-person collaboration on a
single paragraph.
Wikis make sense for collaboration, but not for communication. ~~~
and ~~~~ never made any sense.
However, I would suggest that the mountain is unlikely
to
come to you; instead, you must go to the mountain.
In this particular case, the mountain had already come to me. I was
just objecting to your suggestion that it go back.