Thomas Dalton wrote:
As to the question of argumentation, the list I'm talking about ("wikien-forum" in my proposal) would be specifically biased against argumentation and direct replies to individual points. Most contributions would have to be able to stand on their own: thematically related to the thread, but no quoting, ranting, or kvetching. People who want to have direct discussions would be encouraged to do so, just not on the list.
How does that work? All conversation pretty much falls into two categories - informative and argumentative. Informative takes the form of question and answer, argumentative takes the form of point-counterpoint. Either way involves each email being a reply to a previous email. A dialogue does not consist of a sequence of monologues, and mailing lists are intending for dialogues (or polylogues, or whatever you call multi-way conversations). If people want to post monologues, they can start blogs.
Mailing lists are intended for whatever people intend them for.
I'm suggesting we split our current one into a version that continues to be a relatively open dialog ("wikien-open") and one that is heavily edited by volunteer moderators ("wikien-forum"). Some threads would be purely in the edited list. Interesting threads on the open list (or wherever) could be summed up or excerpted to the edited list.
How it actually develops would be determined by moderator experimentation and reader feedback, and I'm pretty open to what that would be. The flavor I'd personally aim for is something between a moderated panel discussion and a well-edited interview.
My theory here is that many people are interested in the results of discussions on this list, but very few care to read the long arguments, the tit-for-tat replies, or the seven thousandth post on some issue that we will never settle. So we take turns editing that out.
If you have an improvement or an alternate proposal, please bring it up. As Jussi-Ville Heiskanen pointed out, constructive comments are a lot more useful than purely negative ones.
William