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.
--Oskar
On 8/26/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
--- Oskar Sigvardsson
<oskarsigvardsson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You should REALLY try gmail, it is almost
unsettling how smart it is
in collapsing what you don't need to see. Almost all footers (except
for the first one in a thread, I think that's how it works by
recognizing lines that repeat from mail to mail) gets collapsed,
aswell as all quoted text, except when you need to read it to get the
context of the message. I find myself going "How the hell did Gmail
know I needed to read that!!!". It will also sort mails into
"conversations" which is worse than threading (since it doesn't
explicitly show who responded to whom) but is never a problem. You can
also tag each conversation with whatever you want to make it easier to
sort through. It has a brilliant search engine which you can find
anything with, it has mindnumbingly large storage space and it's
archiving concept means you never have to delete a thing (i've
currently got 177 mb of mail in my account, most of it wikien) but
still get mail out of your inbox. It really is the best there is.
I'll send you an invitation :P
Well that's client based and I was talking about something server-based
that helps everyone see the threads in better way.
The idea is that subject headers are almost entirely useless for
following a thread, and for understanding the value of particular mails.
Oftentimes people will interject one-line humour into serious discussions
about policy, and this will basically kill the thread. Sometimes people
try to change funny discussion into serious discussion. Oftentimes we find
threads are just repeats of earlier types of topics, and its hard to tell
if 1) you dont know the history or and 2) you dont read up on all the
current threads well enough to understand the connections.
Anyway its neat that G-mail can do all of that sorting from just plain email,
and I certainly will try it out (again). :)
SV
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