As the mailing list admin, I take issue with the charge that "The mailing list is a terrible place to run a wiki." In my nearly three years as a Wikipedian, I have found rather that mailing list discussions tend to be _more_ fruitful than the website talk pages. There are several reasons for this.

1. Only people who really care a lot about Wikipedia subscribe to the list. So you get the key players' attention.

2. Discussions cannot get fragmented onto several different and shifting talk pages. So you _keep_ the key player's attention.

3. Mailing list posts cannot be retracted or altered; they are a permanent, easily referenced record.

4. There is stricter attention paid to the "no personal remarks" rule here, so discussions don't descend to the "you're a poopyhead" stage as quickly as on talk pages. So the discussion stays on topic.

5. Jimbo reads the mailing list. ('nuff said)

6. Finally, we do it because it works. It's a self-perpetuating tradition, and all major issues have been resolved (or at least first floated) here.

We've tried to run the wiki on the wiki itself, for routine matters, but when that breaks down we need a "court of last resort".

Ed Poor English Wikipedia Mailing List Admin