On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 7:59 AM, rupert THURNER rupert.thurner@gmail.com wrote:
A somewhat related ticket about trying to unify our discussion platforms was discussed in a session at Wikimania: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T155678
Interesting thanks for the pointer. Compared to the options listed there a mailman upgrade looks rather straight forward and, personally I d really appreciate if it could be done, for the benefits Eric listed.
To be clear, I don't think an upgrade to MM3 would be straightforward; it would be quite a hairball keeping multiple people busy and should only be done incrementally. I say this only to avoid feeding a "Why haven't we done this simple thing yet" narrative that sometimes develops around software updates/upgrades, not in order to specifically criticize your statement. This isn't a simple update by any means.
I think the Q/A site vs. mailing list are very complementary approaches. A StackExchange style knowledge platform certainly may serve certain use cases identified in the ticket Niharika linked to, and some experimentation with different approaches seems wise.
One word of caution -- open source clones are often poor carbon copies that lack important functionality and algorithmic sophistication that made the platforms they are cloning successful. This may include even wiki-style functionality (for example, Quora has an "Answer Wiki" feature sometimes used to highlight the salient aspects of the best answers).
Without such correctives, you may replicate certain well-known problems with upvote/downvote systems, such as a bias towards old answers that received lots of votes early on but have been superseded by much better responses.
The upvote/downvote feature in the Mailman 3 UI [*] that I mentioned is so minimal that I think it can be ignored for all intents and purposes, and would probably best be removed or disabled to minimize confusion and clutter.
Erik
[*] to be precise, it is a feature of Hyperkitty, the archive frontend that also allows posting through the web