I wanted to look up the detailed report that was posted to the list after the Frankfurt retreat. I have entually found it but in the process had some troubles because not realizing that Anthere has been using two different email addresses caused me to miss seeing it when searching by "Author". If any of you are familiar with using our archives, you realize how frustrating it can be to find (or not find) a message you half remember.
The thing that I realized while looking for this information is that everyone is relying much to heavily on these archives. I knew that that all the links from the past list summaries had been scrambled. I went to the WMF website hoping to find the information there after my failure in the archives. I found that the WMF website also uses links to the archives. [1] All of these links have been scrambled in the past week and the archive is gernerally not something that can be expected to be stable.
I ask you to consider making an effort to mirror any offcial messages or detailed reports either on the WMF or Meta instead of simply repairing the existing links. These messages become rather hard to find once the links go bad. If this is decided to be a bad idea for some reason; then please consider using a standardized subject for such messages. Everyone should think twice about linking to the archive in general. If you expect people to be reading what write in six months, I would encourage you to quote the message instead of linking.
Birgitte SB
[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home (See: "Wikimedia Board reorganization" read more link)
____________________________________________________________________________________ Need Mail bonding? Go to the Yahoo! Mail Q&A for great tips from Yahoo! Answers users. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396546091