Tisza, this is very well put.
On 9/11/09, Tisza Gergő gtisza@gmail.com wrote:
- the discussion space is divided by time, not by topic. What little topic-based
Yes. put another way, 'there is no natural namespace to fill and revise over time as all useful discussions are traversed'
- the moderation is not transparent: if someone claims being censured, there is
- the moderation is binary, and consequently too soft: there is no way to flag
- topics cannot be raised on multiple lists without splitting the discussion;
I hadn't thought of some of these.
- it is hard to include new people (who where not subscribed before) into a
discussion bacause the way replying works. (This is actually solved by gmane,
- there is no way to see how many people are interested in a thread.
- there is no way to determine consensus (even approximately). With many
- it just doesn't scale well. Already everyone is complaining about the traffic,
I always found it strange that Wikimedia, being one of the greatest facilitators of online collaboration, doesn't have its own cutting edge communication tools. Not only do the mailing lists suck, wiki talk pages are just as bad. I think the logical thing to do would be to take back most of the meta-project communication to the wikis, eat our own dogfood, and develop a wiki-based communication system that works (preferably in reverse order).
I cannot but agree.
LiquidThreads was developed for that purpose, but it seems to have been largely discarded, with no significant interest from the community, the foundation or the usability team - why?
This may be part of the solution, but there is more to your statement above. LiquidThreads is receiving more attention now; Erik probably has the latest status.
I think the foundation should invest into reviewing state of the art tools for large-scale constructive/informative discussion (slashdot, stackoverflow, ideatorrent, uservoice come to mind) and adding whatever feature needed to LiquidThreads to make it stick. I think opt-out moderation based on some sort of collaborative scoring, some sort of voting or at least ranking method, and thread summaries with a tag or category system are the norm nowadays, and of course there would be need for a bidirectional email gateway.
This would also make [[m:LSS]] much easier to compile :)
- set up a clone of foundation-l which is heavily moderated, and where all
- make better use of Nabble (or some opensource equivalent), which already
- make some of the private lists readable to everyone. If the only reason for
their existence is noise, it is enough to control write access strictly.
- set up a public waste bin where moderated mails can still be read (thus
avoiding the censorship debates) but do not pollute the discussion otherwise.
+4.
Is there a page describing the private lists we use? [[m:Mailing_lists/overview]] only lists oversight, stewards, and checkuser.
SJ