On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 6:51 PM, Erik Zachte erikzachte@infodisiac.com wrote:

For the record, I am one of those who did not speak up yet (ref Austin) who would hope some of our power posters felt less need to share every thought with the rest of us.

In a public debate few people with a firm stance can be convinced to change their mind, so most polemical posts can only hope to win over undecided onlookers.

Changes that that will happen also diminish fast as more and more readers lose interest in a discussion.

I even fear that a new point of view after 20 replies on a thread has less change of getting across as many people already went their way.

There was a time when I tried to see all sides of debate. Nowadays I tend to selectively read replies from people who might have something to contribute. To me that sounds like a bad signal to noise ratio.

I've read whole your email, unlike emails of many others. After a couple of years here, I know well what a number of posters may contribute about some issue and when they may say something interesting to me. There are even some threads which I am not reading and it is not because I think that I won't read there anything new or interesting, but because I think that I don't need to know the content of those threads.

But, I've got something on my mind.

We don't need a forum for communication, we need user-friendly structured discussion and I think that we may make something like that.

Clear wiki pages are not good for that because they are too unstructured and structure has to be made by contributors. But, some wiki-like technology may be a good idea (i.e. some MediaWiki extension). Forums have a kind of that structuring, but it is not enough good. They are too hierarchical and inflexible.

What do I want is something like:

* Wikimedia projects ** <general discussion about Wikimedia projects> ** Wikipedia *** <general discussion about Wikimedia projects> *** New Wikipedias (place for announcing new Wikipedias) *** CheckUser issues (also tagged as Wikimedia Foundation->CheckUser issues) *** Analysis of Wikipedia content (also tagged as Research->Analysis of content->Wikipedia) *** ... * Wikimedia Foundation ** Board *** Ting Chen (also tagged as Wikimedia projects->Wikipedia->Chinese->Contributors->Ting Chen) **** Ting's lecture during Wikimania 2007 (also tagged as Wikimania->2007->Lectures->Ting; also: Wikimedia->Lectures->Tings lecture during Wikimania 2007) ... * Misc ** Chat about weather ** Chat about science ** Chat about Sarah Palin ** ...

And I want to be able to be subscribed via email just on topics interesting to me. So, whenever someone adds a comment or make a new thread about Analysis of content, I want to get email. I also want to get info about newly created categories.

In that case, "list" moderators would have to actively categorize threads, if writers didn't do that well. However, it should be a wik-like model, where contributors should be able to categorize their threads or even particular "emails" (or whatever the name for that would be).

The main benefit from such approach would be possibility to see what has been talked earlier about the same subject; as well as we would have a knowledge database. If someone repeats 5th time the same thing, it would be obviously trolling.

In other words, the concept would be similar to FriendFeed categorized discussions. Foundation-l may stay as a proxy to that service for those who are willing to follow everything and email replies to foundation-l would go to a relevant thread.

Do similar concepts exist? Did I find hot water? :)