Tomos-
The main problem with the mailing list is that some archived messages become unreadable. (Some pointed that it should be the mailing list software. And we will ask further help from Jason soon.)
I presume this is a problem specific to your list setup.
-Reading the archived postings is a bit more difficult than reading BBS threads. Getting a quick overview is especially hard.
One cool feature of Mailman is that you can download the entire archive in the Unix mail format:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/
You can then import this archive into any mail client, probably even Outlook, for easy local browsing. I cannot imagine any easier way to read archived postings -- compare with a BBS where I have to click around to view individual messages.
-Reading through the archived postings takes time when wikipedia is slow, (which is quite frequent these days.)
See above -- in any case, the archive should not be slow if you bookmark it directly, as it does not have to access the database server.
-Discussion on a BBS (and on pages on Wikipedia) tend to be more focused and continuous perhaps because they are written with the previous postings in the same screen, rather than in one's memory. (though this may not always be a disadvantage).
I don't really see the difference between talk pages and a BBS in that respect, in both cases, the entire text of the thread is visible. Most good email clients have a thread view which makes it easy to navigate to prior postings.
-Because the arrival of the messages are not included in the Special:Recent_changes
It would not be difficult to write a bot that puts links to mailing list threads on a wiki page, but I would recommend giving this task to one or several human volunteers instead. A similar approach is used by many Unix- related mailing lists, where there are human-written summaries for the Linux kernel mailing list, KDE mailing list etc. Once your list gets too much traffic, this approach has its advantages.
-Harder to link to pages on wikipedia. (some clients don't support html links)
You don't need HTML, you just need a client that's smart enough to turn http://foo into a clickable link. Most clients are, and if you don't use one of those, you probably don't care about "clickability" anyway.
Regards,
Erik