Just answering some of the questions regarding why we are trying the BBS in Japanese wikipedia.
Again, a long posting. (I'm sorry about it.)
(1) The current BBS
The BBS was written by a user "Hoge-", not from scratch but based on a free-software (no-charge for nonprofits, okay to modify). It uses perl and cgi.
It is hosted by a server s/he has control over. When I notified Jimbo's question, if the BBS needs to be hosted by some official(?) wikipedia server, s/he said there are still some works to be done, so s/he prefers to have the BBS at the current server.
Before, another user also offered to host it if necessary. And s/he said when the current server run out of resource for some reasons, s/he would ask and pass the BBS.
(2) How we come to think of using the BBS
I guess this part is not so informative if your interest is just on the BBS v. Mailing list issue.
We discussed the matter at Village_pump, and the options included mailing list, a page inside wikipedia (Village_pump), and a BBS. We made observations about pros and cons, but no one pushed nor criticized any option very hard (which is somewhat usual in Japanese 'pedia, though I'm not sure if this is attributable to some Japanese cultural norms like modesty and stronger collectivism or something else).
Since no one made a suggestion, I searched on the web and suggested a free BBS (with ads). In responce, Hoge- (the user) observed that it has many limitations (we cannot customize much), and said that s/he will try to build a BBS for us
Some time has passed, and then some of us started talking about using Villege_pump in a better way, (I personally didn't want to push Hoge- to build BBS ASAP for our discussion, so I was in to that idea.)
Sometime around that time, it became clear that some of the archived messages of the mailing list are not readable. Some characters are not handled properly somewhere in the process. It wasn't clear if immediate solution can be found. After all, the list was just created and not used much. (We haven't decided how to use it.)
Then, Hoge- said s/he will build the BBS soon, and indeed s/he did. Some users celebrated Hoge-'s work. No one voiced that we should try to find solution for the mailing list and use it, or stick to the Village_pump plan.
So we started.
(3) BBS v. Mailing list
First, a disclaimer: I don't know if I have reasons to defend the use of BBS against some of the harshest critics among you. As mentioned above, we did not chose the BBS after a heated debate or with the cost of transition from an existing list to the BBS.
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.)
Additional disadvantages (as perceived and voiced by Japanese wikipedia users):
-Reading the archived postings is a bit more difficult than reading BBS threads. Getting a quick overview is especially hard.
-Reading through the archived postings takes time when wikipedia is slow, (which is quite frequent these days.)
-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).
-Because the arrival of the messages are not included in the Special:Recent_changes, discussion seems a bit remote from the activities taking place on the web. (Though it is okay for some topics.)
-Harder to link to pages on wikipedia. (some clients don't support html links)
The last two disadvantages were shared with BBS, but Hoge- solved them by changing codes and making the bot I mentioned in the previous email.
(4) misc.
Just for your information: one user in Japanese 'pedia also recommended the ''http://phpbb.com/'' , the site Hunter mentioned earlier.
cheers,
Tomos
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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
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org