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