Thomas Gries wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:
Kate Turner schrieb:
have you tried reading the lists through gmane
(
http://www.gmane.org/)?
it's a mail-to-news gateway which lets you read (and post to) mailing
lists
from a news reader. as news readers are rather more suited to the
threaded discussion style that occurs on newsgroups and mailing lists,
it's a fair bireplying.
Kate:
A wiki was asked for, not a newsgroup-style thing. A wiki, where you
work together to solve a problem - basically one "page".
wiki is not a good forum for general, open discussion; see
<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ThreadMode>,
<http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WhyWikiWorksNot> for example. ThreadMode
should be used for discussions related to forming a eventual page in
DocumentMode; on Wikipedia, this means talk pages being used to shape the
content of an article. trying to read long discussions on a talk page is
rather difficult, as is finding (and replying to) archived discussions.
what wiki is good for is archiving the results of previous discussions. when
i open a list in my news reader, i see a list of current threads, and can
read which ones i want. what i don't have, that wiki has, is a whiteboard
for preserving permanent discussion. i can link to a previous mailing list
post, but the content i want to give someone may be split over several
messages. what wiki can help with is taking the results of a discussion
and allowing the participants to write up a concise summary of the
important discussion points. for example, asking typical mediawiki-l
questions, or wikitech-l things such as discussion of how to
implement .htaccess authentication, wiki offers little benefit. there's no
easy way to locate new discussions, and a talk page on its own offers
nothing over a newsgroup. however, once a basic strategy for the .htaccess
method has been designed (for example), it can be written up on the wiki,
and changes can be discussed on the talk page. similarly, once a
discussion on something has taken place on mediawiki-l, the result can be
written up as a MediaWiki FAQ entry on the wiki.
that's where wiki is useful. it's not a replacement for mailing lists--it's
just another discussion platform.
The GMANE interface also lacks this feature. Thus, if
you want to have
the "whole" story and all information, you must also visit all postings
in a thread.
This is, why I and several others have proposed to
"go wiki" with the
mailing lists
Tom
kate.