[Foundation-l] Use of moderation

[Liam Wyatt]

On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 1:03 AM, Philippe Beaudette <
pbeaudette at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
> On Sep 11, 2009, at 7:06 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:
>
> >> LiquidThreads was developed for that
> >> purpose, but it seems to have been largely discarded, with no
> >> significant
> >> interest from the community, the foundation or the usability team -
> >> why?
> >
> > This may be part of the solution, but there is more to your
> > statement above.
> > LiquidThreads is receiving more attention now; Erik probably has the
> > latest status.
>
> LiquidThreads will be deploying in a small live environment very soon,
> according to a conversation I had with werdna day before yesterday.
>
> Philippe
>
> yes, LiquidThreads holds great promise for improved communication (at
least, on-Wiki communication). user:Werdna (Andrew Garrett) who is
developing it was
surprised<http://blog.werdn.us/2009/09/so-that-was-wikimania/>to note
at Wikimania how few people knew that it was being revamped as a
matter of priority. Videos of his presentations on the topic at Wikimania
can be seen here
<http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lightning_talks>(day two
video, starting at 13:30) and
here<http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:200908271634-Angela_B_Starling-BOF_MediaWiki_Usability_discussion.ogg>(starting
at 20:00) and I believe it will be live-trialled at the
Stratey.wikimedia.org wiki soon.

As for the discussion of "how to improve foundation-l" I must concur with
what Lars Aronssen said about how the vast majority of followers of this
list "lurk". Tim & Austin I agree with everything you've said here too. As
has been mentioned by Henning Schlottmann a issue with web-based fora (e.g.
message boards) is that they are "pull based". Yes, this can be seen as a
problem and hopefully there are ways to enable more "push" functionality.
However, to reverse the question, one of the major reasons why foundation-l
is so despised by many is precisely *because* it is push-based.
Everyone.Gets.Every.Single.Message - this just doesn't scale. Thank god for
threaded-chat in modern email clients is all I can say. So, whilst having
everything appear in your inbox is a good feature to have if you want it,
IMO the onus should be on the individual to chose to opt-in to a
thread/discussion rather than the email system which forces people to
opt-out (or at least tune-out or at worst unsubscribe). A web-based forum
allows you to bypass discussions you do not want to engage in freeing your
time/mindspace for discussions that are more relevant to your interests.
And, for those that wish to follow every single thread, there surely must be
an option to be automatically notified every time there is a new posting or
a new thread created.

-Liam [[witty lama]]
-- 
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata