[Foundation-l] Creating articles in small wikipedias based on user requirement

[Tim Landscheidt]

Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net> wrote:

> [...]
> Of course, any way that people reply always leaves duplicate and unnecessary text in the email, which can be a pain when you're catching up with a large number of emails in a thread. That's just one of the downsides of the mailing list format, with a setup that can't cope with full conversation trees but instead assumes that the conversation is perfectly linear.

JFTR: No, mailing lists don't assume that in any way. And
one of Jussi-Ville's implicit points of criticism was espe-
cially that top-posting is no conversation, but an exchange
of monologues as the connection between two posts is not al-
ways clear.

> Another way of arguing this (since I only just found Keegan's second reply when cropping the previous email...): having a mixture of posting styles reflects the rich historical culture of email transactions, and is something that we should foster rather than try to do away with.

That may fly at a pitch for a local election campaign for
the incumbent ("our streets aren't dirty/potholed/whatever,
they reflect the rich culture of our community"), but in
most cases people will define the term "culture" *much* nar-
rower.

  And the success of Wikipedia, Wiktionary & Co., not to
speak of the UX initiatives of the WMF, seems to indicate
that some forms of presentation are more likely to attract
and please readers than others.

  But the advantage of email compared to body odours and
choice or lack of clothing is that it is very easy to filter
on the recipient's side so there's no need for fury.

Tim