Monahon, Peter B. wrote:
1 - More than one of my posts has bounced back because either:
- the moderator thinks is inappropriate (to complex?);
- because a list auto-setting complains that my post is too big (to
complex?). Hey, if I had simple problems ...
The maximum message body size is 40KB. The list is unmoderated.
2 - The list recently, at least, has taken w-a-y too long to arrive for me to depend on it for contemporaneous solutions. By the time the digest arrives, it's not only bereft of responses, but it's w-a-y too late, and I've moved on to other resources and other problems.
Then don't use digest delivery, use individual message delivery or gmane.org. At least that way you wouldn't keep breaking the threading.
So, is this list MediaWiki-l dead or dying? Do we all find each other off list instead, and the l-o-n-g time between broadcasts is an indication that this list has little or no function after all?
No it is not dead or dying. The digest frequency has no relation to the quality of support it provides.
Is MediaWiki-l dysfunctional? What is it good for, really?
It is good for answering a certain kind of question which is not too hard and not too easy. This is my experience of all kinds of volunteer question answering, both offline and online. If a question is too easy, the reader would take no pride in answering it, and may consider it insulting or patronising. If the question is too hard, there may be no readers capable of answering it.
Your questions, e.g. "how do I install MediaWiki on Windows", seem to be on the easy end of that scale. The best people for answering easy questions are paid support staff, but Wikimedia doesn't have any of them. I am paid, but I am a developer, not a support technician, and my priority is to help Wikimedia users.
We do have a few volunteers here with a tremendous amount of patience for answering tedious, easy questions, and I have a great deal of respect for them. But you have to be nice to them if you want them to help you.
Particularly time-consuming requests for help will hardly ever be met by a volunteer, unless the volunteer shares your goals.
Why not setup a real ***wiki*** discussion right at the MediaWiki.org home pages, and encourage the MediaWiki software to actually mature to handle such support needs as ours, instead of using an old-fashioned mailing list like this?
We do have a wiki. We also have IRC and a forum at mwusers.com. But the motives for volunteers there are exactly the same as here. So a question that goes unanswered here may well go unanswered everywhere. Buying commercial support is the obvious solution to this problem.
-- Tim Starling