On 12/4/06, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
This is a positive initiative. I have only one issue with it, which is that the mailing list is on Wikimedia's servers, while the wiki is not.
I have no objection to the wiki moving to Wikimedia's servers if Wikimedia want it, though the idea is to expand the concept to cover wikis in general, not only Wikimedia ones, so I don't know how well that would fit into Wikimedia's scope. I originally intended to put the mailing list on the same server as the wiki but the company I'm hosting it with has objections to mailman. I didn't want to put it on Wikia and have people thinking the project was just a way of advertising Wikia, freelists.org discourages private or unarchived lists, and, surprisingly, there don't seem to be any other free hosts of mailman mailing lists. Since Anthere approved the list being hosted by Wikimedia, I thought that would be the best place for it for now.
Users might also be confused when they subscribe to a Wikimedia mailing list but their Wikimedia username doesn't work on the wiki (I'm speaking about the hypothetical post-single login world ;-).
Even if Wikimedia hosts it, they will also be confused when their mailing list password doesn't let them into the wiki (a very common problem at Wikia).
Angela.