[WikiEN-l] Time to reboot wikien-l

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Nov 18, 2007 4:06 AM, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
> >> As to the question of argumentation, the list I'm talking about
> >> ("wikien-forum" in my proposal) would be specifically biased against
> >> argumentation and direct replies to individual points. Most
> >> contributions would have to be able to stand on their own: thematically
> >> related to the thread, but no quoting, ranting, or kvetching. People who
> >> want to have direct discussions would be encouraged to do so, just not
> >> on the list.
> >>
> >
> > How does that work? All conversation pretty much falls into two
> > categories - informative and argumentative. Informative takes the form
> > of question and answer, argumentative takes the form of
> > point-counterpoint. Either way involves each email being a reply to a
> > previous email. A dialogue does not consist of a sequence of
> > monologues, and mailing lists are intending for dialogues (or
> > polylogues, or whatever you call multi-way conversations). If people
> > want to post monologues, they can start blogs.
> >
>
> Mailing lists are intended for whatever people intend them for.
>
> I'm suggesting we split our current one into a version that continues to
> be a relatively open dialog ("wikien-open") and one that is heavily
> edited by volunteer moderators ("wikien-forum"). Some threads would be
> purely in the edited list. Interesting threads on the open list (or
> wherever) could be summed up or excerpted to the edited list.
>
> How it actually develops would be determined by moderator
> experimentation and reader feedback, and I'm pretty open to what that
> would be. The flavor I'd personally aim for is something between a
> moderated panel discussion and a well-edited interview.
>
> My theory here is that many people are interested in the results of
> discussions on this list, but very few care to read the long arguments,
> the tit-for-tat replies, or the seven thousandth post on some issue that
> we will never settle. So we take turns editing that out.
>
> If you have an improvement or an alternate proposal, please bring it up.
> As Jussi-Ville Heiskanen pointed out, constructive comments are a lot
> more useful than purely negative ones.
>

Amusing that you got that from what I posted, but not my basic point,
which is that the _right_ way to drown out noise is by increasing signal
not just in this discussion, but in the mailing list as a whole. Dividing will
conquer no mailing list.

There is a universal dynamic of discussion forums, and no matter how
one names them, they will obey that (as the silly possums found out
when they tried to reform wikimedia related IRC-channels). There are
people who will feed any thread by commenting on it, no matter how
slly (EC are you reading this?), there are people who will comment when
they (narcissistically) think they have something witty or insightful to add
and then there are people (like me) who will only add to the conversation
if they feel they have a contribution to make that they feel most people
will not figure out for themselves anyway (trusting the intelligence of
the readership is one large chunk of not feeding trolls).


--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]