[WikiEN-l] A modest proposal - a recap of resolution-l

[Gwern Branwen]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Samuel Klein<meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, there is something in the original proposal that makes sense to me --
> devoting specific attention to long-term facilitation of discussion and
> resolution of difficult issues.  There is something about wiki-time (to
> borrow a term) that discourages measured discussion over time - if you miss
> the flashpoint discussion that sets a precedent, people may have moved on
> and you'll have to restart the original interest again.
>

Email lists have the attention span of ferrets on crack; if we're
looking for long-term discussions, MLs are the worst model we could
pick, which is another strike against this proposal.

Ironically, wikis are so far the online medium which have done best at
long-term conversations: I routinely see talk page conversations where
the gaps between one message and another may be a year or three. This
is not something I've ever been able to say of email lists, IRC chat,
IM, newsgroups, social sites, web aggregators, most every blog...

-- 
gwern