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

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 6:31 PM, Gwern Branwen<gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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...

Probably to do with the stable central point - the page being
discussed. All the other mediums you mention are transient. New
articles hardly anyone returns to. Here, the encyclopedia pages are
(in theory) kept up-to-date.

On newsgroups I have seen years-old messages being revived, but there
is often a strong social pressure to not do that, and instead start a
new post. And there is no stable object for discussions to revolve
around.

Carcharoth