(anonymous) wrote:
[...]
Broadly, I don't think many people appreciate how important mailing lists have been and continue to be to Wikimedia. Both in terms of providing a(n) historical record and in terms of day-to-day workflow. It would not be a bad investment on the part of the Wikimedia Foundation or a Wikimedia chapter to improve (or replace) mailman. Perhaps Flow or Echo or some other four-letter communication tool... one day. :-)
One idea I had was to have a bot or script post the full messages to wiki pages on Meta-Wiki (e.g., "Mailing lists/wikimedia-l/foo"). This would provide for much more stable links and provide a few other benefits. But it didn't quite seem worth it.
I don't think that's necessary. Gmane provides stable links and is probably better maintained while WMF neither has to pay for administration nor servers. And Lars' blog posts about requests for archive tampering are much more enter- taining :-) (and they /exist/ compared to WMF Legal's clan- destine behaviour that makes something like http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/ unthinkable).
The only major problem with Gmane and wikimedia-l is that someone has set the archives to "encrypt", so for proper quotes of mail addresses you still have to search the WMF archives or subscribe to a folder with auto-expire.
Tim