I am looking for a productive mailing list that discusses matters of importance to the Wikimedia community. That the people on such a list can have these discussions politely, respectfully, and with concern for others in that the words that say, and attitudes taken. I want to see announcements, I want to see a higher quality of conversation on what should be a flaglist in the mailing list space of Wikimedia.
Producing civil discourse isn't easy. I was very impressed by AGF when I first arrived at Wikipedia, and it's taken me some years to realize it goes badly wrong in the long term; protects refined trolls, who learn to use it as a shield against accusations of bad faith and a weapon against those of good faith whom they manage to provoke. The opposite extreme may only work under special circumstances --- Never assume https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Never_assume works tolerably well for en.wn, but Wikinews has the advantage that most discussions can't meaningfully drag out anyway because most issues of contention would be unpublished articles, which rapidly go stale and become irrelevant (so that partial moderation of discussions is afforded indirectly by en.wn's article-review workflow, which is more nearly objective than a direct discussion-moderation). Arguably, AGF shows that fully distributed moderation doesn't work, while Never assume only shows that weak direct moderation can work if there's an external factor imposing order. The internet is a dangerous place http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2014/02/internet_troll_personality_study_machiavellianism_narcissism_psychopathy.html and one wants a set of rules for moderating internet discussions that is radically inclusive of those of good faith but wildly different views, exclusive of troublemakers, and objective enough to be enforced consistently and successfully by many different moderators of good faith.