Ken Manheimer <klm@digicool.com> writes:
In fact, i'm *really* interested in "turning answers into stories". That is, not just getting answers to questions, but preserving them in a way that makes them easy to find when they're next needed - organizing them so they collectively serve to describe the topic they're about, to make the topic, as a whole, discoverable. While i think there are many modes of discussion that can serve this purpose, depending on the application and collaborative context, i think mailling list discussion threads need more. They're a step towards that building-together, but fail to organize beyond that - so the answers they provide are fragmentary glimpses into the topic at hand.
One key way wiki documents help bind the fragments is by providing more "fixed points" around which discussions can range. The fixed points are not immutable - they can evolve - but they're easy to point at, and provide a definite manifestation of the topic at some stage of its life.
That's a good point. Mailing list threads are great if you're around when they come up. After that, searching is doable, but not easy enough - witness that the same threads tend to come up for any list. One good quality of lists is that if you can tell your reader to organize threads, then the discussion is broken up and shoved in your face for you piece by piece. In a wiki, on the other hand, you have to return to the same page, find where you were last, and actively look for changes.
The dev.zope.org proposals site is one example where definite subjects are at hand. As someone behind the WikiNG proposal, who *wants* to be able to reap the suggestions and details from a discussion, but knows i won't have the time for a while to actually concentrate attention on it, i dread having to collect all the messages, for later review for harvesting. Furthermore, messages on the mailling list tend to diverge more and farther from the topic, than they do when placed within the wiki.
What i'd like the best, for now, is to have discussion happen on the mailling list *when someone wants to feel something out*, *and then they're responsible for summarizing in the wiki discussion page, if they have anything to harvest*.
Note that we keep on acknowledging that the different fora are better in different ways, and that what we keep on wanting is the right way to communicate and propagate between the fora. Here, you want it to be easy to pop a thread into a wiki. Something like a thread-to-wiki feature would be nice - tell the wiki "flatten this thread & make a page for it", then edit it by hand. But it's still a one-way link, really, the best you can do is post a final message to the thread - 'see the wiki for further discussion'. Which isn't that bad, really. What I really want is for the different fora to just be interfaces on the information. I'm not sure how, it isn't that realistic, I can't think of an implementation without it getting overfeatured. Something like wiki edits being reflected in the mailing list archive. Nah. -- Karl Anderson karl@digicool.com