On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 mbel44@dial.pipex.net wrote:
Since the beginning of this year DC have moved alot of debate and discussion out of mailing lists, and in to Wikis. http://www.zope.org/WikiCentral/FrontPage lists most Zope Wikis. Does anyone else find Wikis to be far less convenient than a good old mailing list?
Convenient for what? If you've ever tried to support a community through a mailling list, you'll quickly notice that questions, and their corresponding answers, repeat. A lot. The problem is that while maillists are great for keeping people up-to-date on the business of the community, and for disseminating dialogue, they are not so good for building structures - for organizing content so related pieces of a story are appropriately connected. (Note that i do *not* dislike mailling lists - before i joined DC i resurrected mailman from an abandoned prototype and developed it for use on python.org, because we needed a customizable system for conducting the ongoing business of the python community. Maillists just are not right for building structures.) Wikis, as they stand, are not bad for organizing stories. We all sorely miss change notifications and ownership attribution, a preview button, etc - but they're better, even as they currently stand, for building longstanding artifacts than are mailling lists. And hopefully, in not too long, we'll be able to improve them, or provide something else, to do the job right. (I am not hopeful about the fate of the WikiNG proposal right now, the powers that be are dictating that the PTK should be the medium for this kind of thing - and i don't see how to fit the low-impedence features of the wiki in there, and so will be severely disappointed if WikiNG doesn't fly, but that's up to others. In any case, *something* is clearly needed - the wikis are just the best fit for part of the job, right now.) Ken Manheimer klm@digicool.com