Re: Re: Proposal for mailing list versus wiki

Mark Hahn wrote:

> http://prothon.org/wiki?pagename=ThisWiki

"This particular wiki has been in use for one day but I've used many 
wikis before. I find them to be very strong at allowing people to 
collaboratively build a document set: that is what they are for. They 
are quite poor at managing discussions. It is hard to see who said what 
on what date, as part of what thread. Look above: were the bits that I 
said all part of one message or a series of responses to your responses? 
Wikis also scale poorly because two people cannot edit the same page at 
the same time whereas in a mailing list you can easily have a dozen (or 
a hundred!) people reply to a message without conflict.

The print command bug could be easily moved from the list to the wiki 
merely by making links. "The print command is now on the list of things 
to be worked on because of the problems discussed in the following 
mailing list messages." Furthermore, you could summarize the list 
messages so that the wiki represents our current best understanding 
about the issue rather than the discussion that illustrates our early 
confusion about the issue. That's my idea of what the wiki is for: to 
present a coherent picture for insiders and outsiders of our current 
best understanding of issues."