Re: Re: Proposal for mailing list versus wiki

"Paul Prescod" <[email protected]> wrote

> 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?

(I'm going to make one last gasp of a defense).

You were the first to break up an old posting into new postings, not me.  I
just copied you.  We could enforce the convention of keeping postings
entact.

> 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.

This is conjecture on our list.  Do you know how php-wiki handles this?

> The print command bug could be easily moved from the list to the wiki
> merely by making links.

I have been doing this and it is a lot of work.  Finding the archived
message url is non-trivial.

> "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."