Re: Collaborating on EXSLT

Florent Georges wrote:
> Michael Kay wrote:
> 
>   Hi,
> 
>> I would encourage having a "talk" page for each function, even
>> stable ones, with access granted as widely as possible, and
>> encouraging discussion of specific functions to take place on the
>> Wiki rather than the mailing list. I think it's easier to
>> disentangle threads that way and work out whether consensus has
>> been reached; it makes it easy to check the history of the
>> discussion and see its current state, as well as avoiding
>> repeated discussion of the same issues.
> 
>   I wonder what this way of communicating will actually look like.
> For what I've seen in existing wikis, those pages tend to be a
> mess, and contributors just forget to follow the page after a while
> (problem of "pop"-style media.)  It would be useful to have such a
> "talk" page where editors (or even any contributor) would summarize
> discussions as they occur on the mailing list, copy & past
> interesting emails or link to the archives.
> 
>   But using the wiki directly to communicate sounds a bit like a
> misuse.

Yeah, I must admit my experience with wiki discussion pages has been
pretty painful.  Whether Wikipedia, or the original Pie/Atom wiki, which
we were only too happy to abandon once IETF gave us a mailing list, etc.

But Mike does have a point that it would be nice to have a way to keep
track of discussion threads in a less entangled way from the full list
archives.

I wonder if technology could help here.  We could have a script read
mailing list messages for mentions of specific EXSLT extension, and have
an auto-updated page with links to relevant messages for each extension?

Just a wild idea.


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