[cap-talk] Wiki for discussion?? (was Re: cap-talk infrastructure problem?)

[Kevin Reid]

On Dec 6, 2006, at 19:26, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 19:13 -0500, Kevin Reid wrote:
>> Um, a wiki is not at all suitable for replacing a mailing list. Wikis
>> are not good for discussion, because they do not work in terms of
>> messages, unread-message tracking, and the immutable history they
>> track is of changes, not messages.
>
> Systems like Drupal and Plone have some very good modules designed  
> to do
> just this kind of interaction.

Having never used either one I'll wait till I see the proposed system  
to comment on its suitability. However, whether or not it includes a  
wiki, I claim that calling such a system a wiki is confusing and  
inappropriate.

>> I, at least, would far rather stick with silently discarded messages
>> for cap-talk and e-lang than move to an awkward-to-use system.
>
> The real issue isn't discarded messages. It's inability to effectively
> organize the discussion threads.

Depending on what you mean by organization, this might be improved by  
better software for displaying the mail archive. Pipermail has very  
little thread display and navigation capability, but something else  
could.

If you mean larger-scale organization, such as categorizing threads,  
then perhaps effort might be better spent on producing documents from  
the discussion. I'm not sure about this though.


(The most important property of any new discussion system, to me, is  
that I be able to automatically receive all new discussion, either as  
feeds (RSS/Atom) or mail, without having to explicitly subscribe to  
subthreads.)

-- 
Kevin Reid                            <http://homepage.mac.com/kpreid/>