My point was: if someone posts a mail with pointers to warez or porn or spam - it will get through and will be archived in the mailing list archives.
Humm, are we arguing with the stop sign here? We seem close to a settling in on that rare and wonderful thing - a consensus about what to do. Is this hair splitting moving us toward that delightful goal? Maybe I'm missing the scale of the point your making. I'll admit I find it an interesting analogy, so I'll take the bait ... but first ...
My sense is that people are reasonably comfortable with attempting to
move toward a model where there are N wiki are owned and operated by individual PMCs. Those PMC can then strive to make those 'documents' reflect their sense of what makes them proud. Meanwhile interlinking and good search tools should make this just as delightful as the current ownerless wiki.
I see a few good things about that. It resolves a problem for the board, i.e. that it's their legal responsibility requires that they have a simple awnser to the who's in charge question. It creates pools of light were pride of ownership can illuminate the work of polishing the content. It lets us get some diversity of approaches. It makes me happy since it's an idea I've been advocating - and really that's all that's important. Right now I think the Wiki is really neat, but I'm not proud of it. I don't feel enough ownership to fight the good fight to fix that; but I am willing to advocate a restructuring that would create - ah - smaller oceans to boil.
To get at your point. I find it interesting because it seems to get to the heart of how the open source process tried to create a engine that sums up the skills and reputations of individuals into results that are better than the parts, results that have higher reputations than the individuals could probably create on their own.
I do see a striking difference between the wiki and the mailing list. The mailing list is the transcript of a conversation among assorted parties. If I post a stupid, rude, lame, illegal, embarrassing thing to the mailing list there is little doubt that it was me who takes the responsibility for that. It is my reputation that suffers.
The reputation of the list, and in turn the PMC that owns and manages that list suffers only by association. In a list with enough contributors that association will be limited.
The Wiki, on the other hand, give the impression of being the document of the organization (or I hope a PMC). The readers and the writers of that document are encouraged to treat it in that way. So if I go in and write something stupid, rude, lame, illegal, embarrassing in the Wiki the first impression of the reader is not "who ever wrote this is a twit" it's that "this document's authors are twits." The association seems much stronger.
You could argue the same thing is true in a mailing list. If I enter a mailing list and the first few posting are twit-rich(tm) I am as likely to think "The people on this list are twits." as the more accurate "Those three are being twits today."
It's interesting to consider the very nice example of PHP's easy to edit manual annotations. When you read those pages you get a very clear dividing line between the content that is reflects upon the reputation of the PHP doc team and the vs. the content that reflects upon random individuals. As a user of that manual I know to take the comments with a grain (often a very large grain) of salt.
Of course this whole business about how to design systems that have low barriers to entry but then filter out the really good stuff is at the heart of open source, source forge, everything2, etc. etc. Lots of room for experimentation. Presumably when people dis source forge they are critical of the balance they have struck between barrier to entry and filtering.
- ben
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