I don't have any significant experience with wikis, but I have yet to use any discussion board that was anywhere near as useful to me, or as easy to use, as an email list.
Discussion boards have a web browser interface. Typically, they display at most a dozen topics at a time. Scrolling to get the next dozen is slow, as it requires a download from some web server. There is a huge amount of wasted screen space. When there is a topic that generates many messages scrolling through them is slow, as some discussion board interfaces show only 6 or 7 at a time. Search engines provided by the discussion board software are limited and slow. In contrast, in my email client I can show about three dozen subject lines at a time, I can quickly scroll up and down through the list, I can quickly group all the messages with the same subject line with a single click of the mouse. I can easily and quickly store selected messages of particular interest to a place where I can easily find them again. My email software searches very quickly through a huge number of messages. Then there's the question of administration and maintenance. Who is going to set up the wiki or discussion board categories? As far as I can tell (and that's actually not very far), either of them would require a lot more time and effort to set up and maintain than the present email list. Yes, r-help has a huge volume -- right now, my R-help mailbox has almost 22,000 messages in it, 2004-01-02 to the present; its size is about 124 mb. Yes, there is a lot of duplication. None the less, I find it easier and quicker to scan the subject lines a few times a day for interesting-looking topics than it would be to go to a browser and have to navigate up and down through various categories, looking for interesting-looking topics. As far as I can tell, the wiki concept is more along the lines of a reference library, whereas mailing lists and discussion boards are meant for people to ask each other questions, and give each other answers. If that perception is at all accurate, I would have to say that a wiki is by no means a suitable replacement for an email list. And when it comes to a choice between an email list and a discussion board, I have a strong preference for the email list. -Don At 7:04 PM -0600 1/5/06, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote: >I feel that as long as people continue to provide help on r-help wikis >will not be successful. I think we need to move to a central wiki or >discussion board and to move away from e-mail. People are extremely >helpful but e-mail seems to be to always be memory-less and messages get >too long without factorization of old text. R-help is now too active >and too many new users are asking questions asked dozens of times for >e-mail to be effective. > >The wiki also needs to collect and organize example code, especially for >data manipulation. I think that new users would profit immensely from a >compendium of examples. > >Just my .02 Euros > >Frank >-- >Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine > Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University > >______________________________________________ >R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list >https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html -- -------------------------------------- Don MacQueen Environmental Protection Department Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Livermore, CA, USA ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html