Hi,

On Tue, 23 Oct 2001, Pascal Van Hecke wrote:
> Starting the thread at
> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard-user&m=100255929813056&w=2
> , I felt reluctant bringing up again the usual
> sensitive points in an open source, or more generally,
> in a volunteering project.
>
Although you started the thread, It was not your message that hit the
'sensitive spots'. I recall your message to be one of productive
criticism.

> I was asking in my mail to add the annotation
> possibility again to the online manual.  I also think
> the faq is a very good thing, thanks for all that! 
> But I still think that it will remain difficult to
> keep up with the information flow in the mailing list.
>  The problem with the mailing list is that is far too
> unstructured to extract information from it
> afterwards, afterwards meaning: if you do not follow
> it daily.  (And if you DO follow it daily, you simply
> do not have time left to AND work on the documentation
> AND proceed with midgard development...). 
> Furthermore, it turns out that very few people keep
> being motivated for this editorial work, eternally
> having to catch up with the far more exciting
> development...  So I' m afraid that we 'll have to
> find other means to avoid users asking the same
> questions over and over again and developers having to
> spend too much time on support.

The above seems to be all too true, seeing the development and the
coming and going of volunteers over the past few years

<snip>a lot about wiki</snip>

> I really feel we should give it a try and abandon the
> mailinglist for a Wiki.  The people on the mailinglist
> are practically all techies who should not have
> difficulties mastering this new medium, but I think
> the problem we have now is that I'm not sure this
> PhpWiki 1.2 is the right solution at this moment.  So
> I'm anxiously waiting for your feedback,

Although I see great value in a wiki or wiki-like as you proposed, I am
dead set against abandoning the mailinglist. Reason for this is that some
of us can only access mail through a terminal most of the time. completely
moving away from the mailinglist would mean losing contact with those
people.
Having said that, I see no solution for the problem you so rightly
introduced: how to make sure that information from the mailinglist keeps
on finding it's way into manual and FAQ's.

wkr,

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