On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 6:31 PM, Gwern Branwen<[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Samuel Klein<[email protected]> wrote: >> Well, there is something in the original proposal that makes sense to me -- >> devoting specific attention to long-term facilitation of discussion and >> resolution of difficult issues. There is something about wiki-time (to >> borrow a term) that discourages measured discussion over time - if you miss >> the flashpoint discussion that sets a precedent, people may have moved on >> and you'll have to restart the original interest again. >> > > Email lists have the attention span of ferrets on crack; if we're > looking for long-term discussions, MLs are the worst model we could > pick, which is another strike against this proposal. > > Ironically, wikis are so far the online medium which have done best at > long-term conversations: I routinely see talk page conversations where > the gaps between one message and another may be a year or three. This > is not something I've ever been able to say of email lists, IRC chat, > IM, newsgroups, social sites, web aggregators, most every blog...
Probably to do with the stable central point - the page being discussed. All the other mediums you mention are transient. New articles hardly anyone returns to. Here, the encyclopedia pages are (in theory) kept up-to-date. On newsgroups I have seen years-old messages being revived, but there is often a strong social pressure to not do that, and instead start a new post. And there is no stable object for discussions to revolve around. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
