Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

RE: [Icehouse] IGDC Winter (and beyond)

  • FromDavid Artman <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateThu, 04 Oct 2007 09:59:55 -0700
> From: Carl Worth <cworth@xxxxxxxxxx>
> I like wikis. They're great at what they do well, (the talk page is
> excellent for a random visitor to note something while reading, for
> example). But I don't think that actual discussion is something that
> wiki pages do well at all.

Well, yeah, I think the list is better than the wiki for fast-and-loose,
unstructured discussion... but a wiki is actually much better for
threading debate and archiving it (hiding it away, when resolved) and
generally having a lot of powerful tools for presentation of ideas
(illustration, much more format control, etc). And I thought the wikis
were supposed to draw some of this stuff off the lists, for that reason
and to generally enter the 21st Century, information-management-wise?

Frankly, I'd prefer (Simple Machine) Forums for both sites, cross-linked
from the wiki Nav Panel and from the Forum header. That has the benefit
of being opt-in on bandwidth and e-mail storage (rather than receiving
every post) and also provides a clear overview of topics, to find only
those in which one is interested.

Of course... forums suffer from folks not checking them regularly at
least as much as wiki Recent Changes pages suffer (which, by the way, is
what everyone should check to really stay "current"--it's an overview,
too!). E-mail lists (for good or ill) force the information into more
frequently checked "bins": the users' e-mail accounts.

> I greatly prefer a mailing list where everything comes by, and I can
> fairly easily ignore entire threads where they don't interest me.

Visually ignore, yes, but not ignore by your mail storage limits or your
bandwidth or your time to delete them; you'd have to go to the archives,
to really be able to utterly ignore threads... and that's no different
than clicking Recent Changes at the wiki, in the end.

Anyhow... this is an interesting meta-discussion about where and how to
discuss the actual points at hand. Perhaps it should be its own thread,
while this one remains here to receive opinions from folks who really
can't take the time (or learn) to edit the wiki, to post a reply.

Summary: forums are best, wikis a close second (functionally), and lists
are lame; but in the end, I just want a consensus on these Procedural
points, so I can update the IGDC page and then announce Winter
officially (moving Summer info to its own archive page).

:)
David