[documentation] Proposal to deprecate the docs mailing list

[Addison Berry]

On Nov 20, 2008, at 7:40 PM, Joshua Brauer wrote:
>>>
>
> In sort my vote would be that the email list should remain the  
> primary workspace and wiki pages, when appropriate, can serve a  
> valuable purpose as a supplement.

Well the main problem is that we can't "occasionally" use wiki pages  
as a supplement. You have to be a member to use a wiki page and if we  
open up membership then folks can create any kind of group content  
which will end up spawning some discussions on g.d.o and some on the  
mail list.

I think the bottom line, no matter what we do is that there will  
always be a group that prefers either email lists or web based. I'm  
not sure how to accommodate everyone (we can't). A lot of feedback  
that I get when trying to recruit new members to our discussions  
though is that they don't want to join an email list. Or even if they  
are willing to, it is very frustrating to tell new members "oh yeah,  
we are talking about that. you can read up on this nasty piper mail  
interface and then join the mail list and create a new thread  
referring to the archive version that you read." So, um, how many  
people have you seen jump into our discussions like that? *me hears  
crickets chirp* That is seriously one of my main motivations, in terms  
of getting new people involved, that I have to deal with all the time  
when talking to people who want to help out.

I do get the strong arguments in favor of the mail list and no, g.d.o  
is not ideal, but I do still feel that the advantages  of g.d.o are  
greater in terms of collaboration and getting new people involved.  
Unfortunately it is also hard to reach out to get the opinion of  
people who don't use the mail list since, de facto, they have limited  
ways of getting involved in discussions. If they don't subscribe to  
the RSS feed for the doc group, they have no idea this discussion is  
even happening right now. That seems pretty limiting in and of itself.

- Addi