You really should try out Wikipedia; all of this sounds like a duplication of effort.
On Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 09:36:26PM -0400, James Green-Armytage wrote: > - Old versions of the dictionary will still exist in the archives, so if > some malevolent person deletes a definition or two, they can be recovered > effortlessly. Wiki does that. That's why it works. You can always get to old versions of a Wiki page. > - Nobody will ever have to ask "What was the link to the jargon dictionary > again?" because the dictionary will be in the archives, and new versions > will be mailed out periodically. You could save some bandwidth and mail a link to the Wiki page periodically instead. And mailing list archives are much more difficult to find than a page on the most prominent Wiki in existence. > - Similarly, people on the list will be less likely to neglect the > dictionary if it is on the list itself rather than on a separate site. > That means that the dictionary will be updated more often, and hence will > be more useful, and hence will have more attention paid to it, and hence > will be updated more often, and so on in a virtuous cycle. This is another way of saying that the dictionary will keep being mailed to people who aren't looking for it. The specific disadvantage of e-mail: People can end up forking versions of the list accidentally, by not replying to the latest version of the e-mail. Sometimes the latest e-mail is one they haven't even received yet. At this point, this requires effort on someone's part to merge all versions of the list together periodically. This isn't just theoretical - I participated in an online game (with no set turn order) that was played by e-mail. When the concurrency problems built up too much, we finally moved to a Wiki. -- Rob Speer ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
