On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 8:12 PM, Benjamin Lees<emufarm...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Anthony <wikim...@inbox.org> wrote: > >> I propose the foundation-announce-l mailing list be set up with the >> following posting rules: >> 1) One post per person per thread. That includes the initiator of the >> thread. > > That's not how announcement lists work. The whole point of an announcement > list is that the only posts on it will be announcements; and for the list to > be useful, the announcements have to be limited to those that are important > to the list's topic (which is usually narrowly defined) and of interest to > the subscribers—which generally means that only people in positions of > authority are allowed to post. mediawiki-announce and toolserver-announce > are good examples.
I'm pretty confident that Anthony knows how traditional announcement lists work. But what is the meaning of an announcement list for a non-hierarchical highly decentralized project? For smaller projects you just give all the active project members the rights to post to the list — and trust that they understand that they are supposed to keep the volume down and that all the project members agree about what is announcement worthy. I think what Anthony suggests is an interesting and worthwhile idea. The Wikimedia communit(y|(ies)) have a lot of communications challenges: People are often unaware of interesting things that others are doing. The editorial channels like EnWP's signpost are fairly narrow pipe. And the open communication lists suffer from high traffic even when their signal to noise ratio is decent. I don't agree with the notion that "we need moderators and list admins to make sure the rules are not broken", obviously the list would need someone who can enforce the rules but there is little reason to believe that there would be much enforcement work after all: the wikis do okay without heavy handed control. Right now there is a lot of announcement duplication because there is no clearly right place to send announcements with foundation wide impact, so we send them everywhere. Were I king of the universe I'd probably pick somewhat different criteria than Anthony suggested (i.e. I might suggest something crazy like initial posts must be translated into at least two languages… to shift the communication cost onto the sender; or require that any posting be on behalf of at least two people), but I don't know that the specifics matter or that my suggestions would really be any better than his. If someone wants to try out something along the lines of what Anthony is suggesting I'd be willing to volunteer for list-mod duty, with the understanding that the moderators purpose is primary enforcing the rules for traffic control purposes. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l