[EM] trying to start an on-list Jargon Dictionary

[Rob Speer]

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