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Re: Forum

Original poster: Matthew Smith <msmiffy@xxxxxxxxx>

Greetings All

To introduce my $AU 0.02 (since everyone else has), forums don't suit
me.  A mailing list moderated by someone as good as Terry, to me, is
as close to a perfect means of bouncing ideas around a group as I can
think of.  The content is all on my mail client, I can be very
selective of which threads I want to read (I can just delete others)
and I can file and index mails for future reference.   Doing this with
a forum would require a LOT of cutting and pasting.

What I do think we need is a repository of some of the valuable data
that passes through the list (reference material, as opposed to
discussion).  Mail archives are all very well, but one often has to
hunt for the next/previous part of a thread (if indeed it can be found
- not so much a problem in Pupman land, but common elsewhere) and also
extract information from mail bodies that may contain other,
irrelevant material.  I think that a Tesla wiki* would be a good
proposition, but having run this idea past Terry before, who would
make it work?  Some of the people on this list have produced some high
quality material, posted on their personal sites, but a wiki is a good
way to get such material all in one, searchable, place.

I have moved my SciSalvage project <http://www.scisalvage.org> to wiki
format and am watching to see how that progresses; there have been
contributions - mostly from the good folks on this and the HV lists.
When SciSalvage gains 'critical mass', I might start thinking about an
experimental deployment of a MediaWiki site for Tesla-related
material, assuming that it doesn't push me over my bandwidth
allowance.

Cheers

M

* A wiki is a document authored by a community; despite anyone being
able to make edits, this concept works and works well - the most
successful example I have seen being the free encyclopoedia,
Wikipedia.  To find out more about wikis, read the wiki article on
Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki>

--
Matthew Smith
<http://www.mss.cx/blog>