Just answering some of the questions regarding why we are trying the BBS in
Japanese wikipedia.
Again, a long posting. (I'm sorry about it.)
(1) The current BBS
The BBS was written by a user "Hoge-", not from scratch but based on a
free-software (no-charge for nonprofits, okay to modify). It uses perl and
cgi.
It is hosted by a server s/he has control over. When I notified Jimbo's
question, if the
BBS needs to be hosted by some official(?) wikipedia server, s/he said there
are still some
works to be done, so s/he prefers to have the BBS at the current server.
Before, another user also offered to host it if necessary. And s/he said
when the current
server run out of resource for some reasons, s/he would ask and pass the
BBS.
(2) How we come to think of using the BBS
I guess this part is not so informative if your interest is just on the BBS
v. Mailing list issue.
We discussed the matter at Village_pump, and the options included mailing
list, a page inside
wikipedia (Village_pump), and a BBS. We made observations about pros and
cons, but no one
pushed nor criticized any option very hard (which is somewhat usual in
Japanese 'pedia, though I'm
not sure if this is attributable to some Japanese cultural norms like
modesty and stronger
collectivism or something else).
Since no one made a suggestion, I searched on the web and suggested a free
BBS (with ads). In
responce, Hoge- (the user) observed that it has many limitations (we cannot
customize much), and
said that s/he will try to build a BBS for us
Some time has passed, and then some of us started talking about using
Villege_pump in a better
way, (I personally didn't want to push Hoge- to build BBS ASAP for our
discussion, so I was in to
that idea.)
Sometime around that time, it became clear that some of the archived
messages of the mailing list
are not readable. Some characters are not handled properly somewhere in the
process. It wasn't
clear if immediate solution can be found. After all, the list was just
created and not used much.
(We haven't decided how to use it.)
Then, Hoge- said s/he will build the BBS soon, and indeed s/he did. Some
users celebrated
Hoge-'s work. No one voiced that we should try to find solution for the
mailing list and use it,
or stick to the Village_pump plan.
So we started.
(3) BBS v. Mailing list
First, a disclaimer: I don't know if I have reasons to defend the use of BBS
against some
of the harshest critics among you. As mentioned above, we did not chose the
BBS after a
heated debate or with the cost of transition from an existing list to the
BBS.
The main problem with the mailing list is that some archived messages become
unreadable.
(Some pointed that it should be the mailing list software. And we will ask
further help from
Jason soon.)
Additional disadvantages (as perceived and voiced by Japanese wikipedia
users):
-Reading the archived postings is a bit more difficult than reading BBS
threads. Getting a quick
overview is especially hard.
-Reading through the archived postings takes time when wikipedia is slow,
(which is quite frequent
these days.)
-Discussion on a BBS (and on pages on Wikipedia) tend to be more focused and
continuous
perhaps because they are written with the previous postings in the same
screen, rather than in
one's memory. (though this may not always be a disadvantage).
-Because the arrival of the messages are not included in the
Special:Recent_changes, discussion
seems a bit remote from the activities taking place on the web. (Though it
is okay for some
topics.)
-Harder to link to pages on wikipedia. (some clients don't support html
links)
The last two disadvantages were shared with BBS, but Hoge- solved them by
changing codes
and making the bot I mentioned in the previous email.
(4) misc.
Just for your information: one user in Japanese 'pedia also recommended the
''http://phpbb.com/'' ,
the site Hunter mentioned earlier.
cheers,
Tomos
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