[sugar] [OLPC library] Things I would like taken away from the wiki: Sign-up lists

[FFM]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 04:23:04PM -0400, Seth Woodworth wrote:
> There are few policies that we've been implementing from time to time on the
> wiki that I would like to see go away.  It's my belief that these policies
> are hard to maintain, ill-scalable, and unsupportable as-is.  I suggest that
> we retire the following:
> 
> == Sign up lists ==
> * Lists where people are encouraged to sign up to do a task or contribute to
> a given project.
> 
> There are several projects and pages that suggest that you sign-up to help
> do '$variable'.  There are several problems with this idea.
> 
> There is no automatic mechanism in place to communicate to users who sign up
> on a list.  If I wanted to send a message to this list, I would have to wade
> through User_talk: pages and communicate with each person individually each
> time I want to make an announcement.  This is compounded by the fact that
> many users don't sign the page or add a link to their user page, and merely
> type their names.
 
We can say "sign with ~~~~". 

> I feel that a projects should have open task lists or joining a list or some
> other mechanism than a sign up list.  Alternatively, if someone were to
> create a bot or tool that makes this ad-hoc list broadcasting function
> (including making sure people are notified via email), I would be ecstatic.

Such bots are in existance on the english wikipedia, they are also open source.

The issue is that people don't know how easy it is to start a lists.l.o mailing
list, we need to make that more obvious. That could fix much of this issue. 

-FFM