Cohousing-L Mailing List: Sharing our collective wisdom more widely

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

Good subject lines and wiki articles can make wisdom in cohousing-L
more accessible and useful to more people.

My note "Intentional community for people in all stages of life"
suggesting an alternate subject line for current
discussion thread "New View as a model of possibility"
has led me to write this message.

Cohousing-L messages are prominent in the inboxes
of our nearly 800 readers briefly.  Some messages deserve a longer life.
While all messages are available in the archives, in a short time the
noteworthy ones and those of a more fleeting relevance get harder to find
in our now nearly 26,000 archived messages.

Well crafted subject lines

Subject lines are seen much more often than the body of messages, so if
the subject give a good clue as to the content of the message that is
relevant to the reader, they are much more likely to read it.

Places where subject lines are prominent:
o Inbox indexes
o Archive indexes
o Search results **
o The current cohousing-L search engine has a way to limit searches to
  subject lines *** which can be helpful when searching for common words
  or when getting too many hits.

** The current cohousing-L archive search results also return the first
   200 or so unquoted characters of the message so a bit longer summary at
   the beginning of the message is also helpful.  See the first two lines
   of this message.

*** (tho not as easily as the one we used to have from Peter Scott see
   http://lists.cohousing.org/pipermail/cohousing-l/msg12200.html )
   With current form:
   If you prefix a search term with "+subject:", such as +subject:Fruit ...


So the first way to give information in messages a "longer life"
is to use as good a subject line to summarize the general idea of the
message as possible.

---- Wiki articles that link to noteworthy threads ----

I've been pondering use of the cohousing wiki - http://wiki.cohousing.org
recently to give more and better access to notable threads in cohousing-L

Cohousing Wiki articles which can be easily written, edited and updated by
anyone (tho registration is now required to reduce vandalism). Wiki
articles are more adequately organized by topic and thus differs from the
list archives which are basically chronological.  Linking wiki articles to
selected messages in the archives (as well as other resources) seems to
hold great potential.

Such wiki articles could simply have a minimal introduction to a topic and
links to relevant messages in the archives.  Or a much more ambitious wiki
article could summarize and include quotes and new writing to weave
together some synthesis of one or more cohousing-L threads.

This would be an alternative to searching for topics of interest in the
archives. Searching will still be needed for articles about topics that
don't have wiki articles. Searching will be basic to the creation and
updating of such wiki articles.

A minimalist wiki article of this type would simply be the results of
searching the archives on a topic tho it would of course benefit from
editing the relevant hits from the irrelevant.  (Typically searching to
get good results requires use of several terms, combinations of terms etc
and can be considerable effort.)

If and when you search the archives on a topic, please consider sharing
your results with others via the cohousing wiki. If you do not feel up to
editing wiki pages, send a note to the cohousing wiki mailing list
( wiki-L [at] cohousing.org ) and maybe someone will be able to do the wiki
editing part with your research.

I'd like to see cohousing folks with a special interest in a topic
to "adopt" the cohousing wiki article on that topic (or join others who
share that interest **) to see that the article is created, gets updated
etc. ( ** Every cohousing wiki article has an optional discussion page
for people to share info about the article. )

Fred, cohousing-L and cohousing wiki manager

--
Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
Communications for Justice -- Free, superior listserv's w/o ads:
http://justcomm.org      My Link Pg: http://fholson.cohousing.org
612-588-9532 (7am-10pm CST/CDT)   Email: fholson at cohousing.org