A more social and personal editing experience
Kerry - posting a note on your English Wikipedia talk page.
PKM, thank you but I don't think you grasped what I am asking.
I went to the project you mentioned, but like every project I have visited, I cannot find how to be part of the community. How do I sign up for the mailing list? I tried adding the recommended wiki text to my userpage to say I was a member of a project, hoping that maybe that would somehow initiate my membership but still nothing happened.
Apparently I am part of projects but I don't know how to communicate with them. How can I collaborate with people I cannot talk to?
PS I am also a Women of A Certain Age. And my interest in Lucy Osburn is because (many years ago in a decade far far away - I like SF too) I was in Osburn House at school (named in her honour). I was recently a small player in raising money to Digitise The Dawn, a late 19th century feminist newspaper in Australia. So I am interested in Australian Women's Biography.
There isn't a mailing list, but you can talk to us here.
If you add your name to the member's list, we'll know you are interested, and you can also post on the talk pages of other project members.
There's also some discussion on the WWI task force talk page if that interests you.
Sorry to be stupid, but I still don't get it. That's a page. How do I know if someone has answered me? It is like my Talk Pages. I knew you had written something there only because you told me in this thread. But otherwise I would not have known. How would I know if someone had written something new on the page you pointed me to? How would I know if my question was answered? I tried to write on a page like that once but I got a message about edit conflict, so I don't even understand how to write on one.
I'll answer on your talk page.
I'd say something stronger than "cumbersome". I'd say "inefficient" and "ineffective". Wiki pages are great tools for shared information. They are not communications tools. From what you describe, I have to be logged into Wikipedia to see these updates and I then have to constantly visit various pages and read the entire thing to check to see if things are changed.
I am involved with a lot of projects (outside of Wikipedia) and a mailing list seems to be the most basic tool that every project uses. I find Google Groups works fine for many projects (people receive new messages via email but the WWW page maintains an archive of discussion).
Since you say this is a new project, would it be worth the experiment of creating a mailing list to see if it makes the project more effective?
Please ask the project members on the project discussion page. I am the wrong person to ask. I personally loathe mailing lists, and I don't like having my email full of notifications from WP, Facebook, Yammer, Twitter, and all the other tools I use, but that's my personal style. :-) I know most people feel differently.