A more social and personal editing experience

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.