That's why mailing lists are great. 1. Okay, they don't address this, but that's a marginal advantage, easily outweighed by the advantages of asynchrony and di

That's why mailing lists are great. 1. Okay, they don't address this, but that's a marginal advantage, easily outweighed by the advantages of asynchrony and distance agnosticism alone, never mind the benefits of re-use. 2. Mailing lists hit the nail on the head here, because you have the context in the discussion thread. 3. This is a big win for mailing lists with a good search function (such as that provided by Gmail). Sure, it's not as nice as having the information painstakingly organized by a subject matter expert, but as you say, the human effort required to do that organizing is not usually available, and having the information there and searchable is far better than not having it.