http://blog.centraldesktop.com/comments.php?y=06&m=05&entry=entry060501-194015
Certainly it isn't good without some better system of organization associated with it. We were at one point talking about creating such a thing…
Email is pretty bad. Aside from the fact that it is insecure (no one wants to PGP) – and the fact that it is convenient for the NSA to scan and archive – the real problem with email is that there is no way of knowing for sure if an email gets through, except maybe to send another email asking… A vital communication could just disappear and both parties might be clueless about the disappearance. The wiki approach is good – the info is there right away and it is possible to see that it is there.
--ocat
As for wikis, there is also a definite advantage when it comes to conversations involving several people. With e-mail, what one gets are a lot of messages sent between a lot of people (perhaps with the assistance of a centralized listserver) and one has to dig through all those messages to piece together the conversation. With wiki, however, everything occurs in a centralized location. For a good example, look at the conversation which arose from my Two years later last week. I found it much easier to participate in that conversation exactly because it had a central page so I could see the various remarks people posted in the context of the whole and reply to various points raised by various people together rather than as separate replies to separate points.
Indeed this is pretty much the reason why this wiki was created in the first place. Two years ago, Joe, Aaron and I were carrying on a number of conversations on HDM, copyright, PM, and the like via e-mail. This was getting a bit hectic and confusing, so Joe put up this wiki as an alternative venue. --rspuzio
See also: the relative merits of wiki and other workflow management media
FYI, now that my laptop computer is (temporarily) broken again, I have to use a library computer to do work. I have access to email, and I also have access to all of the files that we backed up on Savannah with CVS -- thank goodness! However, what I don't have is the TeXed copies of the documentation we wrote, and I'm not sure I'll be able to run TeX in the library (even though it is a math library). It's times like these that make me wish for a central place to do development work – like a PlanetComputing – with both support for version management via CVS and support for user-friendly views of literate documentation.
--jcorneli