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Welcome to the official Project Wombat website!

Project Wombat is an e-mail discussion list for difficult reference questions. Membership is free, and non-members may submit questions for discussion. Project Wombat continues the many fine traditions started by the Stumpers list once offered by Dominican University with some helpful new options.

For subscription information and the list archives, please see the List page.

Improved Hosting

Project Wombat uses Mailman for e-mail distribution. Mailman has an easy-to-use web interface, and offers many attractive features, and is additionally an open-source program. Although this makes Project Wombat much cheaper to maintain, it means that the old list commands no longer necessarily work. Please use the web interface instead of mail commands unless you have read recent documentation.

Just A Perfect Friendship

E-mail distribution and archiving for Project Wombat is hosted by Project Gutenberg. It is an appropriate combination—both are free, both are essentially Internet services, and both provide volunteer-based service. (And, one might add, both are appreciated by librarians.) Do not forget to look at the list of available works on the Project Gutenberg site!

Multiple Flavors

You can subscribe to three different versions of Project Wombat. Naturally, the main list is intended to carry on the off-beat, eclectic tone set by the Stumpers list, and will be “moderated in retrospect” like that list. In addition to the main list, however, we are offering two new lists. Project Wombat FM is a heavily filtered version of the list in which only questions and answers are distributed, as frequently requested by busy readers. Project Wombat Open is the opposite—except for a minimal filtering process to keep out spam, all posts from subscribers are accepted. All messages are sent to all three lists; the only difference between the lists is which messages make it through. For more information, see the List page.

Faster Operations

Previously, only one person moderated Stumpers at any given time. This was a major bottleneck—particularly if that person was unavailable for any long period. On the new server, there are multiple people with moderator privileges. As a result, questions from off-list can be passed along to the list more quickly, and requests for help can be dealt with any time any of the moderators checks their e-mail.