[Ilugc] Re: eight steps to correct posting
- From: srivasta@xxxxxxxxxx (Manoj Srivastava)
- Date: Thu Oct 25 20:30:47 2007
On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:10:49 +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian
<linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:58:17 +0530, Arnold Noronha
<arnstein87@xxxxxxxxx> said:
On 10/25/07, Roshan Mathews
<rmathews@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But it seems that discussions on how to carry out discussions take up
more space than the actual discussion themselves. Not taking sides,
just making an observation.
Sure. You have to decide on the mechanics and policies before
you can get on to serious work.
A friend of mine recently commented that he didn't want to join the
list because the signal-to-noise ratio was too low :)
Am not taking sides either :)
Incidentally, even the people who are "taking sides" are just
making observations, in a sense. This pretending to hide behind the
guise of an "observer" merely makes people take your statements with
less gravity, and does nothing to reduce discussion. It just makes it
sound like you do not want to stand behind your own statements.
Not playing list police, and not taking up too much time in meta
threads like this does help improve SNR.
Only on the surface. If the content of the list degenerates into
hard to read posts, and postings that come across as rude because they
do not observe common nettiquette, then the signal will also
drop. Better to get it fixed before we lose the quality of the list.
It is better if _someone_ does play list police; ideally
off-list, to get the message across, and yet not clutter up the list.
The solution is to take the gentle reminder off-list, not throw
the baby out with the bath water by letting the list degenerate.
Like I said - Dr.Sreeram is free to appoint someone (say Bharati) to
do the "actual" admining of the list, and he can strive to keep
discussions on topic, as well as unsubscribe (say) people sending
social networking emails, recruitment and body shopping posts
completely unrelated to linux etc. Egregious violations.
Umm. This is not how most mailing lists and USENET groups
work -- they are governed by the charter, and by people sharing the
burden of meeting the charter. The people who created the mailing list
or group does not become a de-facto or de-jure god.
Are you suggesting we just silently ignore top posters and
people who do not know how to ask questions smartly[0]? I will
reluctantly do that, if the people on the mailing list are so resistant
to nettiquette. Presumably the signal will not drop because of this.
manoj
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
--
Spirtle, n.: The fine stream from a grapefruit that always lands right
in your eye. Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends"
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@xxxxxxx> <
http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>
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