Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!chuq
From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: These stubborn group champions
Message-ID: <35675@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 16 Oct 89 06:41:26 GMT
References: <34029@looking.on.ca> <27858@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Life is just a Fantasy novel played for keeps
Lines: 222

>Such groups have no
>tradition to rest on, on the content is determined almost entirely by the
>name.

I don't agree with this at all. As can be found in dozens of groups on the
net, the top level domain really doesn't moderate content significantly.
sci.skeptic, to give one blatant example, isn't any more scientific because
it's in sci. It's a talk group, plain and simple, in the wrong domain
because of the way naming is done. Unfortunately, getting something moved is
impossible without some kind oif major renaming, since renaming on a
case-by-case basis is politically impractical. 

>I have no doubt that "rec.math" would be quite a 
>different group to "sci.math" (not that sci.math is by any means perfect...).

You may not doubt that, but I do. If there were *both* rec.math and
sci.math, yes. Or maybe: the history of comp.unix.questions and
comp.unix.wizards tends to show that if you create a 'beginners' group
and a 'serious persons' group the beginners will simply cross-post into
both places, since it's obvious they need the advice of the expert.
Going from a 'lesser' domain to a 'better' domain (i.e.  soc->sci or
rec->sci) does not improve the content. It improves distribution and
probably makes the founders of the group feel better (since it's a
'serious' group rather than a 'play' group) but it doesn't do anything
to either the audience or the content. I'm not sure that going from a
'better' to a 'lesser' domain would affect content markably, either --
there would be a reduction in audience due to the restricted
distributions, but that should, generally, be an across the board (from
expert to dweeb) cut. Are you really arguing that someone who is
interested in math isn't going to post to a math group just because
it's in a recreational domain?

From the experience we've seen in groups all over the net, the idiots
are just as happy to migrate up the domain as the experts are to head
down into the slums.

There are, frankly, as many good experts in rec.birds and rec.pets as there
are in alt.aquaria -- you don't see the veterinary researchers and the
dog/cat/bird breeders screaming that they're too good for rec.all, though.
And sci.skeptic (among others) shows clearly that putting a group in sci
doesn't make it either better or technical -- or keep the dweebs out.

The upper level naming is nothing more than a series of signposts and
hints. Experience on the net shows that it doesn't moderate posting
behaviour one whit.

>Well, others differ, it is clear.  Proponents of *.skeptic, *.rights.human,
>and *.aquaria all seemed to buy the self-fulfilling prophecy argument, and
>I agree with them.

You can agree all you want -- there's no body of evidence to support it...
I will, for instance, put up rec.arts.comics, rec.arts.sf-lovers,
rec.mag.otherrealms, rec.pets or rec.birds up against any of the sci groups
for signal/noise and content/flame ratio. Being in rec. doesn't imply lack
of content or somehow being lesser. All of those groups, for instance, beat
sci.skeptic, sci.environment and sci.nanotech on content and usefulness and
relative percentage of flames.

People are trying to push 'rec' as somehow inherently bad -- dead wrong.
It's no more bad than 'sci' is inherently good. They're placemarkers, and
goodness and badness are defined by the content of the groups inside, on a
group by group basis. The only domain that can be defined as 'bad' globally
is talk -- and that is by definition.

This whole 'move it into sci so we can get a real conversation' discussion
is a red herring -- there's absolutely no proof that being in one domain
makes a group better, and lots and lots of documentation that shows it makes
no difference. It's an emotional, ego-loaded, political discussion, not a
technical or factual one.

>This is precisely the kind of thing I was trying to get away from.  If domain
>names are based only on the quality of discussion, the "self-fulfilling
>prophecy" law rears it's head.

The only way this works is if all of the groups in that domain are actively
moderated -- because it isn't the name that improves information, it's the
insertion of a body between the poster and the reader to edit/screen.

>Everybody will then of course want their
>group in this domain -- because everybody believes, or at least hopes, that
>their group will be high-quality.

Which is what happened with comp.society.women (and which was proved
incorrect, fairly blatantly). Which is what is currently happening with
sci.aquarium as well. 

>What I suggest instead is that quality of discussion should *never* be an
>explicit factor in the naming of new groups.

The whole purpose of the domain structure was *never* to imply quality of
content, although that's how it seems to be viewed right now (it's *wrong*
but what the hell. USENET has never left facts come in the way of a good
argument). It was done for two reasons:

o to make it easier to tell what a group was for just from the name, and to
bring a little more logic to the name space in general.

o to allow system administrators with limited resources (or patience) to
more easily split off the partial news feed they want. That's one reason for
talk -- people who don't want the flamers can turn it off with a single
swipe. Admins who only want work-related (i.e. technical/computer) groups
can also easily do so.

This latter point, unfortunately, is the crux of this entire discussion.
Naming decisions are being mutated for political reasons -- if you can
figure out a way to put it in sci or comp, you get a wider distribution than
if you go into soc or rec -- and talk is the kiss of death (not that you'd
know it from the number of postings). So people try to rationalize their way
into the wider-distributions ("we aquarium folks are not really hobbyists,
we're researchers and *much* more knowledgable than the researchers in
rec.birds and rec.pets, and since our fish really aren't pets, we shouldn't
be in rec -- we're really scientists. Really. Honest! We won't talk about
recreational stuff, trust us...."). The *entire* purpose of moving
alt.aquaria to sci is not to make it more technical, but to give it a wider
distribution. If the distributions of sci.all and rec.all were equal, this
entire discussion would not be happening and there would be no controversy.

The 'sci has larger distribution' problem has, in the course of sci.aquaria,
somehow mutated to 'being in sci means it's a better group' -- which I
refuted above, and I wish would go away again, since it's not true. However,
like Pandora's box, I'm sure it'll be around until the next Great Renaming
when we put it all back to "net.*" to just make these stupid discussions
obsolete.

>I'm not sure how many new groups have been
>created in "talk" post-Renaming, but I'm sure that as per prophecy, noise
>is high. 

I think talk.abortion (or maybe talk.roots). Very few, and usually it's
because there is some kind of flame-fest that is constantly starting up and
inundating newsgroups, and so a place is created just so the people who
insist on flaming each other have a place to do so out of earshot (and so
the rest of the net can tell them to go back to *their* group and leave the
rest of the net alone). Without talk.abortion, for instance, the abortion
discussion tended to take over soc.women, soc.men, soc.legal, soc.misc and
up to five or six more groups for months at a time, and until talk.abortion
was created, it was impossible to get them to leave the other groups alone,
since there was no place to put them (and it's impossible to get them to
shut up).

>To get away from this eternal problem, the name of a new group should be
>based *solely* on the nature of the proposed group, and not at all on
>the predicted quality.  If we have well-defined, quality-independent
>domains, we can get away from the idea of "stigma" associated with various
>hierarchies.

True. If people would stop equating 'distribution' to 'quality' we'd settle
this thing down. If people would stop trying to create group names for
political or distribution reasons, there would be no problem.

>Fortunately, this isn't too hard to do.  The definition of comp is pretty
>clear,

Except, of course, for comp.edu, comp.risks and comp.society.women, to anme
three mistakes off the top of my head.

>sci is for science-related matter,

Which is unfortunately ambiguous in practice. The sci.aquaria people do have
a point at some level -- but, if we give them that point, there are a dozen
groups currently in rec that should then be moved to sci.* for the same
reason (off the top of my head: rec.audio, rec.video, rec.pets, rec.birds,
rec.music.synth, rec.autos.tech, rec.ham-radio and rec.bicycles). So if you
want to define 'sci' as loosely as Richard does, it opens up an entirely
*new* can of worms and significantly alters the definition of the other
domains as well.

>In practice, such
>decisions would be rather easy.

They are easy, except that sometimes people have hidden agendas and don't
want to use logic or common sense. And you can't argue with an ego.

>and I tend to believe that skeptic
>should go in sci (as an important part of science is clarifying its
>fringes), though a case could be made for misc.

I could make a stronger case for soc, for the reason that the primary
function of the paranormal skeptics is not to bring a scientific basis to
the paranormal, but to use technology and logic to debunk paranormal
hoaxsters and bring rationality to society in it's views on the paranormal.
Putting skeptic in 'sci' mistakes the tools of the process from the purpose
of the process -- and the purpose is to show society what the truth of all
of this is. Hence skeptics is primarily a societal situation.

>"Talk" should go completely,
>as there is *nothing* concrete about its definition other than a prediction
>of quality.

In theory, yes. In practice, it's a convenient setup and you'll have trouble
convincing people to integrate the groups back into the mainstream. This is,
I think,  a place where theory has to bend to practicality.

>(At the bottom line, "talk" may have been a good idea at the
>time of the Renaming, as at that stage it applied only to old, proven to be
>noisy, groups.  Unfortunately, not enough thought was given as to how the 
>hierarchy might apply to new groups.)

Agreed -- but the renaming was primarily an exercise in taking a network
that was in really horrible shape and making it better. There was some
attempt to plan for the future, but much of the really critical planning
wasn't done (and wasn't intended to be done: creation of new groups,
deletion of new groups, naming issues, renaming issues, etc -- all of these
weren't really dealt with and have been slowly dealt with over time with
varying degrees of success). The Great Renaming was a success as far as it
went -- and it isnt' the fault of the Renaming that the rest of the hooks
weren't put in place (or, at least, still haven't). That they haven't simply
shows that the issues involved were complex enough that it wasn't worth
waiting to get them all lined up before moving forward.

>Actually, the only concrete thing about this proposal is that we should get
>rid of the "talk" ghetto, and clearly that's not going to happen overnight.

Or at all.

-- 

Chuq Von Rospach <+> Editor,OtherRealms <+> Member SFWA/ASFA
chuq@apple.com <+> CI$: 73317,635 <+> [This is myself speaking]

Anyone who thinks that the argument over {sci,rec}.fishies is about
group names doesn't understand the system.