Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!chuq From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Re: Namespace Spring Cleaning -- not this year. Message-ID: <35700@apple.Apple.COM> Date: 16 Oct 89 20:31:10 GMT References: <8910161952.AA10769@helios.enea.se> Organization: Life is just a Fantasy novel played for keeps Lines: 126 >Certainly correct. But don't tell me soc is serious, unless... The intent of soc is to be serious. There are groups that are serious, like, um, well, like... Aw, hell. Going through and checking out the groups again, most are pretty bad... Move 'soc.net-people' to news (where it really belongs, since it's really a "where is..." newsgroup, soc.culture.all to misc.culture.all and the rest can go live in talk. Sounds good to me. Let's just call soc.all a failed experiment and get back to the serious business of saving sci.all from the hobbyists. (toss in half a smiley, okay?) >Chuq is doing a nasty trick of agrumentation here. That's my specialty. >He's asking me >define a term that he knows is inherently slippery, and which he >knows that I know it is Yeah. And when things are that slippery, it's really hard to come up with definitions that are solid enough to allow us to define reasonable rules of usage for the net that don't break down when someone comes in trying to tweak the system. Which was really my only point. You can't make rules or guidelines around definitions you can't get people to agree with, and 'serious' is one of those words the net could argue about until the sun goes nova. >"Serious" topics are topics that concerns our professional life. Okay, I'm now a practicing psychologist and marriage counselor. soc.singles, soc.men, soc.women and soc.couples are now of professional interest to me. They're serious. (this is not an original argument, by the way -- I'm just borrowing it here because it's useful...). Or I'm a researcher into AIDS at a university -- so soc.motss becomes critical to me. The problem with this definition is that, when you deal with the net as a whole, you will find people to whom 'professional life' deals with every subject under discussion -- including news.all, since some people make their living running USENET for various companies. > In contrast topics that concern our private life are "unserious". >They can be more considered more or less "unserious", though. Rec >groups that helps us exchange information about our hobbies are to >me more serious than exchanging of flames, pardon me opinions, as >in group like talk.poilitics.misc. Since the renaming, a hierarchy of top level domains has evolved. This wasn't the original idea, but it seems to have happened anyway. I think the question we need to answer on the net is really "we have this. what do we do with it?" The hierarchy, as I see it, looks vaguely like: comp sci rec misc soc talk with news.all sort of hanging out on its own because of its special content and purpose. Comp.all (which actually has it's own set of hierarchies) is the primary purpose of the net, largest distribution (and volume). sci is, in theory, at technical as comp but not about computers. Rec is a non-technical equivalent to sci. It has a slightly higher noise level then sci, but they're effectively equal except for distribution (sci is more widely distributed). Soc is a fairly high noise level distribution for groups that haven't been banished to talk. Talk is where groups have been banished. Misc sort of hangs out and doesn't get categorized. Based on this, perhaps a better hierarchy based on what we have (if, for instance, I were to propose a brand new Grand Renaming, which I'm not) would be a three level hierarchy: comp.all misc.all talk.all That's effectively what we have, only it's split up more than that. > This definition is very vague and should be use with utmost care. It's not bad, either..... >This is particulary evident in the sci groups. And, one >should not forget, there is a good deal of "unserious" material in the >comp groups too, the most serious of them all. All language and OS >wars, all uninformed replies etc. Definitely. One of these days, it probably even makes sense to split comp into multiple top-level domains -- it probably makes sense to split Unix related stuff into its own domain, and the same micros: comp.all unix.all micro.mac.* micro.pc.all micro.amiga.all micra.etc.ad.nauseum >Good point! If you got away with all the garbage to talk or alt, *then* >soc could be considered a serious domain. But don't try to tell me >that soc *today* is serious. No, you've convinced me that soc.all is obsolete... >I think we agree on the state of affairs, but have different ideas >on how to fix it. You seem more idealistic than me. It's fun. For the first draft of my renaming, I tossed in just about everything, for the simple fact that it creates discussion and generates ideas and feedback -- and if I make an arbitrary decision on something early on, it keeps the net from having a say as to whether it's really the right decision. I'd rather propose too much, be too sweeping and too idealistic and tone it down through discussion than be too conservative and do the wrong thing (or not enough). -- 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.