Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!kuhub.cc.ukans.edu!sloane From: SLOANE@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (Bob Sloane) Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Re: Proposal for changes to the newsgroup creation guidlines. Message-ID: <15094@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> Date: 19 Oct 89 16:16:06 GMT References: <14718.2538b6f4@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <14980.253c557f@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> Distribution: na Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services Lines: 65 I sometimes regret that I didn't pay more attention in that class I took about writing, because I seem to have a hard time getting my point across. Let me try one more time. When we are deciding on whether or not to create a group, we need to decide two things. First, we need to decide if there is any interest in discussing the subject, and second we need to decide where to put the group in the news hierarchy. As we have seen in the (sci|rec).[pets.](aquaria|fish) case, the current voting mechanism doesn't really work well. It answers the first question, but not the second. When we call for votes there are two different groups of people likely to submit votes. The first group, and IMHO the largest, just wants to discuss the topic, and doesn't really care about the name. The second group has nothing against the topic, but favors putting the group in the news hierarchy in a particular place. Of course some people will be members of both groups. What I tried to do was come up with a voting mechanism that worked for both groups. It seems to me that the other proposals leaves one or the other group of people out. Take STV. As I understand STV, the people that just want the group created would have to vote for ALL of the possible names for the group to express what they want. This means that there is a large body of voters that are voting for EVERY name. Suppose I am the vote taker for a new group to discuss lithuanian sheepdogs. I want it to be in the sci hierarchy. I will just count the vote for sci.lith-dogs first, and it will probably pass because of the large vote from those who don't care about the name. This defeats the second purpose of the vote, determining the name, and sort of makes the votes from the people who care about the name meaningless. Alien's proposal is very similar to mine, in that he would allow yes or no votes for each of several possible names. The basic difference between the two schemes is that he requires a specific list of group names, while I would allow voting for or against hierarchies. His scheme seems to require a predefined list of group names, since the voters need to know ALL the possible names to vote for or against. A stubborn group proposer could just issue a call for votes for the group name he or she wanted, for example a call for votes on sci.aquaria (semi-moderated.) Of course, this vote would probably fail (I have already mailed my no vote), but it would waste time and effort, and wouldn't really be much different from the current scheme. What would we do, declare the vote invalid because it didn't specify enough names? Doesn't sound practical to me. My proposal differs from Aliens proposal in that I want to allow write-in votes. Really, that is the only thing I want to add to his proposal. It does complicate things a bit, because people that want to vote against a particlular hierarchy can't give a specific list of group to vote against. That is why I have "wildcard" votes, ie votes against a CLASS of groups, rather than a specific name. I admit that it is more work for the vote taker, but I have already volunteered to run votes for anyone who asks, so anyone who doesn't want the extra work can avoid it. No, I wouldn't write a program to parse votes in english, I would read them, and translate them myself to use all the funny "*" characters. All the voters would have to do is tell me CLEARLY what they were for or agains. I might or might not write a program to tabulate the translated votes, but I suspect that it wouldn't be too hard to write. I would present the results in the same form as Alien's vote, ie a table of all of the specific name voted on, and the yes/no totals for each. Hopefully, this is a little clearer. I don't really think what I am proposing is very complicated. After all, I understand it. :-) -- USmail: Bob Sloane, University of Kansas Computer Center, Lawrence, KS, 66045 E-mail: sloane@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu, sloane@ukanvax.bitnet, AT&T: (913)864-0444 "The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage." -- Mark Russell