Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!purdue!bee
From: bee@cs.purdue.EDU (Zaphod Beeblebrox)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: .aquaria
Message-ID: <8395@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 23 Oct 89 22:42:09 GMT
References: <20983@gryphon.COM> <4732@ncar.ucar.edu> <2688@cpoint.UUCP> <8348@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <2696@cpoint.UUCP>
Reply-To: bee@cs.purdue.edu (Zaphod Beeblebrox)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
Lines: 74

Said alien@cpoint.UUCP (Alien Wells): 
(in article <2696@cpoint.UUCP>)
|In article <8348@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> bee@cs.purdue.edu (Zaphod Beeblebrox) writes:
|>We hear so much from the .aquaria folks about "you don't know what's
|>in our group; don't tell us where our group should go in the
|>hierarchy".  My response to that is: "You don't know a damned thing
|>about the net hierarchy; quit telling us where groups belong in it."
|
|I was not aware that Usenet protocol had appointed some group of people
|(yourself included, apparently) to decide what name each group should have.
|I will grant you that I am net.naive, but I had thought that the proper
|protocol was to publicly announce a discussion period with a proposed name,
|have the discussion, and then call a vote.  I thought that Richard stacked
|the deck against sci. by including rec.pets in the distribution of his
|proposal and call for votes (as you have seen, most aquarists do not 
|consider themselves to own pets), but I thought that was a touch of class
|on his part.
|
|Now, if you had simply informed us two weeks ago that we were violating
|Usenet protocol, and that we should be going throught the officially 
|appointed name bureaucracy instead of proposing a name ourselves (quotes
|of the appropriate documents would be most convincing) you would have 
|saved us all a lot of bother.
|
|So - what happens now?  I assume that any vote currently in progress is
|invalidated since we didn't go through the appropriate naming committee.
|It is clear that you are a member, can you tell us who the other members
|are?  How do we submit a formal request to the committee?  When can we 
|expect to get the benefit of your official wisdom?

This points out precisely the point I was trying to make, namely that
you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHATSOEVER how the net is run (or not run,
depending on your point of view :-) )

Let it hereby be known the following facts about Usenet:

1) There is NO "official Usenet" ANYTHING.  Usenet is a cooperating
anarchy.  Each site decides which newsgroups it wants to carry, and
which it doesn't, and no other site can change that decision.  Any
news admin can send out a newgroup for any group at any time.  The
chance of other sites keeping the group, however, is quite dependent
on the circumstances regarding who sent out the newgroup, and the
circumstances surrounding the newgroup.  What this means roughly is
that currently, a group that has been run through a vote conducted in
the manner specified by Greg's guidelines and designated as successful
by same, and is created by a "well-known" personality (Greg, Spaf,
Chuq, and others), has a high probability of being carried by a
particular site.  Other groups have a lesser chance of being carried
depending on how far and in what way they deviate from this "formula".
There are of course innumerable other factors that also contribute to
this; the most important one being that basically only the
"mainstream" groups (comp, rec, sci, talk, soc, misc, and news) are
affected by this.  Groups in other hierarchies (most notably alt) have
their own little set of "rules".  The mere fact that certain
individuals have more "influence" in what happens on the net than your
average net.user has NOTHING to do with any particular official
position they hold.  "Official" Usenet policy is reached by consensus;
when no concensus is reached, there is no policy (as is currently the
case with deleting groups).  If someone doesn't like the current
consensus, they can try to change it by persuading others.  When there
are two (or more) groups of people with strongly-held contrasting
views re some subject (like *.aquari*), then one gets a large quantity
of flames.  IMHO, the net is MUCH better off this way than to have
someone running the net with an iron fist who says that this group
will be created, this group will not be created, etc.

Anyway, since I've probably bored half the net to death by now, I
guess I better stop here.
                                          B.E.E.
-- 
  Z. Beeblebrox   |  "Some girl with psychic powers asked me,
  (alias B.E.E.)  |   'T-Bone, what's your sign?';
bee@cs.purdue.edu |   I blinked and answered, 'Neon'.
  ..!purdue!bee   |   I thought I'd blown her mind!"  -- _Existential Blues_