Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!woods
From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Proposed Guidelines Change (was Re: A Few Observations)
Message-ID: <5289@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 17 Nov 89 01:15:44 GMT
References: <1989Nov10.045531.4549@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu> <36393@apple.Apple.COM> <1626@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <2562D3D9.16489@ateng.com>
Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 32

In article <2562D3D9.16489@ateng.com> chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>Of course.  The 100 vote requirement should not be weakened.  Chuq's
>proposal (with which I agree) is to add an _additional_ 2/3 majority
>requirement on top of the 100 vote differential requirement.

  This is what I would like to add to the guidelines. It has the virtues of
being simple, verifiable, and does not require any major changes in the voting
procedure. Furthermore, the only groups that would have been defeated by this
rule are exactly those that had huge flame wars over the name.
  The intent of this rule is not so much to block the creation of groups, but
to use the THREAT of blocking creation to force the group champions to consider
naming issues realistically.  It is based on the assumption (which I believe
to be correct) that few people ever bother to vote against a group just because
they themselves are not interested in the topic. I believe that most NO votes
are generated by naming considerations. The results of a number of recent
votes posted in news.announce.newgroups would seem to confirm this, since
the only group that got more than a handful of NO votes was sci.aquaria.

  I'm going to take a survey. Please MAIL me your opinion: should the rule that
would require at least 2/3 of the votes to be YES, in addition to the 100 more
YES than NO rule, be added to the creation guidelines? I will count up
the responses for a couple of weeks and post the results just like a regular
vote, but it should be noted that this is not a binding vote. I just want to
guage the opinion of the net. It seems clear to me that SOME kind of change
is needed in the creation guidelines, and this seems to be the one that
has generated the LEAST amount of controversy while addressing the problem
of misnamed groups.

--Greg

P.S. I will probably post a call for votes on this to news.announce.newgroups
too.