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From: maslak@unix.SRI.COM (Valerie Maslak)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Proposed Guidelines Change (was Re: A Few Observations)
Message-ID: <5806@unix.SRI.COM>
Date: 17 Nov 89 03:27:36 GMT
References: <1989Nov10.045531.4549@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu> <36393@apple.Apple.COM> <1626@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <2562D3D9.16489@ateng.com> <5289@ncar.ucar.edu>
Reply-To: maslak@unix.UUCP (Valerie Maslak)
Organization: SRI International, Menlo Park, CA
Lines: 46

In article <5289@ncar.ucar.edu> woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) writes:

>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.


Greg, I don't have the figures at hand, but would this additional
criterion have made any difference at all in the comp.women
controversy? My memory tells me it would not have. What I see is
that certain newsgroup-creation processes are encumbered by a
political power play component that no fix I've yet seen proposed here
would address.


I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "realistic" in terms of
naming, either. When push came to shove with comp.women, it was
not the net at large that had to be satisfied, it was a couple of
powerful backboners. So where does all this lead us? Naming
committee, backbone, whatever,  examining the comp.women debacle
along with this latest brouha seems to indicate that 100-vote margins
and 2/3 majorities aren't going to make any difference at all
when net.politics are involved.


I guess I share what I perceived as Brian Reid's exasperation
with all this.


Valerie Maslak