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From: dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Why is my post being rejected?
Message-ID: <1991Jun20.144736.516@smsc.sony.com>
Date: 20 Jun 91 14:47:36 GMT
References: <14JUN91.15182407@nerus.pfc.mit.edu> <1991Jun15.020233.14816@dartvax.dartmouth.edu> <1991Jun17.111656.2692@corpane.uucp>
Sender: dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott)
Organization: Sony Microsystems, San Jose, CA
Lines: 40


In article <1991Jun17.111656.2692@corpane.uucp>, herman@corpane.uucp (Harry Herman) writes:
|> In <1991Jun15.020233.14816@dartvax.dartmouth.edu> mjm@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Andy Behrens) writes:
|> >The polite thing to do is to summarize the quotation: you rarely need
|> >to repeat the whole thing.  (Besides, your audience has probably just
|> >read the article you're citing).  Since people are often lazy, your news
|> >program is enforcing the polite behavior.

|> Not necessarily.  It is not unusual for me to see replies to articles that
|> I have never seen the original.  I could have just joined the group (or
|> started reading again for the first time in a long time) and the original
|> has expired.  Our news feed is intermittent, so it is possible that the
|> original never got here.

While all of this is true, it's a really bad justification.

Should the third book in a trilogy include the first two books?  After
all, it's possible for the bookstore to be out of them.  Should a movie
sequel begin with the entire original to accomodate the people who
didn't make it to the first one?

My point is that we shouldn't fix the problem of lost context by
including everything.  It's even worse when it's not consistent (if
everyone did it, we might be able to come up with a reasonable way of
dealing with it).  I think that the proper fix in this case is to make
sure that that original article is available somehow.  It's not an easy
problem to solve, but I think it is the real underlying problem.

I'm not in favor of automatically rejecting articles.  I think people
need to think about what they post, though.  If someone is responding
to an article and needs to make sure that there is enough context to be
understood, that's fine.  The real problem is that we have people who
respond to articles without thinking -- some responding by posting when
mail would do, others not understanding what the original was saying.

--
...David Elliott
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...(408)944-4073
..."Art is never fair" - paa