Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sco!davidbe
From: davidbe@sco.COM (The Cat in the Hat)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: A Thought Experiment about News.Groups
Message-ID: <3479@viscous.sco.COM>
Date: 2 Jun 89 19:23:51 GMT
References: <371@odi.ODI.COM> <3400@looking.on.ca> <372@odi.ODI.COM> <3315@ncar.ucar.edu> <375@odi.ODI.COM>
Sender: news@sco.COM
Reply-To: davidbe@sco.COM (The Cat in the Hat)
Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.  (Scovert Operations)
Lines: 47

benson@odi.com (Benson Margulies) said:
-In article <3315@ncar.ucar.edu> woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) writes:
-
->  Without NO votes, how do you propose to decide whether a group is "properly"
->named?
-
-Very simply. If 100 people (or 200, or whatever) agree on the name, it
-is presumptively pretty good. 

Right.  And 5 million Elvis fans can't be wrong.

Just because there are so many of them *never* makes the majority right.
It only makes them the majority.

-As Mr. Templeton pointed out, there are
-hardly any NO votes anyway. Since there are so few, they clearly don't
-serve the purpose Mr. Woods claims for them. Perhaps they serve the
-anti-purpose of egging on certain kinds of useless flaming.

They do serve a purpose.  Since there are hardly any NO votes, when there
are a bunch of them it shows that something is wrong with the proposal.

I may agree with someone in their reasoning that a new newsgroup is necessary.
However, because I don't care about that group (soc.culture.asian-american is
an example) I won't vote on it.

But, in some cases, I disagree with someone's reasoning on a new newsgroup
(sometimes almost violently).  Soc.personals is a good example of this.  And
the fact that over 100 people thought it was a bad idea should give some
idea that, perhaps, it is a bad idea.

When you call for votes there's more than just a YES or NO involved.  There's
a third category: I Don't Care (IDC).  And unless you can convince all these
people who are voting IDC (by not voting at all) to vote, you *need* both
YES and NO votes.  Otherwise you can justifying only counting NO votes instead
of YES votes.

(Note: a flame of this article appears in alt.flame, for those who care.)

-- 
David Bedno, Systems Administrator, The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
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