usenet@cps3xx.UUCP (Usenet file owner) (11/25/89)
There seems to be a delusion on the part of some people that the namespace structure -- the system of newsgroup naming conventions -- is to help readers find articles they want to read. This reason is often given in argu- ments about what name a newsgroup should have, especially what hierarchy it should be in. This delusion is almost the opposite of the truth. The function of the namespace is to help sysadmins filter out articles they don't want on their systems. That is why sci groups are better distributed than, say, soc groups. In other words, far from providing assistance, the namespace is used to _deny_ readers access to articles they (might) want to read. The system of values which explains the particular value of a newsgroup name and the hierarchy to which it belongs reflects, I think, the authoritarian environment of the average sysadmin (most sites are either academic or corp- orate; academic institutions and corporations are almost always organized on principles of hierarchic authority.) Persons who work at responsible levels in such organiza- tions must either internalize the official point of view or give a good simulation of having done so. The namespace prefixes, then, are actually grades of validity or value with respect to an official point of view. This is why comp.women and sci.aquaria were given so much trouble: in the official view, one would have contained social issues and the other recreational material. Speech about social issues or recreation has intrinsically _less_ _value_ than speech about computers or science. (Extrin- sically, it is hard to say why speech about, say, physics, is of more or less value to a software company than speech about gender issues in employment. Therefore, the dif- ference of value must be intrinsic. I assume the basis of the difference in valuation is ultimately a religious matter.) By using "improper" names, the proponents of the contested newsgroups would be changing the language; if the language is changed, the system of organizational control is weakened. Those who identify with the system thus feel that they have been attacked, and strike back, generally (if things have gone as far as a vote) by questioning the validity of the votes[1], the honesty of the vote-gatherer, and finally the voting system itself. If these fail, some of the sysadmins often try to sabotage the results of the vote by refusing to carry the newsgroup in question. You can probably observe all of these tactics in currently unexpired articles on your system, in this newsgroup (news.groups), by looking at those which refer to sci.aquaria. Eric Hoffer (ugh -- but give the devil his due) is said to have said that if you let people do what they want, they will mostly all do the same things. It is interesting to see how the participants in Usenet, an anarchy, without any direct external pressure, attempt to form themselves at once into two contradictory polities, both taken from the external world: the authoritarian, pyramidical structure of the corporation, and the level political space of the democracy. Since Usenet is a linguistic enterprise, it is not surprising that a focus of the resultant conflict is the language used to prescribe its structure. Is there a solution to this problem? Probably not. The procedure most in tune with actuality would reveal unacceptable truths. For example, since mere readers don't matter as such, voting by mere readers would be eliminated. In its place, a self-appointed committee of the sysadmins from the really important sites could decide all such issues, or delegate it to a subcommittee. (I'm sure they -- and we -- know who they are.) They could poll the readers or the less important sysadmins as they pleased. Everyone would know what was going on, and people who didn't like the results of the system would be invited (as they often are now) to start a network of their own, or to use the alt net. But consent would not have been engineered[2] and resentments would surface. Better, then, the pass at democracy, with an occasional flap when it actually functions as such. Needless to say, there are many other ways in which articles could be categorized and cross-referenced, if anyone wanted to approach the problem with different purposes, presumptions, and, especially, values. -- [1] Notice that this sort of attack is not often carried out against newsgroup proposals which "stay in their place." The only exception I can think of was ..unitex, where the motivation was equally political, but the politics was of a different level -- off-net politics. [2] A phrase due to Noam Chomsky. It has been inserted so that those who dislike this article can refer to it as a "neo-Marxist Chomskyan screed", but only if they read it almost to the end. -- Gordon Fitch | gcf@frith | uunet!hombre!mydog!gcf
allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) (11/26/89)
In your article <5513@cps3xx.UUCP> ["The Namespace: A Serious Delusion for the Net"], you wrote: +--------------- | There seems to be a delusion on the part of some people | that the namespace structure -- the system of newsgroup | naming conventions -- is to help readers find articles | they want to read. This reason is often given in argu- | ments about what name a newsgroup should have, especially | what hierarchy it should be in. | | This delusion is almost the opposite of the truth. The | function of the namespace is to help sysadmins filter out | articles they don't want on their systems. That is why | sci groups are better distributed than, say, soc groups. +--------------- You further go on to state that those who oppose "misplaced" newsgroups are authoritarian anti-democratic etc., etc., etc. I voted against sci.aquaria. I explained my reasoning to Richard Sexton, who had stated that he wanted *.aquaria to have good distribution, which meant placing it in sci.all. I replied that this was mis-use of the top-level hierarchies, which were intended to classify newsgroups by type and subject; his response to this was that the top-level hierarchies are nonetheless used for administrative control and that he intended to get the best of it. (My further response was that two wrongs don't make a right, which is tangentially related to the current subject.) In any case, the argument in question is the opposite of that which you put forward; paradoxically, Richard Sexton's preference of sci.aquaria legitimizes the very "authoritarian" use of top-level hierarchies that you dislike, and my counter-argument against sci.aquaria was based on a denial of that use. The basic problem is that, as of the same news software revision which made multiple hierarchies possible, independent news distributions were also made possible -- but they are rarely used and distinctly unstable. (See the discussion of "leaky" newsgroups in the "inet" distribution.) C news repairs this by explicitly separating distribution from hierarchy, but the damage is already done. In a perfect world, the sci *distribution* would have nothing to do with the sci.all *hierarchy*. Unfortunately, B news (with the possible exception of B 3.0 aka TMNN) does not make this distinction clear, suffering from much the same problem as do humans trying to distinguish the two uses of "sci" described by the first statement in this paragraph. The simple cure, usable in both B and C news, is to use distinctive distri- bution names which differ from the hierarchy names. It is quite reasonable to consider an article whose header contains, say, Newsgroups: sci.aquaria Distribution: dist-rec where the "dist-" prefix denotes a distribution, as opposed to a hierarchy. Even the slightly confused distribution semantics of B news can deal with this distinction. Will it happen? I doubt it; rational responses don't appear to be character- istic of the Usenet as it currently exists. But it is relatively easy to implement and will not break existing software (except for pre-B 2.10.2 news, which was pretty well broken by the Great Newsgroup Renaming anyway), and will help to resolve the problem caused by one servant (hierarchy) serving two masters (classification and distribution). ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery allbery@NCoast.ORG, BALLBERY (MCI Mail), ALLBERY (Delphi) uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu bsa@telotech.uucp *(comp.sources.misc mail to comp-sources-misc[-request]@backbone.site, please)* *Third party vote-collection service: send mail to allbery@uunet.uu.net (ONLY)* expnet.all: Experiments in *net management and organization. Mail me for info.
billd@fps.com (Bill Davids_on) (11/27/89)
In article <5513@cps3xx.UUCP> gcf@frith.egr.msu.edu (Gordon Fitch) writes: >[...] The >function of the namespace is to help sysadmins filter out >articles they don't want on their systems. That is why >sci groups are better distributed than, say, soc groups. I'm with you so far. This is the real reason but... >In other words, far from providing assistance, the >namespace is used to _deny_ readers access to articles >they (might) want to read. Do you mean to say that the fact that many admins want to cut their transmission times or conserve disk space has nothing to do with it? I have never had any reason to keep my users from reading any group. In the past I have limited my feed. >The system of values which explains the particular value >of a newsgroup name and the hierarchy to which it belongs >reflects, I think, the authoritarian environment of the >average sysadmin (most sites are either academic or corp- >orate; academic institutions and corporations are almost >always organized on principles of hierarchic authority.) >Persons who work at responsible levels in such organiza- >tions must either internalize the official point of view >or give a good simulation of having done so. This sounds pretty damned paranoid to me. It may be true of many sites but I think that it's probably untrue of many sites as well (mine included). Most academic institutions that I'm aware of try to get as full a feed as possible. The same goes for public access sites. I can see how military sites and some corporations may do this (I wonder how many military sites carry alt.drugs :-). I see an large number of 386 PC's in the maps. I suspect that most of these sites have serious disk space restrictions. >The namespace prefixes, then, are actually grades of >validity or value with respect to an official point of >view. You mean that not wanting the soc groups is a political statement? Did it ever occur to you that a site may want the comp groups because they help people get work done and they don't get the rec groups because the cost is too high and they don't help get work done? If the cost became minimal then they might get it. My site didn't carry a lot of groups because we didn't have the resources. Some excess resources showed up (old extra disks from a defunct machine and a high speed modem :-) and we started carrying everything we could get our hands on. The reason we didn't carry things before was cost and we got things based on value (rather than validity). Now that the cost is small, we no longer attempt to make judgements. (Now the only complaints I get are that there are too many new groups all the time :-). We have no "official point of view" to impose on our users. The utilitarian parts of usenet are more likely to get justification for using our resources but we have nothing against carrying the others. Discussion of social issues is important but having usenet to do it with does not rank as highly as receiving comp.bugs.4bsd does to me. UNIX is a big part of our business here so knowing about the latest things involving it is very important to us. Each site will assign value according to it's own criteria (UNIX and computer architecture groups having the highest value at this site). >This is why comp.women and sci.aquaria were given so much >trouble: in the official view, one would have contained >social issues and the other recreational material. Speech >about social issues or recreation has intrinsically _less_ >_value_ than speech about computers or science. (Extrin- >sically, it is hard to say why speech about, say, physics, >is of more or less value to a software company than speech >about gender issues in employment. Therefore, the dif- >ference of value must be intrinsic. I assume the basis >of the difference in valuation is ultimately a religious >matter.) Ah. Now we are in agreement. It is about value. Who is anyone to say what should or shouldn't be valuable to someone else? By placing things in the wrong namespace you make filtering inconvenient for sysadmins. It takes extra work on the part of the sending system to not send sci.aquaria to a site that gets sci. It makes the sys file larger for no good reason. It's not really a big deal but it is annoying. If I didn't carry the rec groups, I wouldn't carry sci.aquaria. I don't know if I'd do the same for comp.women but I might. It's moot since I carry everything I can get. >By using "improper" names, the proponents of the >contested newsgroups would be changing the language; if >the language is changed, the system of organizational >control is weakened. Those who identify with the system >thus feel that they have been attacked, and strike back, >generally (if things have gone as far as a vote) by >questioning the validity of the votes[1], the honesty of >the vote-gatherer, and finally the voting system itself. >If these fail, some of the sysadmins often try to >sabotage the results of the vote by refusing to carry the >newsgroup in question. You can probably observe all of >these tactics in currently unexpired articles on your >system, in this newsgroup (news.groups), by looking at >those which refer to sci.aquaria. Yep. One of my major feeds has sci.aquaria aliased to alt.aquaria and that's how I get it. The backbone cabal sort of still exists. It seems that many admins of major usenet sites on the internet are not carrying it so it's not getting around very well or posts to it end up circulating in alt.aquaria. Some of the posts instead work their way to me over other feeds (and quite slowly at that). What annoys me the most is that people try to defeat the name space for no good reason. They try to give arguments that social issues are just as important. This is beside the point. The point is that admins want a convenient way to decide which groups to get. Defeating the namespace organization just to get your group more widely distributed is childish. The sysadmins who don't carry sci.aquaria or play all those other games are simply responding in kind. It's amazing how quickly we all revert to acting like 12 years olds when someone treats us in an imature way (I must admit to being guilty of this as well, lest I be flamed). BTW, I noticed an awful lot of admins in the NO category for the sci.aquaria vote (including mine). Just out of curiosity, I wonder if there is a way to determine how many votes for each side were by news admins. I think that this admins tend to be against it (the improper name) and users don't really care (they just want the group). --Bill (probably going down in flames) Davidson
dave@viper.Lynx.MN.Org (David Messer) (11/28/89)
In article <5513@cps3xx.UUCP> gcf@frith.egr.msu.edu (Gordon Fitch) writes: >There seems to be a delusion on the part of some people >that the namespace structure -- the system of newsgroup >naming conventions -- is to help readers find articles >they want to read. ... > >The function of the namespace is to help sysadmins filter out >articles they don't want on their systems. This is basically correct. The namespace is already too large to allow new users to figure out what they want to read from the group list. The list is more help when they want to post, however. > [Opinion about how corporations and academic institutions are > authoritarian, deleted] > >The namespace prefixes, then, are actually grades of >validity or value with respect to an official point of >view. More like 50,000 official points of view... >This is why comp.women and sci.aquaria were given so much >trouble: in the official view, one would have contained >social issues and the other recreational material. I thought it was because aquarium hobbiests [mostly] aren't scientists and women [mostly] aren't computers. >Speech >about social issues or recreation has intrinsically _less_ >_value_ than speech about computers or science. Hmmm... Or could it be that such groups tend to attract idiots who post articles because they like to here the keys click on their terminal? Could it be that using company resources to allow employees to talk about their fish isn't in the best interests of the stockholders of a corporation? Is it time for talk.groups? >[Extrensically, it is hard to say why speech about, say, physics, >is of more or less value to a software company than speech >about gender issues in employment. I didn't know there WERE any "gender" issues in employment. Why, English is basically a gender-free language ... unless you mean employment agreements written in Latin or something. I didn't know there was a group for discussion of employment agreements written in foreign languages -- interesting. Of course there are a lot of SEX issues in employment, but they are probably covered in soc.feminism or soc.rights.human I suppose. >[More blather about the authoritarian nature of system > administrators deleted.] > >Eric Hoffer (ugh -- but give the devil his due) is said to >have said that if you let people do what they want, they >will mostly all do the same things. It is interesting to >see how the participants in Usenet, an anarchy, without any >direct external pressure, attempt to form themselves at once >into two contradictory polities, both taken from the >external world: the authoritarian, pyramidical structure of >the corporation, and the level political space of the >democracy. I thought you said that USENET was an authoritarian structure? Never mind, it is the nature of an anarchy to behave as you describe; that is why anarchys don't survive for long. >[Blather about how sysadmins from important sites could decide > how usenet is run, and how the poor reader, who doesn't contribute > anything but bytes to the data stream, should be given more of > a voice, deleted. [Hmmm.. I may be editorializing a little in > my summary here. Nah. :-) ]] As has been said before anyone can be as important as he wants simply by buying a computer and taking on as much of the news load as he can afford. If you share your wealth with us poor folk (as the current "backbone" does), many sysadmins of small sites will be grateful. Of course, you will probably have to put up with the complaints of some of the users that you aren't giving them enough. -- Remember Tiananmen Square. | David Messer dave@Lynx.MN.Org -or- | Lynx Data Systems ...!bungia!viper!dave
jsb@panix.UUCP (J. S. B'ach) (11/30/89)
In article <2956@viper.Lynx.MN.Org> dave@viper.Lynx.MN.Org (David Messer) writes:
)
)I didn't know there WERE any "gender" issues in employment. Why,
)English is basically a gender-free language ... unless you mean
)employment agreements written in Latin or something. I didn't
)know there was a group for discussion of employment agreements
)written in foreign languages -- interesting.
)
)Of course there are a lot of SEX issues in employment, but they
)are probably covered in soc.feminism or soc.rights.human I suppose.
Is it bad netiquette to respond to a grammar flame with a spelling flame?
)Hmmm... Or could it be that such groups tend to attract idiots
)who post articles because they like to here the keys click on
^^^^
--
rutgers!cmcl2!panix!jsb (or, if you want the mail to get there, uunet!actnyc!jsb)
"Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God" - Lenny Brucegcf@althea.UUCP (Gordon Fitch) (12/06/89)
dave@viper.Lynx.MN.Org (David Messer) writes: ))I didn't know there WERE any "gender" issues in employment. Why, ))English is basically a gender-free language ... unless you mean ))employment agreements written in Latin or something. I didn't ))know there was a group for discussion of employment agreements ))written in foreign languages -- interesting. )) ))Of course there are a lot of SEX issues in employment, but they ))are probably covered in soc.feminism or soc.rights.human I suppose. Jsb@panix.UUCP (J. S. B'ach) writes: )Is it bad netiquette to respond to a grammar flame with a spelling flame? ) ))Hmmm... Or could it be that such groups tend to attract idiots ))who post articles because they like to here the keys click on ) ^^^^ It's not a grammar flame, it's a vocabulary flame. And it's "wrong", in the sense that the stodgiest, most _authoritative_ institutions (like the New York Times) accept the usage. On the whole, I thought the entire article was pretty funny, mis- spellings and all. It was even noticed in talk.bizarre. My articles may be boring, but I get some great follow-ups. -- -- Gordon Fitch * gcf@althea || ...uunet!hombre!mydog!gcf