rtw@lzwi.UUCP (R.T.WURTH) (10/31/85)
Much of the discussion regarding the creation/deletion of new groups has focused on following the right procedures. What I seem to observe is that one person has either set himself up or been asked by others through some undefined procedures to serve as police force, prosecutor, and Supreme Court of the procedures, with no right of appeal and is out to get groups for which somewhere someone forgot to dot an "i" or cross a "t." This reminds me of the recent Mayoral primary in New York City. It is the law that nominating petitions had to be filed, containing some minimum number of signatures. The law about those petitions is quite arcane, so candidates regularly overcollect signatures by extremely wide margins, to allow for the fact that very large numbers are thrown out. This year several candidates had more petition forms thrown out than they had planned for because of minor technical flaws. They went to court and the court ordered the petitions accepted in spite of the minor technical flaws. The will of the people was clear, as was the intent by candiates to obey the law. Not every one still enjoys the luxury of great amounts of spare leisure time, some of us work for a living out here in the real world! As a result, such people have little time to worry about fulfilling minor technicalities and exacting details of an arcane set of rules. On behalf of my busy colleagues in the real world, I ask for a error-tolerant system, one which, like the court-mandated petition-checking system in NY, can occasionally overlook the "i" left undotted and the "t" left uncrossed. Looking at the current situation, such a system would ignore such arguments as "The significant volume didn't start until after the rogue group was started." Under such a system quibbling over whether a unanimous vote in favor of a group constituted a consensus would not be grounds for immediate group deletion. I guess my point is that the argument over total, complete, slavish, exact, perfect, strict adherence to procedure is missing the more important issues of whether the intent of the procedure is being met, and whether there is merit in having the group. Rules should be our servants, not our masters. In the situation at hand, it is obvious from the flames that users are not being served. In my college days, I was able to totally stifle debate in, and paralyze one of the campus organizations by clever use of _Robert's Rules of Order_. What did I prove? That I could make enemies and provoke anger from others; that I was a [characterization deleted]. (This isn't net.flame, so I won't use the the term; suffice to say that it questions my ancestry.) I see a parallel in the current rules and the manner of their enforcement which give the appearance (I don't know the people involved, so I can only speak to the issue of apparent intent, not actual intent.) that enforcers are using them to stifle the creation of new groups regardless of the merits of the groups. Just look at the net.ham-radio.packet controversy. In that case, the technicalities of the rules were enough to entrap someone who was virtually a charter Usenetter. Similarly, net.internat has had significant traffic with high technical content and almost no flaming. A large number of people wanted it, but somewhere someone forgot to cross all the "t"s to the satisfaction of the net police. To correct this situation, I think that as an addendum to the rules, so-called rouge newsgroups should not be removed for minor technical flaws in their nominating and creation process until a four week grace period has elapsed. Obvious mistakes and deliberate violations (e.g. the old mis-spelled groups like uniz-wizards of several years ago, and e.g. a group with Article #1 saying "I just created this group so lets have some articles to justify keeping it" should have no grace period. The grace period should begin when someone cross-posts to net.news.group and to the alleged offending group a notice of deficiency outlining which part of the procedure was not followed to the exact letter and what needs to happen to correct it. The grace period would be used to re-do the alleged deficient steps to the satisfaction of the powers that be. If at the end of four weeks (Is four weeks enough? Some articles take four weeks just to reach seismo.), the deficiencies had not been corrected, then, by all means the group should be removed. The introduction of a chance to repair minor technical flaws in a less-threatening environment may just reduce the amount of _ad-hominem_ flaming directed against the person charged with the unfortunate thankless task of enforcing the rules. The current "I just sent a worldwide rmgroup message for <your favorite new group> because..." followed by a list of undotted "i"s and uncrossed "t"s is not conducive to reasoned constructive discussion and does much to raise the anger level and the level of flames.