military-request@amd.com (Moderator) (04/04/91)
While several people have said they like my ruthless approach to deleting unnecessary quoted text, another person raised an objection so I thought I'd mention what my policy is. Comments pro or con should go to military-request@amd.com, NOT the digest or newsgroup! I do take user preferences heavily into account in deciding how much editing to do; it takes a lot of time but I like to think it improves the results. The reason quoting is used extensively in news is because sometimes articles arrive before the articles they're referring to, because of the way news is transmitted. This rarely or never happens with sci.military because each day's articles are sent out at the same time, and the next day's articles are sent out a day later after the previous articles have had time to reach every corner of the net. So the previous article should always be present; most news readers have some way to follow the References: header to look at a previous article in a thread; for example, ^P in rn should do that. sci.military is also a mailing list, with the articles compiled into a digest each day and sent out via mail. Long stretches of quoted text is just noise for that, because everyone has already seen the previous day's digest. It's especially bad when several people in a row are replying to the same message and in such cases I usually trim all but the first so the digest readers don't suffer through reading half a dozen copies of the same message. As much as possible a posting should be complete in itself, understandable with minimal reference to the article it replies to. If it requires most of the previous article to be included to make it comprehensible, then it's generally better to rewrite it so that it doesn't. In my last stint as moderator I often mailed back submissions with too much quoted text for rework, but this slows things down considerably and generally means by the time the article is finally ready for inclusion everyone else has moved on to other topics, so in my current stint as moderator I'm just trimming them. However, if you really feel every line of quoted text is absolutely necessary, you can mention so in a bracketed comment (with []) at the front of your article and if I feel they're excessive I'll send the article back for rework or reject it instead of just trimming it. Likewise as moderator I reserve the right to cut lengthy .signatures and correct misspellings and formatting in postings to make the digest easier to read, although I NEVER edit for content. Again, anyone who doesn't want their words touched for any reason can say so in a comment at the beginning and I'll send back, reject or accept without alteration, as appropriate. -- Carl Rigney cdr@amd.com