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From: eric@hippo.UUCP (Eric Bergan)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Answers to many of the `Re: The Requested ...' messages
Message-ID: <140@hippo.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-Jul-87 13:39:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: hippo.140
Posted: Tue Jul 14 13:39:11 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Jul-87 06:47:58 EDT
References: <266@brandx.rutgers.edu> <8225@utzoo.UUCP> <272@brandx.rutgers.edu> <1006@aramis.rutgers.edu>
Organization: HEALTHCARE 2000
Lines: 52

In article <1006@aramis.rutgers.edu>, webber@aramis.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) writes:
> It seems to me that people who have been proposing moderation have been using
> as their vision of news some kind of online library where people go to get
> reliable information.  While this is a worthy goal, I find it completely
> alien to what the news system has been about for the last 5 years or so.
> [...]
> When I ask myself what is the essence of Usenet, I say that it is direct
> unfiltered communication between a very large number of people (most of whom
> have above average educations and experience with computers).

	Its not clear to me that your vision of the use of usenet is shared
by the majority of the people on the network. I certainly view usenet as
much more of a library or distributed bulletin board than a "town hall forum"
for carrying on conversations.

	Its definitely true that moderation favors the former model, and
quota systems favor the latter system. But I think that the network as
a whole will have to decide which model they prefer. This may be extremely
difficult to judge, since such a small fraction of readers of the news
ever post anything.

	The rest of your posting is primarily defense for your position
that moderation is not an effective control of resources, given your view
of what the network should be. I agree, no question that moderation will
tend to dampen the kind of interaction you are looking for. On the other
hand, quota systems will dampen the kind of interaction that I am looking
for - namely that questions be answered, but only once - rather than
9000 postings of dictionaries of different "face" symbols possible under
ASCII character sets. Who is to say which of us has the right to impose
their model on the other? I think the answer is that neither of us, deciding
on our own, has the right to impose on the other. The net as a whole needs
to decide. Those that are unhappy with the decision will have to either
live with it, or form an alternative mechanism for the kind of model
they are seeking.

> In most cases, I suspect that people would be better off
> purchasing better documentation, hiring qualified consultants, and buying
> source licenses, than trying to use the net solely as a `library.'

	I don't think this is necessarily the case. When I request
information from the network, it tends to be for small "snippets" that
really aren't available in any other form. Examples would be finding
out other users experiences with a given product, or how to get system
x to work with system y, etc. There may not be better documentation, it
may not be worth hiring a consultant (who may not know the answer, either),
and it may not be solvable from source (when's the last time you saw source
code for the firmware in the LaserWriter offered?).

-- 

					eric
					...!ptsfa!hippo!eric