Xref: utzoo news.groups:12590 news.admin:7062 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!bionet!apple!chuq From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin Subject: A new great renaming? (spring cleaning?) Message-ID: <35044@apple.Apple.COM> Date: 26 Sep 89 23:24:18 GMT Organization: Life is just a Fantasy novel played for keeps Lines: 63 With all of the discussion of the name space, deleting groups, how and why to create groups and other related topics, a thought just occurred to me. We've been trying, on and off, to set up some form of deletion proposal for years -- always unsuccessful. Maybe the problem is that we're looking at it from too narrow a view. newsgroup deletion, unlike newsgroup creation, isn't an individual situation -- it's part of a larger, overall philosophy for the network. Maybe the answer is looking at things from a macro-standpoint. Rather than try to figure out how/when to delete a newsgroup, we should every so often sit down and evaluate the namespace and see how it can be tweaked and improved -- maybe once a year or every 18 months or whenever people decide it's needed. The way I think it could work is this: someone in charge takes feedback on what people think are problems in the name space -- misnamed groups, misplaced groups, etc. They filter it all out and decide which things really ought to be dealt with and then put up a consensus proposal, which is then discussed and refined until everyone generally agrees it's a good thing. Then we do it. The proposals would be things like: o rename rec.wobegon rec.radio.npr o rename rec.ham-radio rec.radio.amateur o delete comp.ai.shells o unmoderate comp.sys.sun o delete comp.lang.forth.mac o create new top level domain arts.all o shift comp.society.women to soc domain o create rec.birds.watching & rec.birds.pet o delete comp.std.internat Anyway, you get the idea. This would the the time to consider new top-level domains for future expansion, moving things from one domain to another, deleting domains (hah!), deleting groups and generally optimizing the name space and taking a longer-term look at the future of USENET. Rather than arguing each nit-picking detail ad infinitum, we could put it all together, fix it up and then get it done all at once, reducing the lead time *and* the amount of noise and nastiness that goes on with all of this. And no, I don't propose putting it to a general vote, although I could probably be convinced. Based on what happened with the original grand renaming, the marginal and very controversial stuff either gets dropped or we decided to do it anyway. The things that would key in a go/no-go decision would be the general consensus of the people involved and whether the net.elders (definition of which being, for the sake of the argument, Greg and Spaf and maybe me -- keepers of the things and lists of the net -- and other people who have been around and are generally well-thought of on the net. We can argue specifics later...) Anyway, this is really a meta-proposal for meta-discussion rather than anything formal. It just seems like a reasonable idea to me -- which means there has to be a nasty flaw in it somewhere. Something to think about, at least. -- Chuq Von Rospach <+> Editor,OtherRealms <+> Member SFWA/ASFA chuq@apple.com <+> CI$: 73317,635 <+> [This is myself speaking. I am not Appl Segmentation Fault. Core dumped.