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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.