From: matt@physics2.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern)
Newsgroups: news.groups,sci.physics
Subject: Re: sci.physics.research: proposed panel of moderators
Date: 7 Jan 93 11:14:04
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Theoretical Physics Group)
	<1993Jan7.004542.7517@galois.mit.edu>
Reply-To: matt@physics.berkeley.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: physics2.berkeley.edu
In-reply-to: jbaez@riesz.mit.edu's message of Thu, 7 Jan 93 00:45:42 GMT

In article <1993Jan7.004542.7517@galois.mit.edu> jbaez@riesz.mit.edu (John C. Baez) writes:

> Dale does tend to flame on but if he attempts to do so on
> sci.physics.research I think the rest of us moderators can be counted on
> to take action quite firmly.  (However, I have no idea if there is an
> institutional mechanism for booting out bad co-moderators of newsgroups,
> other than good old peer pressure.)
> 
> I would prefer it if even moderators, yes even myself, had to follow
> normal submission procedures on sci.physics.research.  
> 
> And hopefully Dale will do whatever flaming he needs to do on sci.physics
> rather than sci.physics.research.   :-)

Dale certainly doesn't need me to stick up for him, but since I'm the
one who posted the article with the proposed panel, I thought I should
say just a bit about what I had in mind.

First of all, I don't expect that the personal opinions of the
moderators will be as important in this group as they might be in some
others.  The general consensus seems to be that the group should be
"lightly" moderated, so what's really important is that the moderator
be scientifically competent.  I don't think there's any doubt that
this is true of all four of the people on this panel.  Of course,
nobody is an expert on everything, which is one reason that the
moderators were chosen to have a range of different research
interests.  There are still a great many fields that aren't
represented by anyone on the panel (astronomy, solid state
theory,...), but there's nothing to stop the moderators from asking
other people for expert advice. For that matter, there's nothing to
stop the panel from being expanded in the future if that turns out to
be necessary.

Second: in those rare occasions when personal opinions do become
important, I believe it is important to have a diversity of opinions
represented on the moderation panel.  All of the people on the panel
have strong opinions on some issues.  So do I.  (In fact, attentive
readers of the Net will probably remember occasions when I have had
disputes with some of these people on this newsgroup...)  Again, I
don't think there's anything wrong with having strong opinions.  One
of the reasons for having several moderators is so that no one person
imposes his or her opinions on everybody.

I think that a moderated physics newsgroup is necessary if we are to
have any degree of real participation in Net discussions by the
physics community, and I think that this panel will be able to do a
good job.
--
Matthew Austern                   Just keep yelling until you attract a
(510) 644-2618                    crowd, then a constituency, a movement, a
austern@lbl.bitnet                faction, an army!  If you don't have any
matt@physics.berkeley.edu         solutions, become a part of the problem!