From: jhildeb1@cc.swarthmore.edu (Jeff Hildebrand)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: About the elitism in news.groups
Date: 15 Nov 92 21:45:08 GMT
Article-I.D.: cc.7B8SBVBD
Reply-To: hildebra@math.wisc.edu (Jeff Hildebrand)
Organization: Don's Merry Horde of Topologists

herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com (daniel lance herrick) writes:
> The long standing net.citizens have prepared a pretty good introductory
> course for newbies.  Sometimes they get impatient with newbies who refuse
> to drink at the well and demand that the world begin by providing them
> with a customized introduction.  The newbies who trigger that impatience
> are usually just plain stupid.

	Agreed that for the most part the information contained in the
introductory articles is pretty good. However it has the same inherent
"problem" (it's not so much a problem in and of itself, it just leads to
problems) that a lot of technical material has. Any theoretical explanation
is going to be slightly confusing as long as it's in the abstract. The
only way you're going to fully understand what's going on is by watching a
few examples.

	Now most of the time this isn't a problem. New group creation votes
are fairly straightforward and most newbies, if they're interested, can
figure out what's going on fairly easily. However I don't think it's
co-incidence that we keep seeing problems with more complicated votes
(complicated defined as involving more than one vote going on at once). The
examples that spring to mind are the current rec.music.* situation and the
sf-lovers fiasco of last summer. What's happening here is that newbies are
now suddenly finding that they may be interested in something, but they're
dealing with a complicated situation. To pull in an analogy from my
experience as a TA: I don't care how well the textbook is written, I don't
expect my students to be able to do the hardest problems at the end of the
chapter right away. I do expect them to be able to do the average ones at
the start of the chapter right away and build up to the hard ones. Thus it's
probably a little unfair to blame newbies on the net for being confused by a
long RFD or CFV.

	What can be done about all this. A couple suggestions. First, it
would probably be a good idea for anyone writing a RFD/CFV to put in a line
pointing new users to the appropriate articles in news.announce.newusers.
Then if someone comes up with a question after reading those, treat them
with courtesy and answer the questions. If they haven't read them, tell them
to go read them.

	The more complicated situation is with longer ballots. A suggestion
I saw made which made a lot of sense to me was this: On a longer ballot
which is going to effect several groups, make a short post to each group
affected, summarizing the effect on that group and including pointers to the
original RFD and the explanitory articles in news.announce.newusers.

	Basic summary: it's reasonable to expect newbies to figure out
what's going on with a basic vote. However, something could probably be done
to make more complicated votes easier to understand.

-Jeff
-- 
Jeff Hildebrand, The Shaggy TA		       	   hildebra@math.wisc.edu
"The following statement  is an editorial viewpoint  and does not reflect 
the views of WSRN-FM, its employees, or mutant drosophila" - Off the Cuff
"You can't confuse us; we're not listening to you!"  -  topology students
Newsgroups: news.groups