From: irilyth@fenris.claremont.edu (Josh Smith)
Subject: Re: Discussion request: Keeping soc.religion.* flat
Originator: irilyth@fenris
Organization: HMC Academic Computing Services
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 22:54:23 GMT

In a prior article, Seth Blumberg (slb22@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu) writes:
> While I agree that the result of the proposed guidelines change (i.e.,
> eliminating argument about whether religious groups are or are not
> subgroups of other religious groups during the RFD process) is highly
> desirable, I think that the side effects of this change mitigate strongly
> against its adoption. 

Fair enough.

> 1.) It's just not right to have a hierarchy-specific guideline like that.

I agree that this is a problem. It is aesthetically ugly to have specific
guidelines in what is otherwise a general document. I'm definitely
soliciting ideas on how we could "adopt a policy" without modifying the
Guidlines. I don't have any good ideas right now, as the Guidelines are
currently our only real policy document. Perhaps a second document,
"Hierarchy-specific policies", would be in order.

> 2.) It's un-orthogonal.  Everywhere else in the hierarchy, we try to
> maintain "namespace purity," aiming for a cleanly-branched tree nested to
> a depth of at most 4 or 5; to turn against this overwhelmingly useful
> philosophy in the case of soc.religion invites a general abandonment of
> net.elegance.  You wouldn't want everything to start looking like the
> alt.* "hierarchy," would you? :-)

I'm not sure what you mean here. I suppose a side comment to my suggestion
should include that newsgroup names should not include names of larger
groups: for example, soc.religion.ahmadiyya-islam is no better than
soc.religion.islam.ahmadiyya as far as avoiding political debate goes.

Let me give a couple of non-controversial examples of what I'm suggesting.
On the left side, I have groups which might be created in a non-flat
soc.religion hierarchy; on the right, a corresponding name in a flat
hierarchy:

soc.religion.christian.protestant          soc.religion.protestant
soc.religion.christian.catholic            soc.religion.catholic
soc.religion.christian.greek-orthodox      soc.religion.greek-orthodox

I've just thought of another problem, though: what about controversial
groups whose names are a generic adjective and a supergroup? For example,
Messianic Jews? soc.religion.messianic isn't not entirely descriptive, but
if non-Messianic Jews don't think Messianic Jews are Jews, they'll be
politically opposed to soc.religion.messianic-jews or .messianic-judaism
(too long) or whatever.

I guess it falls to the proposer of a group to come up with a political
acceptible group name. Keeping soc.religion.* flat pushes people in that
direction, but obviously still can't force anything.

> On the other hand, I see nothing particularly wrong with making it an
> officially unofficial rule, and flaming the heck out of anyone who dares
> break it.  Isn't that what news.groups is for?

Yep. That's why I'm soliciting comments: if nothing else, if we can conclude
that keeping soc.religion.* is a good thing, even if we can't codify it
somehow, it does establish a (small) precedent.
-- 
Josh Smith, User Support Coordinator  ::  irilyth@fenris.claremont.edu
Harvey Mudd College, Claremont CA     ::  consult(std-disclaimer.pl).
"Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why
several of us died of tuberculosis." -Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts
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