Subject: [lojban] Re: preventing cartmanism (was: RE: Re: a new kind of fundamentalism

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 09:21:18 -0400

At 01:14 PM 10/4/02 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
>Jay:
> > On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 01:44:27AM +0300, Robin Turner wrote:
> > > A speaker of a conlang is more likely to say, in the immortal words
> > > of Eric Cartman, "Screw you guys, I'm going home."
> >
> > Exactly. And this is what the "new fundamentalists" want to prevent.
>
>It's what we all want to prevent. How to prevent it is one of the
>themes of this thread. My view continues to be that the best
>solution is to ghettoize (to different lists and different areas
>of the wiki) the controversial activities of the various factions,
>and reserve the common forums for uncontroversial things. Lojbab
>seems to have come round to this view recently.

Primarily because the community seems to now be robust enough that the 
"ghettos" can be populated without depopulating the main list.

I still would like to see the summary articles, but they'll likely be 
solicited for JL when it restarts, even if people don't start habitually 
posting summaries.

I don't know whether you or anyone else still reads Linguist List, but what 
I would like to see wrt the "ghettoization", is when someone on Linguist 
List has posted a query, collected answers off-list, and then posted a 
summary for the List of the response. For Lojban purposes, this would mean 
that someone posts a "how to say it" query, and if it seems to get into 
technicalities, someone says - "let's take it to jboske and I will 
summarize the results for the main list". The jboske option is superior to 
private email in that the arguments are logged.

BTW, while I have had objections to moving the main Lojban List off 
yahoogroups for advertising reasons, I would encourage the mirroring/moving 
of the specialty lists to lojban.org because of the archiving question.

>In other words, given that not everyone wants to play the same game,
>we should manage our affairs so that the different games can be
>played separately without infringing on the others.

I really don't see that we are playing different games. Rather, it is a 
question of data volume and relevance. Mailing lists really don't have 
many filtering options. But when the volume gets too high, people tune out 
from overload or sign off the list. When the volume gets too low, people 
fall asleep.

The wiki has turned out to be a better tool for working at the interest 
level you want without getting bogged in excess detail (which can be shoved 
off to another page) (Nora likes reading it more than the list). But it 
isn't nearly as easy to follow in real time as a mailing list.

lojbab

-- 
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org