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Which Classical Music Newsgroup? (FAQ)

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Sandy and Julie Nicholson

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Oct 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/21/00

Archive-name: music/classical/newsgroups
Posting-frequency: fortnightly
Last-modified: 2 January 1999
Version: 0.12b

W H I C H C L A S S I C A L N E W S G R O U P ?

This fortnightly posting is intended to guide those wishing to post to
the various Usenet newsgroups dealing with classical music. It aims to
help the potential poster select the right newsgroup(s) as well as
alerting them to various aspects of general Usenet etiquette (commonly
referred to as `netiquette'). I hope that it will also prove helpful
to newcomers to Usenet in selecting appropriate newsgroups to read.

So - you have an article which you suppose would be of interest to
people who enjoy listening to classical music or to performers of
classical music or to composers of classical music, or perhaps you
have a question which you would like to put to one of these groups of
people. Which newsgroup or newsgroups should you post to?

Now that you know where your article should go, it is worth making
sure before you actually go ahead and post it that you do so in
accordance with Usenet `netiquette', a loose body of rules which have
been developed over the years to prevent posters wasting readers'
time, causing undue offence or abusing the network resources.

First of all, you should make sure that your article is clearly
written and pitched at the right level for the intended audience.
This can be a tricky exercise as Usenet newsgroups are read by a
diverse group of several hundred thousand people worldwide. It is,
however, worthwhile taking the time to read through your article and
check at the very least for spelling mistakes, simple grammatical
errors and ambiguous or difficult-to-read sentences. In particular,
try to avoid the use of local idiom and colloquialisms as these may
be misunderstood by people in other parts of the world and may even
cause offence where they have different meanings to different people.
Do take the time to capitalise the initial letters of sentences and
proper names but do not write your entire article in block capitals!

Choose an appropriate title for your article, to be included in the
`Subject' line. This is the first point of contact readers have with
your article and should be sufficiently informative that they can
decide whether or not it will be worth reading, on that basis alone.
If your article is a reply to an existing `thread' of articles, make
sure that you change the subject line appropriately if the thread
has strayed from the original topic, as often happens. Also, when
replying to articles, make sure readers can understand your article
without having seen preceding articles; on the other hand, do not
quote excessively from other articles.

Do not post the same article to more than one newsgroup. In the event
that your article crosses newsgroup boundaries in its scope but there
is no way of dividing it to eliminate this problem, you should
cross-post the article by including two (or very rarely more than
two) newsgroup names in the newsgroups line. They should be separated
by commas (and no spaces), e.g.,

Newsgroups: rec.music.compose,rec.music.classical

This way, use of network resources will be lessened and readers of
more than one of the newsgroups to which you cross-post will only see
your article once, in the first newsgroup they happen to read.[3]

If your article puts a question to the readership of a newsgroup,
make sure first of all that your question is not one of the group's
frequently-asked questions. To do this you should refer to the FAQ
(frequently-asked questions file) for the newsgroup, where it exists.
There are general FAQs for the newsgroups rec.music.classical and
rec.music.classical.performing. All FAQs are posted periodically
(usually monthly) to the newsgroups in question. If your system does
not retain periodic postings during that time, you can also obtain
FAQs by anonymous FTP from a number of sites around the world. Ask
a local system administrator how to do this. The article you are
reading just now can be obtained in the same way.

Of course, not all frequently-asked questions appear in formal lists
and another way of finding out whether your question/topic has been
answered/addressed previously is to consult archives of postings to
the newsgroup in question. These are maintained in various places,
notably on the World-Wide Web at http://www.dejanews.com/. (The WWW
also houses numerous useful repositories of musical information; a
good starting point is http://www.gprep.org/classical/.)

Finally, the best guide to netiquette is simply to read newsgroups
for a while before attempting to post at all. Six months is probably
a reasonable time to become suitably familiar with Usenet procedure.[1]
I would also strongly recommend reading articles in the newsgroup
news.announce.newusers. These cover far more of netiquette than I
have sketched here and a lot more besides.

----

[1] Two or three people have commented that six months is a
ridiculously long time to wait before posting to Usenet. This
period is based on what seemed to be widely accepted as
reasonable a few years ago. Since then, with the proliferation
of public access to the Internet, there has been a noticeable
decline in the average quality of postings, strongly suggesting
to me that this sensible guideline is no longer being followed
by more than a small minority. This does not make it any less
valid, in my opinion. While the basic mechanics of posting can
be easily discovered within hours, there is much to be said for
observing over an extended period of time to see which topics
recur frequently and to learn from the mistakes made by more
impatient novice (and some seasoned) posters.

[2] After a number of suggestions and much head-scratching, I have
amended my definition of early music to include the music of
Bach, and even later music, noting that the central tenet of
early music in this sense is essentially historical performance
accuracy and that a particular period is not strictly implied.

[3] I used to include a note to the effect that you should also
appropriately limit the geographical distribution of your
article. However, at present, the Usenet method of restricting
distribution is almost completely broken, for various reasons.
Until such time as a meaningful replacement for this once-useful
facility is found, I will omit such a recommendation.
--
Sandy Nicholson * <new web site URL to be announced>

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