Informal proposal sci.math.moderated
William Elliot
(Moderated)
Distribution List:
news.announce.newgroups
news.groups.proposals
sci.math
Proponent: William Elliot <ma...@rdrop.com>
Moderators: Cliff Bott, Bart Goddard, Bob Silverman,
Penny Hassett, Jack Bateman, Tonico
Rationale:
Over the last few years, the ever increasing amount of inane, off topic,
gross and commercial stuff has been posted at sci.math and ensuing upon
that, numerous posts complaining, lamenting about the large amount of
trash, what to do about it and added discussions about sci.math's
cranks.
The overwhelming amount of noisome noise puts an undue strain upon
legitimate posters just to filter out the inanity. To the loss of
sci.math, this volume of lousy posts and posters has discouraged some
of the quality posters. In addition, it likely discourages welcomed
new posters as well as giving others a totally wrong impression about
sci.math.
The abuse of sci.math has reached the point where some participants have
resolved to thwart further deterioration of sci.math by creating a
moderated sci.math. Six participants have offered to be moderators and
I, another participant, have offered to tackle the creation of a new group.
-- Charter and moderation policy
This is a moderated group for discussion about mathematics,
elementary through advanced, history of math, math education,
mathematical resources and mathematical puzzles, games and humor.
Posts are required to be on topic, sensible,
devoid of rudeness and vulgarity, and non-commercial.
Posts asking for or offering solution manuals are rejected.
Usenet etiquette is expected. See:
http://oakroadsystems.com/genl/unice.htm
To inquire about a moderator's rejection, post to sci.math.mod
with subject "Moderator" with a correct email address by
which the moderator may privately reply.
This is a plain text ascii only newsgroup that allows tiny amounts
of simple inline TeX. Binaries and attachments are not allowed.
----
Bart Goddard
news:2010041703...@agora.rdrop.com:
> The abuse of sci.math has reached the point where some participants
> have resolved to thwart further deterioration of sci.math by creating
> a moderated sci.math.
This is long overdue, which is why I volunteered to moderate.
I've enjoyed sci.math since circa 1993, and, while perhaps
it's a reactionary viewpoint, I'd sure like to see it
return to the Good Old Days(TM). A sci.math.moderated,
with a sensible moderation policy, has the best chance
of doing so.
Bart
--
Cheerfully resisting change since 1959.
Kathy Morgan
> sci.math.moderated Mathematics, elementary through advanced.
> (Moderated)
>
> Distribution List:
> news.announce.newgroups
> news.groups.proposals
> sci.math
>
> Proponent: William Elliot <ma...@rdrop.com>
>
> Moderators: Cliff Bott, Bart Goddard, Bob Silverman,
> Penny Hassett, Jack Bateman, Tonico
It's really a pleasure to see a proposal with multiple moderators for a
moderated group. Do any of you have prior experience moderating a
newsgroup? Have you selected moderation software? Read the Moderator's
Handbook, Pitfalls of Moderation, and Moderated Newsgroups FAQ? (If
not, there are links to these at
<http://www.big-8.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=faqs:moderation#links>.)
--
Kathy, member of B8MB but speaking only for myself
Bart Goddard
kmo...@spamcop.net:
>Do any of you have prior experience moderating a
> newsgroup? Have you selected moderation software? Read the Moderator's
> Handbook, Pitfalls of Moderation, and Moderated Newsgroups FAQ?
The answers to all these questions are "yes", except for
the "prior experience". And one "yes" is qualified with
"DMOD".
Dr J R Stockton
>, Sat, 17 Apr 2010 17:43:26, William Elliot <ma...@rdrop.com> posted:
>sci.math.moderated Mathematics, elementary through advanced.
>(Moderated)
>
>Distribution List:
> news.announce.newgroups
> news.groups.proposals
> sci.math
>
>Proponent: William Elliot <ma...@rdrop.com>
>
>Moderators: Cliff Bott, Bart Goddard, Bob Silverman,
> Penny Hassett, Jack Bateman, Tonico
Where are they? A moderation team for a mainly English-language
newsgroup should endeavour to contain moderators from New Zealand,
India, Europe or South Africa, East Canada, and Hawaii (or other places
in nearby longitudes), in order that something approximating to 24-hour
activity is possible.
--
(c) John Stockton, nr London UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk Turnpike v6.05 MIME.
Web <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/> - FAQish topics, acronyms, & links.
Proper <= 4-line sig. separator as above, a line exactly "-- " (RFCs 5536/7)
Do not Mail News to me. Before a reply, quote with ">" or "> " (RFCs 5536/7)
Doug Freyburger
>
> sci.math.moderated Mathematics, elementary through advanced.
> (Moderated)
> -- Charter and moderation policy
>
> with subject "Moderator" with a correct email address by
> which the moderator may privately reply.
The usual method is to include in the RFD a pair of e-mail addresses.
One is for submissions - This address gets linked to in the moderation
database. The other is the administrator address - This address gets
correspondance to the moderation team or even among the moderation team.
Is there a reason for proposing a method different from the usual
method? A failure mode of your proposed method is for appeals to be
posted to the general readership.
> This is a plain text ascii only newsgroup that allows tiny amounts
> of simple inline TeX. Binaries and attachments are not allowed.
How about alternate character sets or languages other than English?
English is the default language of UseNet but plenty of mathematics is
conducted in other languages including ones that use alternate character
sets.
Bart Goddard
news:jKrYPnYo...@invalid.uk.co.demon.merlyn.invalid:
>>Moderators: Cliff Bott, Bart Goddard, Bob Silverman,
>> Penny Hassett, Jack Bateman, Tonico
>
> Where are they?
I'm in Texas. (Central time.) Although I'm not sure
it's such a big issue. In the other discussions, lag
time came up, and IIRC, the consensus was that it's not
a big deal to have a day lag.
Bart Goddard
news:jKrYPnYo...@invalid.uk.co.demon.merlyn.invalid:
>>Moderators: Cliff Bott, Bart Goddard, Bob Silverman,
>> Penny Hassett, Jack Bateman, Tonico
>
> Where are they?
I'm in Texas. (Central time.) Although I'm not sure
Bart Goddard
@news.eternal-september.org:
>> This is a plain text ascii only newsgroup that allows tiny amounts
>> of simple inline TeX. Binaries and attachments are not allowed.
>
> How about alternate character sets or languages other than English?
> English is the default language of UseNet but plenty of mathematics is
> conducted in other languages including ones that use alternate character
> sets.
I might be misreading this. If you mean some other encoding than
ASCII (isn't one EBEDIC or something like that?) then I have nothing
intellegent to say. But if you just mean "How will Hungarians post
things with all those ticks and accents in their language?" Then
one answer is: (La)TeX is universal in math, and I would expect that
most Hungarian mathematicians would know how to typeset their
language. So my answer is "They'd do it in (La)TeX." This may
not be ideal, since the "c with the check-mark above" won't
appear like it's supposed to, but rather like \uppercheck{c} (or
however one does it.} But I imagine that Hungarian mathematicians
read such stuff as readily as English mathematicians read TeX
on the fly.
Most mathematics journals require submissions to be in AMSTeX
or something similar, nowadays, which is why I'd expect most
mathematicians in the world to know some flavor of TeX.
Doug Freyburger
> Doug Freyburger <dfre...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>> This is a plain text ascii only newsgroup that allows tiny amounts
>>> of simple inline TeX. Binaries and attachments are not allowed.
>>
>> How about alternate character sets or languages other than English?
>> English is the default language of UseNet but plenty of mathematics is
>> conducted in other languages including ones that use alternate character
>> sets.
>
> I might be misreading this. If you mean some other encoding than
> ASCII (isn't one EBEDIC or something like that?) then I have nothing
> intellegent to say. But if you just mean "How will Hungarians post
> things with all those ticks and accents in their language?"
I wondered about Cyrillic actually. I remember my college professor's
shelves had as many books in Russian as in German or English. With
English being the default language of UseNet there's no real need to
address the issue if you don't want to.
Bart Goddard
> I wondered about Cyrillic actually. I remember my college professor's
> shelves had as many books in Russian as in German or English. With
> English being the default language of UseNet there's no real need to
> address the issue if you don't want to.
Not "don't want do", just "can't." I have no idea how,
technically, we could accomodate other alphabets.
That is, I don't know if it's easy or if yet another
skill set is needed. I'm
not opposed to doing so, but I suppose we'd need a
Russian-fluent moderator to handle those posts.
In the end, if we get this group off the ground, I
imagine it would be up to the moderators to yield
to whatever demand there is for this or that
alphabet, according to what volunteer skills are
available...?
Alexander Bartolich
> [...]
> This is a plain text ascii only newsgroup that allows tiny amounts
> of simple inline TeX. Binaries and attachments are not allowed.
Please drop the word "ascii". With this rule posts like mine would not
be allowed in your group. (Check the value of "Content-Type:" in the
headers.)
--
Lass die Leute reden und lächle einfach mild,
Die meisten Leute haben ihre Bildung aus der Bild.
Und die besteht nun mal, wer wüsste das nicht,
aus: Angst, Hass, Titten und dem Wetterbericht!
David E. Ross
> In news.groups.proposals message <2010041703...@agora.rdrop.com
>> , Sat, 17 Apr 2010 17:43:26, William Elliot <ma...@rdrop.com> posted:
>> sci.math.moderated Mathematics, elementary through advanced.
>> (Moderated)
>>
>> Distribution List:
>> news.announce.newgroups
>> news.groups.proposals
>> sci.math
>>
>> Proponent: William Elliot <ma...@rdrop.com>
>>
>> Moderators: Cliff Bott, Bart Goddard, Bob Silverman,
>> Penny Hassett, Jack Bateman, Tonico
>
> Where are they? A moderation team for a mainly English-language
> newsgroup should endeavour to contain moderators from New Zealand,
> India, Europe or South Africa, East Canada, and Hawaii (or other places
> in nearby longitudes), in order that something approximating to 24-hour
> activity is possible.
>
In unmoderated newsgroups, replies often take as long as a day to
appear. I would not expect faster responses from a moderated newsgroup.
--
David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>.
Anyone who thinks government owns a monopoly on inefficient, obstructive
bureaucracy has obviously never worked for a large corporation. © 1997
nm...@cam.ac.uk
That's actually confounding two things: the natural language (or set
of them) and the encoding. It's many years ago now, but one of the
oft-forgotten principles is that the 'type' of a message must be
that pair, and they are not practically separable. All attempts
to treat them as orthogonal characteristics come unstuck fairly
rapidly.
Of course, that doesn't mean that you have to be dogmatic and stick
to strict ASCII and USA English, or I would join Alexander Bartolich
in being excluded :-) But it really isn't practical to have too much
flexibility, as the software won't handle it correctly even if every
participant understood all of the languages.
An analogy is permitting not just TeX but dvi, MathML and various
other formats. That just won't work.
Regards,
Nick Maclaren.
Alexander Bartolich
> [...] I have no idea how, technically, we could accomodate other
> alphabets. That is, I don't know if it's easy or if yet another
> skill set is needed.
Contemporary newsreaders are 8-bit clean and can handle the character
code conversions defined by the MIME standard (Multipurpose Internet
Mail Extensions). Contemporary user interfaces (Windows NT, Mac OS,
GNOME, KDE) can handle different encodings and support most parts of
Unicode.
That is, nowadays about everyone supports popular left-to-right
alphabets like Latin (including extensions used in Europe), Greek
and Cyrillic. Correctly displaying right-to-left alphabets (e.g.
Hebrew) and composite characters ("Chinese") requires more effort,
but uses the same encoding system (i.e. Unicode).
Executive summary: If you can operate Thunderbird or Outlook Express
then you have all the required skills.
--
seq 100 | sed 's/.*/Romani Ite Domum./'
William Elliot
> Bart Goddard wrote:
>> alphabets. That is, I don't know if it's easy or if yet another
>> skill set is needed.
>
> Contemporary newsreaders are 8-bit clean and can handle the character
> code conversions defined by the MIME standard (Multipurpose Internet
> Mail Extensions). Contemporary user interfaces (Windows NT, Mac OS,
> GNOME, KDE) can handle different encodings and support most parts of
> Unicode.
Among the infinitude of character sets, the 8-bit characters have
ways of making unexpected appearances to the multitudes of browsers.
For the most part sci.math and usenet that I frequent, is in plane text
7-bit ascii as was established many years before the internet. That's
what I mean by plane text ascii, only those characters that appear on the
key board. How other than plane text ascii, would you describe that?
> That is, nowadays about everyone supports popular left-to-right
> alphabets like Latin (including extensions used in Europe), Greek
> and Cyrillic. Correctly displaying right-to-left alphabets (e.g.
> Hebrew) and composite characters ("Chinese") requires more effort,
> but uses the same encoding system (i.e. Unicode).
>
Other than Latin, the others aren't plane text.
> Executive summary: If you can operate Thunderbird or Outlook Express
> then you have all the required skills.
That can't be expected of everybody who uses usenet.
Anyway, I suppose that I ought to stick "primarily English"
somewhere into the proposal.
--
Once upon a time computers all spoke Ascii.
But in their arrogance acclaiming to know it all,
they were cursed to babble in a multitude of confusing formats.
----
Alexander Bartolich
> [...]
> For the most part sci.math and usenet that I frequent, is in plane text
> 7-bit ascii as was established many years before the internet. That's
> what I mean by plane text ascii, only those characters that appear on the
> key board. How other than plane text ascii, would you describe that?
I cannot take a group about mathematics seriously that outlaws the
correct spelling of "Carl Friedrich Gauß" and "Kurt Friedrich Gödel".
And yes, the letters ß and ö appear on a German keyboard.
By the way, plain text has nothing to do with topology.
--
Bart Goddard
@agora.rdrop.com:
>> Executive summary: If you can operate Thunderbird or Outlook Express
>> then you have all the required skills.
>
> That can't be expected of everybody who uses usenet.
>
> Anyway, I suppose that I ought to stick "primarily English"
> somewhere into the proposal.
>
I think he meant that if one can operate Thunderbird or Outlook
then one has the skills to _moderate_. Such skills could be
expected of moderators.
But rather than sticking in "primarily English", why not
just drop "ascii" and say "plain text". If a submission
is unreadable, it will be rejected.
Martin X. Moleski, SJ
>Among the infinitude of character sets, the 8-bit characters have
>ways of making unexpected appearances to the multitudes of browsers.
These are some 8-bit characters. I made this
list the other day while doing some OCR of some
German passages:
ü 129
Ü 154
ä 132
ë 137
ö 148
Ö 153
I have kept a listing of the IBM PC DOS ASCII character
set by my side since the 80s. It is very handy because
on a PC, the characters from 128..175 still match
the old DOS set:
Ç £ ¿ »
I doubt that the "multitudes of browsers" (IE, Firefox,
Safari, Opera, Chrome) would have difficulty displaying
these characters. I'm pretty sure most of the modern
browsers can handle the Unicode system, which uses
12 or more bits to create character sets.
>For the most part sci.math and usenet that I frequent, is in plane text
>7-bit ascii as was established many years before the internet. That's
>what I mean by plane text ascii, only those characters that appear on the
>key board. How other than plane text ascii, would you describe that?
Plane text: text that is written in a two-dimensional plane; or
a text about plane geometry, as the case may be.
Plain text: the term you are attempting to define.
Whose keyboard are we using for a reference? When I
visited Puerto Rico and Germany, I found out that there
are different kinds of keyboards in different parts of
the world.
>> That is, nowadays about everyone supports popular left-to-right
>> alphabets like Latin (including extensions used in Europe), Greek
>> and Cyrillic. Correctly displaying right-to-left alphabets (e.g.
>> Hebrew) and composite characters ("Chinese") requires more effort,
>> but uses the same encoding system (i.e. Unicode).
>Other than Latin, the others aren't plane text.
I think what you mean by plain text is ASCII 32..126: the
printable 7-bit characters from space to tilde.
You could avoid the problem of finding the right verbal
definition by enumerating the legal characters. Of
course to be complete, you need to add the word
"space" to the list because it is impossible to
see the space character on the list:
A a
! B b
" C c
# D d
$ E e
% F f
& G g
' H h
( I i
) J j
* K k
+ L l
, M m
- N n
.. O o
/ P p
0 Q q
1 R r
2 S s
3 T t
4 U u
5 V v
6 W w
7 X x
8 Y y
9 Z z
: [ {
; \ |
< ] }
= ^ ~
> _
? `
@ a
On my newsreader, even this looks problematic--Agent
is trying to interpret some of the symbols.
>Anyway, I suppose that I ought to stick "primarily English"
>somewhere into the proposal.
Make up your mind. If the mods are going to require English,
say that the group requires English; if not, not.
Marty
--
Co-chair of the Big-8 Management Board (B8MB) <http://www.big-8.org>
Unless otherwise indicated, I speak for myself, not for the Board.
Martin X. Moleski, SJ
<ufadnSz7JtuCaVPW...@supernews.com>:
>.. O o
This is the only anomaly that I see in my enumeration
of the "plain" characters (printable 7-bit ASCII).
YMMV.
I guess a period in first position in a post has a
special meaning.
Trying again with a leading space and a layout that
leaves out the space character from the table:
! A a
" B b
# C c
$ D d
% E e
& F f
' G g
( H h
) I i
* J j
+ K k
, L l
- M m
. N n
/ O o
0 P p
1 Q q
2 R r
3 S s
4 T t
5 U u
6 V v
7 W w
8 X x
9 Y y
: Z z
; [ {
< \ |
= ] }
> ^ ~
? _
OK. I'm pretty sure that that list is what you mean by
"plain text."
Having said that, I agree with Alexander that it does not
make sense to deny users the ability to spell words
correctly. Chacun à son goût!
Doug Freyburger
>
> I'm
> not opposed to doing so, but I suppose we'd need a
> Russian-fluent moderator to handle those posts.
Got it. Thanks. I recalled soc.culture.russian which has a mixture of
English in Latin characters and Russian in Cyrillic. It's an added
complication unless you have an assortment of folks already using
Cyrillic as I saw in pirnt in my math prof's office at college.
Alexander Bartolich
This thread is going in a direction I don't understand.
Obviously a moderator needs to be able to read and understand submis-
sions. This does require correct rendering of posts on his display de-
vice. But that's really the easy part of the story. For example only
a subset of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange is
needed to write Latin. Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Obviously the ability to read Latin characters does not mean that you
can understand Latin. This applies to both readers and moderators.
A moderator that can read Russian texts written in the Cyrillic alpha-
bet is nice to have. It does not mean that such contributions would
find acceptance in the group, though.
Technically speaking, it's not redundant to define English as the pri-
mary or only language of SMM. The Big 8 is a collection of international
discussion newsgroups, and some areas are dominated by other languages.
However, I don't think that any reasonably person would expect to find
any other language than English in sci.math.moderated.
The newsgroup charter is the right place to state intrinsic character-
istics of the group. Even if they are glaringly obvious. On the other
hand, limitations imposed through the moderator's choice of tools are
not intrinsic. Should the moderator on duty happen to use a trusted
VT52 with his PDP, then that's just the way things are. But such pass-
ing details are better published in a FAQ.
--
David E. Ross
Do you have enough input yet to present a formal RFC?
Bart Goddard
@news.albasani.net:
> Technically speaking, it's not redundant to define English as the pri-
> mary or only language of SMM. The Big 8 is a collection of international
> discussion newsgroups, and some areas are dominated by other languages.
> However, I don't think that any reasonably person would expect to find
> any other language than English in sci.math.moderated.
>
> The newsgroup charter is the right place to state intrinsic character-
> istics of the group. Even if they are glaringly obvious.
On sci.math, there have been posts in other languages (French,
Italian and German, I recall) and they were answered in kind.
I think, even though I don't know any Italian at all, that I
could still tell the difference between a legitimate post
and spam or crackpottery even if it were in Italian. If
it has some equations in it, and didn't have every other
word in ALL CAPS, then I'd tend to pass it.
If sci.math.moderated is going to be a true substitute for
sci.math, then I think we need to allow other languages.
We can say "primarily English", but there's no need to
exclude other languages outright.
William Elliot
I agree.
.... this group is for discussion, primarily in English, about ...
William Elliot
> On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 09:15:47 CST, "Martin X. Moleski, SJ" <mol...@canisius.edu> wrote in
> <ufadnSz7JtuCaVPW...@supernews.com>:
>
>> .. O o
>
> This is the only anomaly that I see in my enumeration
> of the "plain" characters (printable 7-bit ASCII).
>
> YMMV.
>
> I guess a period in first position in a post has a
> special meaning.
>
Usually it doesn't though it may for some software.
Also -- has special meaning for some software.
Likewise, in spite of all the software for handling
different character sets, there can still be some
weird effects for special and 8-bit characters.
That's correct, the original ascii character set.
That seems to be the same for all English or Latin
character sets and the only characters that have
assurance of showing the same on all browsers.
What would you call that text?
Printable 7-bit ascii?
I call it plain 7-bit ascii text.
> Having said that, I agree with Alexander that it does not
> make sense to deny users the ability to spell words
> correctly.
Gauss is much more readable than Gau@# or whatever appears.
Simple questions like "What's a Gau@#ian integer?" may not
be understood.
William Elliot
Because the plain text of one country may be different than
the plain text of another country. Including "primarily English"
stipulates what plain text.
clarifies what plain text and
Martin X. Moleski, SJ
>What would you call that text?
> Printable 7-bit ascii?
Yes. Or ASCII characters 32..126.
>I call it plain 7-bit ascii text.
The ASCII 7-bit code has 128 characters
in it (0..127).
The printable characters (counting the space,
which takes up space but is otherwise not
"printed") are 32..126.
Characters 0..31 and 127 are control characters.
Character 127 was taken to mean "deleted" in the paper
tape days because all 7 bits were punched out; without
that convention, there would be no way to delete a
character on the tape. Every other printable character
on the paper tape has at least one bit not punched.
>> Having said that, I agree with Alexander that it does not
>> make sense to deny users the ability to spell words
>> correctly.
>Gauss is much more readable than Gau@# or whatever appears.
>Simple questions like "What's a Gau@#ian integer?" may not
>be understood.
I won't vote against the RFD on the grounds that your
prposed policy is unnecessarily restrictive. But I do think
that it is unnecessarily restrictive.
Thinking that English authors cannot use diacritical marks
is naïve.
David E. Ross
I have to agree even though I'm generally at a loss in anything other
than English.
I do recall early in my career as a computer programmer when I sat with
an English-German dictionary in order to write a program implementing
spherical functions (Kugelfunctionen) that were presented in a German
reference work.
Some of the most important developments in mathematics since the
Renaissance were done by Germans, Italians, French, Russians, Poles, and
Indians. Thus, I would not restrict s.m.m to the English language.
Further, mathematical discussions often fail when limited to oral
communications because they require writing symbols that are not part of
the basic ASCII repertoire. Those symbols require too much verbiage to
describe orally but succinctly present concepts when written. Thus, I
would not restrict s.m.m to the basic ASCII set of characters, which are
valid primarily to represent oral English communication in writing
(despite containing some symbols and, in the the 8-bit version, some
non-English ligatures and accented letters).
Note that expanding the allowed set of characters in a newsgroup does
not require the use of HTML. Thus, it would be valid to ban HTML
messages, which often are used merely to convey gratuitous images and
provide unnecessary formatting while at the same time bloating the
messages.
Kathy Morgan
> Further, mathematical discussions often fail when limited to oral
> communications because they require writing symbols that are not part of
> the basic ASCII repertoire. Those symbols require too much verbiage to
> describe orally but succinctly present concepts when written. Thus, I
> would not restrict s.m.m to the basic ASCII set of characters, which are
> valid primarily to represent oral English communication in writing
> (despite containing some symbols and, in the the 8-bit version, some
> non-English ligatures and accented letters).
Since the proposed charter/moderation policy allows small amounts of
inline TeX, the mathematical symbols can be handled using TeX; nothing
outside of plain text (and small amounts of TeX) would be required.
--
Kathy
William Elliot
small amount.