Re: [ga] truth in labelling

["Roberto Gaetano" <roberto.gaetano@voila.fr>]

Michael Froomkin wrote:

>I wish to protest the labelling of the lists at
>http://www.dnso.org/archives.html
>
>It is extremely misleading to identify all the archival GA lists as 
"with
>rules".  There was, for a substantial period of time, no censorship.  
At
>some undefined point, censorship was applied secretly and arbitrarily. 
 It
>is a falsification of history to call this "with rules" or indeed to
>suggest that there is a continuity between that secret, arbitrary 
process
>and the current, far more open, and perhaps less arbitrary process.
>


Question for clarification.
In practical terms, are you proposing something like to have the GA list
 until 2000-02-04, then the GQ (with rules) from 2000-02-04, and the GA-
full from 2000-02-04?
If not, please clarify.


>Please, could the person responsible for maintaining this site -- which
 I
>hope is a person different from the one who conducted the secret and
>arbitrary censorship -- make appropriate adjustments ASAP?  One useful
>distinction would be to identify the point at which the secret 
filtering
>began and segregate the historical lists accordingly; another would be 
to
>distinguish between the recent period in which there was no filtering, 
and
>the current regime.


Frankly, I don't understand the attitude many have against Elisabeth.
The problem of "censorship" (and I use this term for the sake of brevity
, not because I buy it) is a political problem, and responsibility has 
to be taken at a different level that the technical management.
The GA has been without guidance in the last months of 1999, with the 
Council that had its main focus somewhere else (on DNS issues, for 
instance) and no Chairman in place. Obviously, when the "political 
directives" are lacking, it is possible that people with mainly a 
technical management focus may take decisions that the "political 
management" would not have taken. This is, IMHO, not the fault of the 
technical people that have been facing problems that were outside their 
field.
This said, what is the purpose of continuing this discussion on the past
, when we all recognize that the situation has changed?



>
>Finally, although this is not an issue of historical accuracy, but just

>one of convenience, would it be possible to have a link to a page with
>subscribe instructions for the various lists mentioned on this page?


What you ask for is on page http://www.dnso.org/listsdnso.html (pointed 
by "List of DNSO mailing lists and archives" on the main page).
Of course, this page needs to be updated with the information on GA-
full.


>
>PS. I commend to you the practice of breaking up the archive according 
to
>some predictable metric (monthly), with URLS that have dates rather 
than
>arbitrary numbers such as "00" or "01".  That makes it much easier to 
find
>stuff, and keeps files down to a reasonable size.


While I agree with you on this, I cannot avoid noting that the biggest 
problem for the newcomer that browses the archives is to find the 1% (or
 2% at the most) of the messages that deal with DNS-related issues.

Maybe we should mark them in a different colour.

Or maybe, if ever somebody will post a message of this type, it should 
be clearly indicated "off-topic" in the subject.

Best regards
Roberto