ATTN SELF-STYLED LIST POLICE (was RE: Mr. Day)

[Timothy Payne]

On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 11:56 -0500, A. Rick Anderson wrote:
> John Summerfield wrote:
> > On Wednesday 08 December 2004 19:10, A. Rick Anderson wrote:
> >   
> > > In other words 1%.  For the
> > > sake of debate, let's assume that every response from a Red Hat employee
> > > is worth 10 times that of every other responder on the list.
> > >     
> > How do you tustify that unscientific assumption? Stats please!
> I can't.  I was conceding the point simply to move beyond that
> argument as a meaningful point of discussion.  If you don't concede
> the point, then the argument that all email should be reduced to the
> text only mode simply to support the 3/5 Red Hat employees who utilize
> Mutt or text only email clients as their reader becomes even more
> absurd.  Without that previous assumption, the number of responses
> from Red Hat employees who use Mutt becomes statistically
> insignificant ... and there is no rational support for the previous
> demand that every newbie, who has the audacity to use an HTML browser,
> needs to be severely chastised for wasting precious bandwidth.  
> 
> 79 messages out of over 6,000 a month.  Do the math and draw your own
> conclusions about how the level of contribution that the folks with
> text-only browsers from Red Hat are making and how much effort
> everyone else should expend in order to facilitate the vital responses
> and assistance that they are providing.
> 
> The point of the concession was simply to point out that either those
> 79 messages were absolutely vital, and nobody else could have provide
> the *quality* of response that they did, or to the raise the question
> of why there was any concern for tiny segment of the mailing list who
> contributed barely of the traffic 1% of the traffic.
> 
> Not trying to say who was right or wrong.  Just doing the math.
> -- 
> A. Rick Anderson

I don't think it's a matter of numbers or right and wrong.  It's more of
a standard for the list.

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You can choose how you want to post, it's just a few people take it upon
themselves to act as police for the list.  But that's just the way it
goes, you can always read it or delete it.

Tim...