Re: fr.

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Mike says

"I have NO objection to seeing articles posted in other languages. I
read French and Dutch fluently and might even try to write some in
followup. There is no rule that requires news posts to be in
English, and anyone who'd discourage other languages is just being
xenophobic (IMHO). If you don;t understand the language of a post,
that's what the "next message" key is for!

In any case, I am really saddened by the growing trend to set up
(natural-) language-specific groups for French, German, and whatever.
Why should we trake a wonderfully worldwide community and balkanize it?"


I strongly disagree. Fine, Mike you read Dutch fluently, but a post in
Dutch is incomprehensible to 99% of the readers, and hence noise. The
common appeal to the delete key is unconvincing, if 90% of the messages
on a newsgroup become complete noise, people would simply stop contributing.
Furthermore, you will find (look what has happened in other groups) that
those who contribute most valuable posts are the ones whose time is
valuable enough not to put up with the noise.

Breaking down the traffic into language specific groups makes perfect
sense, and is not in any way xenophobic and does not constitute
balkanization.

You might as well argue that there should be only one giant newsgroup
in the world, and that those wanting information on Ada can simply delete
messages more suitable to alt.startrek.sex.fetish.

The reason we split up newsgroups is to increase the probability that
messages will be of interest to those who read the newsgroup. Often it
is a bit tricky to deal with distinguishing subject material, but language
makes a *perfect* criterion for splitting up groups. You subscribe (and
hopefully participate) in those groups for which you understand the
language. Mike, you can subscribe to the English, French and Dutch
newsgroups, but it seems like it would be a complete waste of time
for you to see messages in Japanese, so you simply do not select this
group.

Eventually it might be nice to have a different mechanism available,
for example, coding of messages by language with automatic filtering,
or even automatic translation (which would of course also be facilitated
by language coding, and might be more practical than general translation,
because of the limited subject domain).

But for now, separate newsgroups is what makes sense. I realize that 
current trendy political correctness leads in the direction of thinking
that it is frightfully liberal and tolerant to welcome mixed languages
on newsgroups, but from a pragmatic sense it is simply silly.

For those who like to see messages in foreign languages, simply subscribe
to all the groups in sight! Mike did you subscribe to the French Ada
group? If not, why not?