From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, SUBJECT_NEEDS_ENCODING,SUBJ_ILLEGAL_CHARS autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 107e1d,c724b6870c226707 X-Google-Attributes: gid107e1d,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,c724b6870c226707 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: fr.comp.lang.ada, pour discuter en fran�ais du langage Ada Date: 1997/01/26 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 212351488 references: <32E48C50.59E2@Rational.COM> <5c2ks7$dm7@ash.ridgecrest.ca.us> <5c54p8$oov@ns1.sw-eng.falls-church.va.us> <5cemf3$8v2@felix.seas.gwu.edu> organization: New York University newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,fr.comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-01-26T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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?