[Air-l] Signal To Noise Ratio

[James Watt]

There has been some talk about splitting this list, because of its 
increasing volume and diversity of posts. I agree with several posters who 
value the range of topics, and I think a single list should be retained. 
But the volume of the posts clearly needs to be reduced, as it now takes a 
significant amount of time to read them.

The most fundamental way to do this is to adhere to basic mailing list 
rules, which are unfortunately routinely ignored on this list. In 
particular (I'll avoid capitalized shouting here, although the urge is 
strong), don't quote an entire _digest_ of several messages when posting a 
response; in fact, don't quote entire messages unless they are short. Quote 
only a few sentences to establish the thread of discussion.

I just spent several minutes wading through postings that quoted previous 
postings that quoted previous postings, etc. ... And to clinch it, a quoted 
version of a MIME file, which may be the single best example of wasted 
bandwidth you could come up with. By my calculations, only about 10% of the 
posting contained new information. This is enormously wasteful of list 
members' time.

Although it takes a few seconds to edit your quoted replies, here's what it 
costs if you don't:

Assume 600 list members (I think that's about the size of this list) who 
spend 1 wasted minute per day sorting through redundant quotations. That's 
10 person-hours of wasted time. If you put a reasonable and modest value on 
people's time of $20/hour, the failure to edit posts costs the community 
$200 per day in wasted time, or $73,000 per year.

It also encourages people who value their time to drop off the list.






========================================================
James H. Watt
Professor and Chair, Department of Language, Literature, and Communication
Faculty of Information Technology
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
110 8th Street, Sage Lab 4708
Troy, NY 12180-3590
email: wattj at rpi.edu
voice: (518) 276-2784
fax:   (518) 276-4092