Q0.2: How do I get started? What about USENET documentation?
The following guidelines present the essentials of the USENET online
documentation, that is posted each month to news.announce.newusers.
If you are already familiar with "netiquette" you can skip to the end
of this answer; if you don't know what the hell this is all about,
proceed as follows: (1) carefully read the following paragraphs, (2)
read all the documents in news.announce.newusers before posting any
article to USENET. At least you should give the introductory stuff a
try, i.e. files "news-answers/introduction" and "news-answers/news-
newusers-intro". Both are survey articles, that provide a short and
easy way to get an overview of the interesting parts of the online
docs, and thus can help to prevent you from drowning in the megabytes
to read. Both can be received either by subscribing to news.answers,
or sending the following message to <mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu>:
send usenet/news.answers/introduction
send usenet/news.answers/news-newusers-intro
quit
Netiquette
"Usenet is a convention, in every sense of the word."
Although USENET is usually characterized as "an anarchy, with no laws
and no one in charge" there have "emerged" several rules over the
past years that shall facilitate life within newsgroups. Thus, you
will probably find the following types of articles:
1. Requests
Requests are articles of the form "I am looking for X" where X is
something public like a book, an article, a piece of software.
If multiple different answers can be expected, the person making the
request should prepare to make a summary of the answers he/she got
and announce to do so with a phrase like "Please e-mail, I'll
summarize" at the end of the posting.
The Subject line of the posting should then be something like
"Request: X"
2. Questions
As opposed to requests, questions are concerned with something so
specific that general interest cannot readily be assumed. If the
poster thinks that the topic is of some general interest, he/she
should announce a summary (see above).
The Subject line of the posting should be something like "Question:
this-and-that" (Q: this-and-that) or have the form of a question
(i.e., end with a question mark)
3. Answers
These are reactions to questions or requests. As a rule of thumb
articles of type "answer" should be rare. Ideally, in most cases
either the answer is too specific to be of general interest (and
should thus be e-mailed to the poster) or a summary was announced
with the question or request (and answers should thus be e-mailed to
the poster).
The subject lines of answers are automatically adjusted by the news
software.
4. Summaries
In all cases of requests or questions the answers for which can be
assumed to be of some general interest, the poster of the request or
question shall summarize the answers he/she received. Such a summary
should be announced in the original posting of the question or
request with a phrase like "Please answer by e-mail, I'll summarize"
In such a case answers should NOT be posted to the newsgroup but
instead be mailed to the poster who collects and reviews them. After
about 10 to 20 days from the original posting, its poster should make
the summary of answers and post it to the net.
Some care should be invested into a summary:
a) simple concatenation of all the answers might not be enough;
instead redundancies, irrelevances, verbosities and errors should
be filtered out (as good as possible),
b) the answers shall be separated clearly
c) the contributors of the individual answers shall be identifiable
unless they requested to remain anonymous [eds note: yes, that
happens])
d) the summary shall start with the "quintessence" of the answers, as
seen by the original poster
e) A summary should, when posted, clearly be indicated to be one by
giving it a Subject line starting with "Summary:"
Note that a good summary is pure gold for the rest of the newsgroup
community, so summary work will be most appreciated by all of us.
(Good summaries are more valuable than any moderator!)
5. Announcements
Some articles never need any public reaction. These are called
announcements (for instance for a workshop, conference or the
availability of some technical report or software system).
Announcements should be clearly indicated to be such by giving them a
subject line of the form "Announcement: this-and-that", or "ust "A:
this-and-that".
Due to common practice, conference announcements usually carry a
"CFP:" in their subject line, i.e. "call for papers" (or: "call for
participation").
6. Reports
Sometimes people spontaneously want to report something to the
newsgroup. This might be special experiences with some software,
results of own experiments or conceptual work, or especially
interesting information from somewhere else.
Reports should be clearly indicated to be such by giving them a
subject line of the form "Report: this-and-that"
7. Discussions
An especially valuable possibility of USENET is of course that of
discussing a certain topic with hundreds of potential participants.
All traffic in the newsgroup that can not be subsumed under one of
the above categories should belong to a discussion.
If somebody explicitly wants to start a discussion, he/she can do so
by giving the posting a subject line of the form "Start discussion:
this-and-that" (People who react on this, please remove the "Start
discussion: " label from the subject line of your replies)
It is quite difficult to keep a discussion from drifting into chaos,
but, unfortunately, as many other newsgroups show there seems to be
no secure way to avoid this. On the other hand, comp.ai.genetic has
not had many problems with this effect, yet, so let's just go and
hope...
Thanks in advance for your patience!
The Internet
For information on internet services, see Q15.5.
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End of ai-faq/genetic/part1
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