Re: Proposal for an emacs-humanities mailing list

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > The kinds of tips and
>   > information that academics will find useful might lend themselves well
>   > to a "knowledgebase" sort of presentation, and emacswiki could be ideal
>   > for that. We could have a separate area on the wiki, and at the top note
>   > that if you want to discuss any of the information in that section,
>   > write to emacs-help with such-and-such a prefix.
>
> It might be useful, but it might backfire at a deeper level.
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the people
> who set up emacswiki do not have a connection to the GNU Project,
> and do not see a problem in advising people to use nonfree software.
> More generally, they present nonfree software as acceptable
> and not as something we should all shun.
>
> If that is so, directing people to emacswiki exacerbates the promotion
> of that point of view.  That would be a reason for us to make some
> other choice.  When we ask people to write material about using Emacs,
> we would be more effective if we ask people to publish it via gnu.org.

I wasn't aware of these issues with emacswiki, thank you for bringing
that up.

It wasn't so much that it had to be emacswiki, but that I think this
effort might be best served by a semi-static knowledgebase, with a
mailing list being a supplement to that.