Re: Proposal for an emacs-humanities mailing list

[Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>]

* Paul W. Rankin" via "Emacs development discussions. <emacs-devel@gnu.org> [2020-12-03 11:31]:
> Hi Eli,
> 
> Sorry for the delayed response.
> 
> Upon consulting Wikipedia, it seems that in the US the term "Humanities" has
> a narrower definition, i.e. as distinct from the arts and social sciences.
> For emacs-deval readers in the US, emacs-humanities would cover the Liberal
> Arts.
> 
> So, a more precise description:
> 
> This list is for general discussion on using GNU Emacs in the Humanities and
> Emacs-related topics that are interesting to those who study or otherwise
> participate in the Humanities (also called Liberal Arts in N. America).
> Discussion here welcomes contributions from any GNU Emacs user (or potential
> user) involved in the disciplines of: anthropology, archaeology, classics,
> history, linguistics and languages, law and politics, literature,
> philosophy, religion, or the performing or visual arts.

That sounds fine to me, partially.

You said people are welcome who are potential users of GNU Emacs. I
hope that also people will be welcome who are potentially interested
users in the discussion that is going on even if they are not involved
directly in some of those disciplines. There is anyway no method of
verification who is involved in some of those disciplines.

> Participants are assumed not to have programming knowledge and
> respected as such. Support that requires any writing of code should
> be directed to help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.

I cannot see than how is the mailing list related to Emacs. Then maybe
you just wish to call it "humanities"?

When there is even setting with init file involved it is already so
that user is participating in the programming and that shall be
encouraged.

Then to tell such users to go to other mailing list is rather counter
productive, as let us say student of the law suddenly wish to write a
report in Org mode, should we then just bounce users from one to other
mailing lists, that does not seem useful.

Overall I am generally supporting any kind of communication between
people. People involved in humanities are already there. 

> I'm happy to moderate, although I think the ideal would be to have
> at least one additional moderator because sometimes I go stretches
> without attending to email. (I was sure I saw someone else in this
> thread put their hand up but upon reading back I think perhaps I
> misread.) I am painfully fickle when it comes to email addresses, so
> to be safe it probably should be hello@paulwrankin.com.

I hope it will not be moderated to exclude people for expressing their
opinions as the description above tells me it leads there. Maybe in
the next revision it will look so much better.