Re: Proposal for an emacs-humanities mailing list

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>]

On 30 Nov 2020, Drew Adams wrote:
>Chiming in here, but not with a strong opinion...
>
>> The cost if the experiment fails is a dead list sitting on a server.
>> That cost doesn't seem very high to me in any case
>
>... but there's also the possible cost of others who
>might be interested or able to help missing some info
>or questions that they might be able to help with.
>
>emacs-tangents is hardly used.  It's essentially
>a catch-all.
>
>help-emacs-window isn't used a lot.  But it's pretty 
>precisely targeted.  "Humanities" is not (IMO).
>
>An alternative might be to start by inviting potential
>"humanities" participants to use help-gnu-emacs (or
>emacs-tangents?), but with a particular prefix in the
>Subject line.  If volume becomes reasonably high then
>a new mailing list could be spun off to handle it (but
>with the attendant lack of visibility to some that I
>mentioned above).
>
>The same approach could be adopted for any other
>potential "subgroup" of an Emacs list.  And it makes
>it pretty easy for people to filter, sort, etc.,
>whether or not they're interesting in topics of the
>subgroup.
>
>Just a thought.  The basic idea is to try something
>out, to see how much traffic/interest there is,
>before sending people off to a new list.

That sounds like a good (and easy) approach to see if there really is a well-defined interest group here.  Gregory Heytings also suggested it.

(And, of course, anyone is free to go and create an 'emacs-humanities' mailing list on some server that they have access to -- there's no strong reason it has to be @gnu.org, except for a bit of findability bonus.)

Best regards,
-Karl