Re: Proposal for an emacs-humanities mailing list

[Jean Louis]

* Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com> [2020-12-01 00:28]:
> First, plenty of free software (and even non-free software)
> applications have domain-specific users groups that don't involve a
> lot of participation from active maintainers.  It's normal for there
> to be expert users who, although they are not maintainers, still
> have collectively a large body of knowledge to share.  For example,
> on this proposed list, I would expect a lot of people who have
> expertise in using TeX / LaTeX modes in Emacs to answer questions --
> and there is probably only slight correlation between having that
> expertise and being an Emacs maintainer.

Then if for TeX / LaTex than it is more useful to work with known
mailing list such as gnu-emacs-help@gnu.org in separate threads. But
if it is for general help to help people write books than such could
fall into humanities. I was just expecting such mailing list to be for
those who are in sciences, but not directly computer sciences. LaTeX
is typesetting, I use it since decades, but is not necessarily
generic. There is TeXmacs software and LyX for LaTeX that do maybe
better job than Emacs.

Things like how to structure books, how to find references, making
collective knowledge for people in relation to various sciences such
as literature and having such accessible from Emacs would be something
falling into category of humanities, so for me.

For me the term humanities would mean something like level of
discussions on how to help general people though intelligent social
approaches. Some people could program and some could plan on helping
others.

humanities

* Overview of noun humanities

The noun humanities has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)

1. humanistic discipline, humanities, liberal arts, arts -- (studies
intended to provide general knowledge and intellectual skills (rather
than occupational or professional skills); "the college of arts and
sciences")

I do not think that LaTeX exports fall into general knowledge. But I
think that LyX would be first tool if offered as general knowledge
tool. Emacs is in my opinion not due to its advanced nature and lack
of good integrations specifically to LaTeX as implemented by LyX and
Emacs. User of LyX need not know much about LaTeX to write high
quality books and articles with it.

Examples of approaches that I would think of are following:

- helping people learn how to read and write, planning a program,
  executing such in those areas of the world where needed

- helping minority languages and so those minorities of people to get
  broader record or educational facilities,

- implementing GNU Health access through Emacs and programs for
  hospitals to adopt them, counting how many have adopted it

- helping people read books, and write books by using Emacs.

- establishing offline access to Wikipedia and Wiktionary by using
  Emacs.

- scripts for theaters, programs for actors and for music, and
  similar.

If it is again only specifically Emacs-modes related than why make a
special list when issues of LaTeX in Emacs can be posted into the
anyway under-trafficed gnu-emacs-help mailing list.

> Second, in the particular case of Emacs, the software's extensible
> architecture makes it especially probable that non-maintainer users
> would have deep expertise in certain areas.  There are so many
> specialized modes available, and so many domain-specific usage tips
> and configuration tricks, that whether a person is or is not an
> active *maintainer* of Emacs might not correlate very strongly with
> that person participating usefully in a discussion.  (Also, don't
> code contributions regularly come in from people who are not
> maintainers?)

> 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, and given the
> enthusiasm we've heard so far for it, I think the chances that the
> experiment would fail -- or at least that it would fail quickly --
> are probably at worst 50%.

There are many dead lists. If you need help, just ask and invite
others. If one mailing list would be overflown of questions related to
TeX/LaTeX than fine.

I do not mind being subscribed to several mailing lists.

I just see that people would be without reason excluded from areas
where they could help. Isn't it not enough to separate by threads?

> I understood the 'emacs-tangents' list to be basically a default
> place to get certain discussions off of 'emacs-devel'.  But this
> proposed new list is different.  It's not defined by a negative
> space, it's defined by a positive space: a semi-cohesive group that
> is likely to have various usage needs in common, and whose needs may
> eventually make their way back to Emacs Devel in the form of
> beneficial suggestions for Emacs.  I could be wrong about this, of
> course; I'm just saying the chances look good enough that IMHO
> creating the list and seeing if it works is worth it.

If somebody would be making good advertising for many people to
participate that would be useful. If there is no power, engine, money
or method to bring people into discussions actually related to
humanities, then gnu-emacs-help sounds good place to discuss,
especially as it needs more people to promote Emacs.

Jean