Re: Proposal for an emacs-humanities mailing list

[Eric Abrahamsen]

<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

> On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 03:17:23PM -0800, Drew Adams wrote:
>> Chiming in here, but not with a strong opinion...
>
> [...]
>
>> 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).
>
> At first blush a good idea. After giving it a second
> thought, I think one of the strong points of a separate
> list might be that non-hackers (by which I mean those
> that consider themselves to be non-hackers!) might feel
> intimidated by volume, style or content (or all three!)
> of help-gnu-emacs.
>
> I concur that the cost of setting up a new mailing list
> is minimal.
>
> Perhaps... to reassure those fearing lots of "empty"
> lists, perhaps it should be wise to sketch some kind
> of "teardown procedure": six months after set up, if
> less than N mails per time unit have been seen, a
> teardown message is sent. If nobody complains, the
> list is shut down. Or something.

It occurs to me that, more than other areas of Emacs usage, this topic
would benefit from relying on the wiki. 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.

Then the top-level wiki page could be the main entry point to the whole
project, and that could be the link that gets sent around when trying to
do outreach to the academic community.

It would also give us a nice initial launch, if we could get a few Emacs
users to do full writeups on the wiki about various aspects of Emacs
usage in the humanities.

Just a thought,
Eric