Re: de.rec.fahrrad FAQ part 0

Michael C. Berch (mcb@net.bio.net)
Fri, 18 Feb 1994 01:14:55 -0800

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mathew writes:
> [ Background:
>
> Several cycling FAQs in German only were batch-posted to
> news.answers. I wondered why we were receiving them, because we don't
> want any German language newsgroups. I asked the poster,
> S.P.Zeidler, why he hadn't posted them with Distribution: de.
> The story continues: ]
>
> In message <19940216.7BBDED0.12AA4@serpens.rhein.de>,
> S.P.Zeidler writes:
> > A distribution de has been discussed at the time of creation of the
> > de hierarchy, and was voted down. You ask for de.*, you get it, no
> > matter where you are.
>
> That's the case with a distribution as well. I'm not suggesting that
> people outside Germany should not be able to get German newsgroups;
> rather, I'm suggesting that people outside Germany should be able, if
> they choose, to *not* get German-language postings, even if they're
[...]
> In a similar way, when I post something which is only relevant to
> people in the UK -- like, say, an obscure joke about a minor UK
> politician -- I stick Distribution: uk on it. It's simply polite to
> do so.

Personally, I don't think languages have anything to do with regional
distributions/hierarchies. There are German speakers (and French
speakers and Finnish and Japanese and whatever) here in California. I
don't see the parallel between "something only relevant to people in
Germany" and, say, "something written in German". It depends *what*
was written in German: an article, in a sports newsgroup,
discussing the latest Monchen-Gladbach v. Karlsruhe football match
might not be of global interest, but an article in German about
commercialization of the Olympics might be.

What is probably needed is a Language: header, and then you could
filter for it at the newsreader level. (I don't read German, so I
probably would do so, even though the articles might contain
information useful to me.) I don't see the need to filter out
foreign (to the site) language articles at the transport level, except
to the extent of not bothering with entire hierarchies that are not in
the local languge; the worst-case scenario being, of course, languages
requiring special character sets that will be incomprehensible without
special hardware and/or software.

--
Michael C. Berch
mcb@net.bio.net / mcb@postmodern.com

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