I say if you have a problem in soc.culture.russian, try to solve it in
soc.culture.russian. I could even suggest that you undertake this vote
quite informally in the newsgroup and make the results part of the
"good guys" FAQ.
Institutionalizing more votetaking chores on Usenet doesn't sound,
uh, sound. You need volunteers to do the votetaking -- and there seems
already to be too few people willing to undertake votetaking because
of all the senseless flak it would inflict on them.
By the way, I don't think the proposed scheme sounds very democratic
unless you also have a simple means for revoting. You're stuck with
the decisions of whatever people happened to be there and be
interested last time a vote was taken. Insisting on new votes all the
time would be yet another venue for the troublemakers to explore.
(This is a problem with Usenet group approval as well, of course.
But the implications are different. For one thing, the mere existence
of a "useless" newsgroup is a lesser problem than a "useless" FAQ
because the FAQ will be read and referred to even if it's out of line,
or out of date and orphaned, whereas a newsgroup nobody uses is
perfectly out of the way. Having unreliable "approved" FAQ:s floating
around would quickly lose the appeal of the approval stamp, IMHO.
And then you only need to have a general sense of what Usenet is to
understand, say, a CFV for soc.culture.finnish. [There is a
soc.culture.nordic -- which I don't read -- which covers all the
Nordic countries. I don't know if there is any pressure to split the
group. A good and valid CFV would explain such things.] On the other
hand, approving or rejecting a FAQ based on its content requires some
understanding of the content, often even regular expertise in the area
covered by the FAQ. [As has been stated elsewhere many times, many a
"FAQ" is actually not so much a list of "frequently asked questions"
-- you have everything from pedagogical introductions to interesting
topics, to in-depth technical explanations of complicated matters.]
Maybe you could have some sort of CFV-like "cover letter" introducing
the issues, but then that would again require more work to get a FAQ
approved and require yet more volunteers.)
/* era */
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