RE: Proposal for an emacs-humanities mailing list

[Drew Adams]

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.