[Wikipedia-l] excessive posting

[Mark Williamson]

> With the enormous output of mails some participants
> produce here and the impossibility of reading all of
> them, important arguments can be overlooked easily. On
> top of that, the arguments of members who don't have
> the time to write a dozen or more e-mails per day are
> sometimes drowned out by an overly productive
> minority.

It's called "skimming". You skim an e-mail to see if you care at all.
If you don't, just delete it and move on. While it may not be possible
to read all the e-mails, it's certainly possible to skim all of them.

And, if you've gotten tired of a particular thread or person, you can
just stop all of those particular e-mails.

> I've sure heard about that delete button but I think
> it can't replace a sound culture of discussion. In an
> oral conversation you can't talk 80% of the time.
> Here, I sometimes get the impression that some people
> believe the more (and the longer) e-mails they write,
> the more right they are.

And who might that be? I think it has more with a desire to respond to
ALL the messages on a topic, rather than a belief that more e-mails
makes you more right, which it obviously does not.

Mark

PS

Geritt said something earlier, presumably jokingly, about an all-caps
signature. The purpose of that is that miniscule letters were not used
in ancient Rome. Thus, "QVANTUM" in my signature rather than
"Quantum". I'm pretty sure that in situations like that (ie,
sociolinguistic authenticity), all-caps are considered acceptable by
the general public.