SC - rare foods at feasts-rant

[LrdRas@aol.com]

Since Ras seemed to be perturbed when I answered multiple messages as
they came to me, even though I thought I was adding new information
each time, let me see if I can collect my replies to multiple questions
together into one message.

Bear said:
> I would point out that leaving the headers lets the reader know who posted
> the information, when it was posted, and sometimes their e-mail address at
> that time.  This allows one to determine the quality of the source, provides
> a temporal reference for changes of opinion, and provides a possible way of
> directly contacting the poster for clarification on various points.  I've
> used all of these pieces of information when working through the Florilegium
> and others have used them to contact me.

This is a reasonable summation of why I keep some header info intact. It
is quite important to me that folks get credit for what they have written.
So the name stays. Since often the email name header is a user code or
name, I will usually leave the trailer if it has a more complete name
and a different email address. Some address trailers can be quite long.
For instance Master Cariadoc's when he is posting from work. In that
case, I will occasionally leave the entire thing so a dedicated search
will find it, but I will trim off a lot of it for most messages.

I leave the date to allow some chronolgical ordering of messages to be
done if needed. While I try to arrange messages in chronological order,
sometimes I do mess up, so it's better to keep the date line. I will
keep the seperate newsgroup or maillist name if it exists and I keep
the subject line so that if someone wishes to reconstruct a thread it
can be done even if crudely. It also makes it easier to use something
like Deja-News to locate other messages in a thread that I didn't keep.

While email addresses do often change, I really can't try to maintain
a list of the modern email addresses for all posters and update that
info in the various messages. It's taken me almost a year to simply
update the format of each of the files at the old Rialto site and move
them to the new Florilegium site. But then it is over 1200 different
files, not including different formats of each.
 
> It is also the kind of information scholars find useful and since the
> Florilegium has put in an appearance in at least one scholar paper, the
> headers might be worth leaving just for that reason.

Oh??? I've heard some comments that this might happen but never seen
anything concrete. I'd love to see any more info you have on this
particular scholarly paper.

Lady Celia des L'archier said:
> When someone is doing a volunteer work, especially one as time consuming as
> collecting and cateloguing information, it is more productive to offer help
> than to criticize the way in which the task is being done.

Yes, help would be appreciated. However, criticism does have its place.
I have often commented more on the internal dilemmas and philosophies
found in my handling of the Florilegium here on this list. For several
reasons. First, as a group, you are probably one of heaviest users
of the Florilegium that I can reach. Secondus, I hope that if you have
suggestions or criticisms you will come forward with them. And third,
this list doesn't seem prone to flame wars. Ras does have some 
suggestions that I have either previously considered or will. Since
this message is long, I'll address some of this in another message.

I get very little feedback on the Florilegium. While some of the
logs I've looked at show close to 100,000 copies of files being
downloaded in a month (and that statistic is over a year old), I
get maybe half-a-dozen if that many messages on the Florilegium
itself (as opposed to people asking for more information). I have
had bad links in the Florilegium exist for months  Had someone
emailed me about them I would have fixed them that day.

Criticisim does let me know what to work on next and how folks
use the Florilegium. I really don't have a good feel for whether
folks browse through it, hunt for something specific and then
leave when they find it, whether my organisation of files is
sufficent or could be improved and if so, how.

When most of the SCA online conversation was on the Rialto (the 
rec.org.sca newsgrou), I had a fair chance of seeing a lot of it even
if it was a very busy newsgroup. Now it is much less busy and the
noise to signal ratio has gone way up. However, starting back in 1994
or so, the SCA traffic started to transfer to specialized mail lists,
such as this one. I can barely keep up with this list sometimes and
I'm way behind in reading SCA-Arts. There is lots of useful bits of
information that is out there, but is disappearing.

I welcome folks who collect messages on a particular thread and
send it to me for inclusion in the Florilegium, and unless requested
not to, I will give them credit in the files for doing this.

I also had hopes a while back of moving more and more to submitted
articles instead of messages in the Florilegium. Unfortunately,
while I do sometimes get unsolicited articles and articles I specifically
ask for, the quantity and the subjects they cover have never been
large.

> If Lord Stefan does not edit out headers and footers, then perhaps
> volunteering to help him to edit that element would be productive?  If not,
> then there may be a reason which *he* sees for leaving them intact.  For
> myself, if I were editing something like the Floriegium, I would at the
> very least want to leave the "from" information intact.

See above comments.

> as much of the information exchanged here is a matter of
> opinion and I would want the archive to include those different opinions
> and arguments including any information that the individuals used to
> support their arguments.  Much of what is discussed here is open to debate,
> and debate we do :-)  ... deleting one side of the debate because you
> consider it "garbage" and consider the other side of the debate to be more
> accurate/correct/valid/supported takes away the right of the researcher to
> make their own decisions based on the arguments.  

Yes, I have to do most of my editing on the fly, as I see messages.
If I omit a message because I think it is wrong and doesn't have
enough supporting evidence, I may find myself in trouble when in
the next message, or a week later good supporting evidence is
provided but by that time I can no longer locate or recover the
original message. I did start saving old digests that had messages
I thought might be of use in the future when more info might become
available. But so far, I've seldom had time to go back and look
at these.

More later. Specifically on some of Ras' comments.

- -- 
Lord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas           stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****