Installation discussion list, Jan 2005 [was: Re: [plug] Newbie Guide - The beginning]

[James Devenish]

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In message <200501282342.11432.bob at fots.org.au>
on Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 11:42:10PM +0800, bob wrote:
> I have been a member of PLUG for some years now, and a list subscriber for 
> considerably longer. I have persisted with PLUG despite the problems with 
> dealing with newbies (and not so newbies) in hopes of an improvement...
[...]
> Expressing contempt for someone who has asked some lame question,
> because they may not know enough to be able to ask something sensible,
> is not the answer.

Do you have examples of such problems? I am also wondering: who are
these "newbies" and how do you know that they are "newbies"? There is a
great deal of hand-holding on this list and my impression is that
"conspicuous newbies" are normally treated well. (A recent exception has
been noted repeatedly in this thread.) When I refer to "conspicuous
newbies" I am thinking of two things: (a) it is sometimes obvious from
someone's writing that they do not have confidence with Linux (b) I get
an e-mail each time someone subscribes or unsubscribes from the list,
and in that sense I see that people who are new to the mailing list get
treated well. We are all newbies forever, but it's the rate at which an
individual migrates from "absolute newbie" to "reasonably confident"
that is going to vary. Perhaps one problem is that it is daunting to try
to use e-mail to help an "extreme newbies" (i.e. someone who lacks
confidence with personal computing *and* is inexperienced with Linux) --
I'd imagine a "face-to-face" approach would be a better idea! It's
really disheartening when that happens, but sometimes it's too hard to
help someone via e-mail, and they need to self-learn some concepts
before the list could do them any good. Also, people who have been
regularly getting assistance via the list would be expected to show
citizenship by expanding their own wealth of knowledge and improving
their "helpability" (i.e. making it easier for others to comprehend and
explain their problem) as well as perhaps contributing their own
experiences to the list.

On a related note, that are some "long-term newbies" (e.g. I think Arie
described himself as a "newbie"), but the meaning of this is not clear
to me. Perhaps is a reference to people's self-evaluation of their own
confidence or overall experience? I wouldn't subscribe myself to a
"newbie list", yet I'd be stuck like a newbie if I wanted plug in a
FireWire video camera, or play a DVD, or use WINE, or play a game with a
3-d graphics card, or dual-boot a PC with Windows (took me three hours
to partition the last PC hard drive I used).

There was recently a discussion on another local lists where people
expressed feelings of personal offence that their questions had gone
unanswered. But, really, it's a bit like failing to get responses from
an ad in a newspaper -- it's natural that sometimes no one thinks they
have a worthwhile response to offer. It is unfortunate if this makes
people feel "offended", but that is the same as any social situation.
Perhaps the all we can hope to do in practical terms is add a warning
to the newcomers' welcome message (I might forward a draft to the list
later today.)

Also, could someone clarify what newbie thinks a "flamewar" is? Although
I do not read all the posts in this list, I have recently seen several
people write that "I don't want to start an X versus Y flamewar". What
does this mean and what is the point of saying it? I don't think
flamewars start without a reason: there must be some difference of
opinion to begin with. If people can't debate their opposing points of
view then others won't see how to make a choice among the inevitable
plethora of options presented on this list. (Don't forget: sometimes
people complain that "there were three different options mentioned, but
no one explained why they would choose one instead of the other".)

Your note about "cringing" suggests that you think newbies are often
"mistreated". I can imagine that this sometimes arises from simple
misinterpretation / misunderstanding, and we can't eliminate that. Short
of getting everyone to document their level of skill, it is purely a
personal judgement as to the level of detail or conciseness that is
needed in the reply. No one wants to have to explain how to launch a web
browser if all that needs to be said is "You should search for this sort
of problem with Google" -- this is the type of answer you get when we
have no local experience with the issue. However, if we had a "newbie
list", it might be more obvious that exorbitant explanation is required.
I think that "newbie lists" work well if they exist for people who need
answers to narrow range of frequently-asked or "obvious" questions.
Otherwise, the distinction between a "newbie list" the "main list" is
more like factional segregation (and we don't currently have factions,
do we???).

One of the problems I see with a generic "newbie list" is that everyone
is a newbie in one way or another, and everyone has lapses of memory.
Would we expect that an explanation of the command-line shell would
appear on the newbie list or the main list -- the answers could benefit
both newbies *and* non-newbies! Perhaps, instead, we could think of
having an "installation" discussion list. I think this is a more helpful
distinction for "gurus" as well as "newbies". The list would naturally
be open to those who are generally exploring the possibility of
installing an operating system, or installing Linux applications for the
first time. Indeed, we could collect people's names and addresses at
workshops and installfests so that they could receive follow-up
assistance via a list called installation at plug.linux.org.au.

FYI, statistics...I think we have about 300 subscribers on the list, of
whom a whopping 210 have posted messages in the last six months (overall
rate of about 25 messages per day over the last six months -- less than
in previous years). We've gained 60 new subscribers in the last six
months and lost 44. 15 people joined but then didn't make it past six
months. I compared that to some non-academic lists at the Guild and
their gain/loss ratio was 1.6: ours is 1.4. (But these are guesses --
it's really hard to give good stats for gains/losses because a lot of
people unsubscribe/resubscribe due to holidays or changes of address,
not because they are joining or leaving PLUG -- I've tried to manually
exclude them from the above stats).