OFF-TOPIC: Netiquette & our group

["g. souther" <ss@maestro.com>]

As I see it, there can't be more than a very rew -- if any -- rules of 
etiquette that apply equally all across the net.  I think the net is now 
too diverse for that.  At considerable risk of being trite, it seems more 
accurate to me to view the net as a very large collection of communities 
of varying cohesion and duration.  Each such community must develop its 
own rules.

We are all drawn here because we want to talk about sumo.  The contours of
our conversations, and our etiquette, are defined in part by that
identity.  Hence it is unlikely that a majority of us would welcome posts
in French, bawdy limericks, ASCII art, batch files, or any of a host of
other things that dominate other groups.  Nonetheless, we are the ones who
decide what goes on here. 

For my part, I see this more as a group of sumo fans, rather than a group
of people talking exclusively about sumo.  If we were all at a bar, I
doubt that we would talk exclusively about sumo.  Some topics raised here
no doubt develop more fully in private interchanges among subsets of our
membership.  Without off-topic messages, those interchanges would never
arise.  It does seem to me, however, that off-topic courtesy mandates
brevity and appropriate disclosure in the header (as in Abe-san's virus
warning). 
 
It seems to me that a major part of this group's -- and any group's --
business is figuring out who we are, why we are here, and what we want to
do together.  In so doing, we learn how better to be human.