Re: Do not quote entire XSL-List posts

[Tony Graham <tgraham at mulberrytech dot com>]

At 16 Feb 2000 15:50 -0400, XSL-List Owner wrote:
...
 > Please observe the simple courtesy of trimming your quotes to the
 > portion to which you are directly replying or quote just enough to
 > establish the context.

I'm pleased to note many people have stopped wholesale quoting since
Wednesday's message, and the XSL-List's signal-to-noise ratio has
increased significantly as a result.

Using the empirical signal-to-noise ratio of the number of messages in
a digest compared to the number of "XSL-List info and archive" tag
lines in the digest, a digest with no wholesale quoting would have a
ratio of 1, since there is one tag line for every new message.  Any
unnecessary quoting of the tag line adds to the noise and decreases
the ratio.  Wednesday's third digest was probably an all-time low,
since 14 messages contained 22 tag lines for a ratio of 0.636.
Happily, the most recent digest was 25 messages containing 27 tag
lines for a ratio of 0.923.

I don't intend to keep calculating signal-to-noise ratios, but I do
ask and expect that people will continue to trim their quotes of
previous XSL-List posts.

Regards,


Tony Graham
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Tony Graham                            mailto:tgraham@mulberrytech.com
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