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Re: [MathGroup]: Descriptive headings

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg51985] Re: [mg51935] [MathGroup]: Descriptive headings
• From: "David Park" <djmp at earthlink.net>
• Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 02:07:59 -0500 (EST)
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Paul,

This is an idea that sounds nice in principle but is probably very difficult
in practice. It just imposes another test that a submission has to go
through before final posting. Whether the test is on the moderator or the
poster, it is just going to be an annoyance. Yes, it would be nice if
posters always used succinct perfectly descriptive headers but I would
rather things be open and easy than trying to shoehorn every posting into
some category.

But this does raise the question: Does it help if repliers change the
headings to make them more descriptive and if so, to what extent should they
change them?

David Park
djmp at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/



From: Paul Abbott [mailto:paul at physics.uwa.edu.au]
To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net

[I will be commenting on this in a post shortly - moderator]

Hi all, and especially Steve Christensen:

At the recent Wolfram Technology Conference in Champaign, Luc Barthelet
<lucb at ea.com>, a regular user of MathGroup suggested that it would be
good if all postings to MathGroup included a categorisation in their
header, e.g.

  Newbies, Graphics, Functions, Programming, Statistics, Teaching,
  Integration, Numerics, Symbolic Algebra, Special Functions, ...

so a Subject line might take the form

  [Statistics]: How to fit to an elliptical function?

(not sure if the [ ] are required or useful). In this way, sorting by
Subject would be easier. Of course, it's not always easy to do such a
categorisation, and they may change with time (as a problem stated as a
Numerics might end up being solved using Symbolic Algebra).
Nevertheless, I think such a change would be very useful. It should also
help when doing searches on MathGroup archives.

Cheers,
Paul

--
Paul Abbott                                   Phone: +61 8 6488 2734
School of Physics, M013                         Fax: +61 8 6488 1014
The University of Western Australia      (CRICOS Provider No 00126G)
35 Stirling Highway
Crawley WA 6009                      mailto:paul at physics.uwa.edu.au
AUSTRALIA                            http://physics.uwa.edu.au/~paul

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