On Sun, 17 Nov 2002, rex wrote: > Peter R. objected to such editing. First, it's your list and > subscribers have no right of free speech there, just as they > don't when they write letters to the editor of a newspaper; It is not "just as" LTEs. It's not "just as" anything except what it is --an emailing list. The policy can be set to whatever the list owner wishes. The subscribers can participate or not, according to those wishes as they please. It is also not an issue of "free speech", and I never suggested it was. It is, simply enough, an issue of courtesy, and an issue of proper attribution, and an issue of not risking misrepresenting the words or intent of the author. The list owner takes on serious responsibility when he attempts to interpret and represent someone else's content, style, emphasis, etc. I suggest that this attempt is prone to failure, and that the better approach is to work directly with the author to resolve the issues (or else to completely ignore and discard the submission). If you have no concern about any of these issues, then indeed feel free to operate your list under whatever other principles of consideration, respect, and concern that you wish. Your subscribers might be told of your particular principles so they can better decide whether to participate. > second, many people do not know the rules of netiquette > (RFC1855). This results in excessive quoting, top posting, > failure to choose an appropriate list topic (if the list uses > topic keywords), etc. Correcting such posts by stripping > excessive quotes, etc, makes the list easier to read without > changing the content of what the author wrote. If the subscribers could only be sure that no meaning or intention was lost in the efforts by the editor, perhaps this could be seen as nothing more than free labor. Why should the list editor get involved in that business if it's not necessary? A list owner could perform this service in behalf of the author, and not attribute the editorializing properly to himself as editor (recall that I said an editor could edit and post IF he properly attributed the content as edited to himself, giving full and accurate acknoweldgements for ideas of the original author as appropriate), and the author might even assume that this is a fine "service" provided by the list's "editor" --"let him do more of the same!". Or, the list owner can refuse to post the item unless the author makes the effort to remedy the situation according to _coherently articulated_ criteria provided by the list's owner (to the author; and to all subscribers in the WELCOME message for example). Further, as you say... > After burning out from the labor involved in editing posts ....