Subject: Network ethics

From: Andre HECK <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 94 11:44:11 +0200

Friends,

There are some concerns over here about this gentleman from Muenster
who was the subject of earlier messages. I second of course the
reservations expressed by Daniel about his astronomical competence.
Daniel, followed by ADS, had also to take measures against an illicit
pointing from him towards Simbad via a US account.

This brings me to more general considerations and I would like to
know how you feel about them. It is obvious that the introduction of
Mosaic and its flexibility brings in new problems and that a new
ethics will have to be adopted. It is all too easy to download via
Mosaic files that have taken hours of navigation to the original
compilers to put together. People with a minimum of deontology will
put the appropriate credit or follow the advices given.

[For instance, some time ago, Don pointed to me a copy of my
institutional list sitting at NFRA in Holland. This was of course an
outdated version. After getting in touch with those people, they
concluded wisely that it was better to point directly to the original
and permanently updated file. So there was ultimately nothing to
complain about in this case.]

In other words, it is obvious that, if we put information on the web,
that's for the best use of it, but usage and copies should always be
made in good intelligence, and with realizing that there might be
some political implications imbedded.

I would recommend we start putting together a few points that might
become part of an ethical charter people could adhere to, at least
in our community. I guess we accumulated enough experience to put
this modestly forward.

There are other recommendations that might be included. For instance,
a page should always be signed with, whenever possible, direct e-mailing
facility to this person.

Icons, pictures and logos should also be kept to a reasonable number and
sizes. The other day, when I was navigating to recover a few additional
entries for my list of individuals, it was taking ages to recover a
page from someone in Poland. I was blaming the network, but not at all.
When the page finally came out, there was first a large-size picture
of the guy's wife (but the resolution was too bad to really appreciate
it), then followed by another large-size picture of the guy himself.
The real value of the page was close to zero.

It is also bad use of hypertext and bad example of electronic handling
of documents to split a document in a sequence of `pages', with nothing
more. An example of that was this paper from V. Bush put on the web. The
only real use of harpooning occurred only in the last page of this document
with anchors pointing towards other legal information in other directories.

Well, I guess these things are unavoidable in what is called in marketing
the initial phase of a product and where some development is sometines
still left up to not quite professional people.

Please feel free to comment and share your experience whenever you have time.

Best,
Andre.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: [email-masked] (anton koekemoer)
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 94 21:10:02 EST

Dear friends,

	My apologies for not joining in the discussion to date, the last week
or two have been extremely busy for me. I actually have some relevant
experiences to share:

Andre Heck wrote:
>                             ... It is all too easy to download via

This has already happened to my old list although the evidence is only
circumstantial. In early March, soon after ATNF came onto WWW, the maintainer
(Jim Argyros) made available a list of astronomy resources remarkably like
mine, including all the URLs, no new ones, and sorted identically - however
no credits as to its origin were given anywhere. When I emailed him about it
he denied having copied it - although I'd found that my list was fetched by
http from his machine the day before it appeared on ATNF. And given the fact
that none of our pre-AstroWeb lists were anywhere near complete, I felt that
the chances of another such list being identical were vanishingly small. The
official announcement of AstroWeb, together with the fact that he did add new
URLs to his list after I emailed him, have made this incident somewhat moot;
however since the issue has been raised I felt I should share this with you.

(NB: Peter Mueller at MPIfR had copied the ATNF list, but happily replaced it
with mine (incl. credits) when I informed him of the true situation. Gereon
Dahmen at the SCMT in Chile had copied the list from MPIfR before Peter changed
it. I emailed him too but received no response - so currently there are two
unathorised, un-credited copies of it on the Net: ATNF and SCMT.. I personally
feel there's no point in pursuing the matter now that AstroWeb is public, since
the old lists have been effectively superceded).

Regarding Don's points about whether or not to publicly list dubious URLs on
AstroWeb - personally I feel that the best thing is to contact the maintainer
of any information which is even slightly dubious, inform them of how widely
the URL will be publicised, and obtain approval (preferably "official", eg from
the dept head). Having obtained this, it would then probably be wise to include
a comment to that effect in the AstroWeb "1-paragraph" description of the URL.
I have in mind Don's examples of the EVN-TNG meeting, military sites, UCL, etc.
I'd also discovered Glazebrook's UCL link (which is now dead?..) but had not
added it because it was not accessible via the UK hyper-map (the only
accessible one is UCL comp. sci.) and therefore apparently not publicly
advertised (although I'll admit that hypermaps are not always as up-to-date
as they should be).

						cheers,
						 - anton.