Re: [Last-Call] OT: change BCP 83 [Re: Last Call: BCP 83 PR-Action Against Dan Harkins]

[Adam Roach <[e-mail]>]

On 10/2/22 04:26, Stephen Farrell wrote:
> I wonder if there's any less subjective metric that could be
> applied to mailing list archives? 


If you're offering to put in the footwork, the general outline of what I 
know how to do would take one of two paths. Both would start with 
getting as complete a copy of the email archives as possible. This used 
to be easily found online, and may yet be; but if it isn't, I'm sure the 
tools team could give you assistance.

Then you either:

  * Take a suitably large random sample of messages over the past 37
    years (work out the size of the corpus and determine what you want
    your confidence interval to be), and assign a team to score which
    ones they believe meet some relevant criteria (e.g., violate today's
    code of conduct). You'll want at least two people -- and preferably
    more -- of differing backgrounds to look at each message to
    countervail certain kinds of biases. Or

  * Use one of the several available forum management tools to
    automatically score each message. Details vary, but most such tools
    will generate both "toxicity" and "sentiment" scores that you can
    plot over time. The ones I'm familiar with are run as a service, so
    you'd need to perform some light API integration (which might be as
    easy as piping formail into a curl command); although it's entirely
    possible that offline tools are also available.

Again, I know how to do this, but can't invest the resources. Let me 
know if you're earnest, and I'll happily consult with you on getting it 
to work.

/a