The WiG Email List
The WiG list is devoted to issues of interest to members of the Coalition of Women in German, founded in 1974 and devoted to the feminist study of German culture. You do not need to be a member of WiG to be on this list. If you wish to join WiG, see the membership information tab.
The former women_in_german list was owned and maintained by members of the GenderCaucus, which was founded in 1975 by women graduate students in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley as the Women’s Caucus. Since March 2017, we migrated to a Google group, which allows us to own and maintain the listserv ourselves.
WIG-L is an “unmoderated” list. This means that messages posted to the list are not reviewed by the owners; this would take considerably more of our time than a moderated list. However, an unmoderated list means that IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT CERTAIN STANDARDS BE FOLLOWED. In the following, we first give some important guidelines regarding material appropriate for posting and etiquette of the network, then we give some basic rules on using the software LISTSERV. PLEASE STORE THIS INFORMATION IN A HANDY PLACE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE; OTHERWISE YOU MIGHT NOT REMEMBER HOW TO SIGN OFF THE LIST either temporarily (vacation) or permanently, and you will have to annoy list users with the message, “How do I get off this list?”
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE:
To subscribe to or to unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to wig@womeningerman.org.
SUMMARY OF ADDRESSES AND OPERATIONS:
You can only post messages to the list if you are subscribed to the list. Once you subscribe and you want to send (“post”) a message to all the people on the mailing list, send ordinary e-mail to listserv@womeningerman.org. This address is normally the “Reply to:” address on any posting from the list, reached by pressing the appropriate key for “Reply”.***PLEASE AVOID SENDING PERSONAL MESSAGES TO THE ENTIRE LIST BY CHANGING THE RECIPIENT ADDRESS IN THE TO LINE IF YOU DO NOT INTEND TO REACH THE ENTIRE LIST.***
DETAILS:
POSTING MESSAGES TO THE LIST (i.e., to all the other subscribers to the discussion group): send an ordinary e-mail message to the list address: listserv@womeningerman.org
WHAT SHOULD YOU POST TO THE LIST?
The subject matter of the list is identified only as issues of interest to members of the Coalition of Women in German. Users should remember that this is an academic group consisting mainly of faculty and graduate students in German Studies. Inquiries or postings that would not interest this group are discouraged. For example, queries that could easily be answered by consulting standard reference materials — e.g., a request for a translation of an ordinary modern German expression unrelated to a broader question of interest to the group — are inappropriate for this list. Other than that, the owners of the list and the Steering Committee of WiG do not wish to restrict the scope of the list; political matters associated with German-related feminism, for example, are welcome, as are pedagogical and research issues, news postings from Germany of interest to the group, announcements of relevant conferences, etc. Postings may be in English or German.
Users are often discouraged by long lists of incoming mail, and may quit the list in despair if they don’t have time or patience to read postings that seem of little value. Please be considerate when you make a posting: is your contribution substantial? For most users,it is frustrating and time-consuming to find a subject header announcing a posting on an issue of ongoing discussion, only to find a message like: “Right on!” The users’ responsibility in this matter will help us avoid changing the list to “moderated” status.
WHEN SHOULD YOU ANSWER A QUERY POSTED TO THE LIST?
It is very important that you review the entire day’s mail from the list before responding to a query, since someone else may have already responded, and in fact a lively discussion could be in progress. The broader the question, the more likely that it has already been answered.
Naturally, you should answer only if you have the proper information; if you will only be able to supply the information after checking somewhere, please wait until finding the information before posting it (i.e., avoid a posting: “I think the author of that work is …, but I’ll check for you”). Someone else might have the information readily at hand.
WHERE SHOULD YOU SEND YOUR REPLY?
Always pause to ask whether you should send a reply privately to the sender of the message, or to the entire list (in fact, the original poster may have specified that s/he wishes to receive a private reply). Will your response be of interest to the entire group? Do you want your reply broadcast to hundreds of people?
***PLEASE NOTE that if you simply press the button (or click on the icon) “REPLY”, you will usually be replying to the entire list, not to the sender of the message. Your mail program might ask you to confirm before it does so, but it might not.***
PLEASE AVOID OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE. While we all get worked up about many issues, the discussion merely turns off most users and veers off course when personal insults or ad hominem arguments come into play. If the owners judge that a particular user consistently posts offensive messages or in other ways is detrimental to the list, they will seek to remedy the matter privately, and if that is not successful, they will exercise the option to remove that person from the list of subscribers.
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Contact Simone Pfleger: pfleger@ualberta.ca