1. Introduction
Description
This article is from the Switzerland FAQ, by Marc Schaefer schaefer@alphanet.ch with numerous contributions by others.
1. Introduction
This newsgroup (in French, this is translated by ``forum'', or not
translated at all) soc.culture.swiss, was created in February
1994. Its aim is to be a forum where Swiss nationals and those
interested in Switzerland can exchange ideas and discuss politics,
economics, and everything that has a more or less distant link to the
word `swiss'. The newsgroup seems to focus itself on Swiss
culture-related items and political discussions.
However, as most of the readers of soc.culture.swiss are either non
Swiss or do not live in Switzerland, soc.culture.swiss should NOT in
general be used to contact Swiss people. The newly-reorganized Swiss
newsgroups are probably best suited for that purpose. Those newsgroups
are not distributed worldwide, but there are some sites willing to
offer NNTP feeds for those newsgroups in the US.
ch hierarchy newsgroups:
ch.general Misc. items of interest to Swiss newsgroups readers
ch.rec General info about recreational activity.
ch.talk Discussions in general.
ch.bulletin.avalanche Bulletins of the ISL Davos.
ch.comp Computer related topics.
ch.comp.networks Network technology and security.
ch.comp.os.linux Linux and Unix in general.
ch.comp.os.ms-windows The MS-Windows operating system.
ch.market Want to buy/sell.
ch.market.comp Want to buy/sell computers and peripherals.
ch.market.jobs Need/search a job.
ch.test A place for test postings.
Beware that those newsgroups are multi-lingual (especially German,
English and French, but also Italian).
Long distance companies or toll call companies and other commercial
postings are NOT appropriate, please use one of the biz hierarchy
newsgroups. Thank you. People interested by genealogy may want to use
the soc.genealogy hierarchy (French-speaking: fr.rec.genealogie). Also
note that Swiss genealogy is mostly discussed in the newsgroup
soc.genealogy.german (don't be afraid of the ``german'' :-))
As a general advice, please consult the newsgroup
news.announce.newusers and follow the discussion in soc.culture.swiss
for some time before your first posting. Articles cross-posted to
another newsgroup are normally NOT appropriate for soc.culture.swiss.
Recently there has been quite a lot of discussion in soc.culture.swiss
about recurrent topics: guns, Europe, service providers and so
on. There have also been a lot of inappropriate or irrelevant
postings; this FAQ may help reduce the noise in the newsgroup.
The question about what language this FAQ should use is difficult to
answer. My first language is French. Many languages are spoken in
Switzerland. However, people in this country do frequently know
English as a second or third language: the fact that most articles in
soc.culture.swiss are in English proves me right. Thus, this FAQ's
official language will be English. Feel free to translate the document
into another language if you like, or to submit new information in
your language (French, German, Italian) which I will be able to
translate. Submit changes to the e-mail address shown at the
beginning of this article.
WARNING: This document contains some views of the political situation
in Switzerland. If you do NOT agree with what I say, because you think
differently, please send me a _mail_: the idea is not to use the
newsgroup as a meta-discussion about the FAQ itself :-) In general, I
try to be as open-minded as possible.
WARNING-2: This document has been written in the hope it would be
useful. There is absolutely no warranty on the content. Feel however
free to spot errors and send corrections to me.
This FAQ is available by WWW
http://www-internal.alphanet.ch/~schaefer/scs/faq
(soft-link to the master version)
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r14160/swiss/swiss.html (Christian ZIMMERMANN)
(this version is usually up to-date, and is faster for North America).
Note that this posting is automatically archived somewhere in
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/
Note for French-speaking people: there is a FAQ about accentuation in
the USENET news system available in fr.usenet.8bits. To stay general,
ISO Latin-1 (8859-1) accentuation _is_ tolerated on the news system,
MIME base-64 or even quoted-printable is not.
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