Talk:Special interest group

The term Special Interest Group isn't specific to computer associations. Eg, Mensa, National Model Railroad Association, NIH. This needs to be expanded. JDX 07:27, 20 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The Mathematical Association of America has Special Interest Groups. Emil Volcheck (talk) 03:52, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Special Interest Groups, Special interest groups, Advocacy groups, Presssure groups etc

I have started a discussion on Talk:Interest group regarding some proposed adjustments to the articles around advocacy groups. This does not directly affect this article (except to resolve the nonsense where Special interest group was redirecting the Interest group (as in Advocacy group) rather than to this article until I changed it this morning. Clearly the terms 'Interest group' and 'Special Interest group' are used in many different ways around the world and can either mean this sort of group or an Advocacy/lobby group however we do need a more consistent set of article titles and redirects than we currently have. Please add any comments you have to the Talk:Interest group discussion. PeterEastern (talk) 11:42, 28 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

History of the term

Stumbled across this article and saw that the term was credited to Compuserve (and chasing that down, to a TRS-80 group, meaning very late 70s or early 80s). I don't know where the term was actually first used, but it was in use by the ACM no later than the late 60s - SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics) dates to 1969, SIGPLAN (Programming Languages) dates to 1967 (prior to that it was a SIC - Special Interest Committee), SIGOPS (Operating Systems) dates to 1968 (a descendent of an earlier SIG whose founding I can't find), etc., and by 1965 or 1966 at latest there seemed to be a formal process to convert a SIC to a SIG, implying they may have existed for a while by then. I'm not updating the article because I have no reason to believe that the ACM's usage was the first, and I tend to believe that it is an obvious enough term that it was probably "invented" numerous times. 108.74.28.81 (talk) 15:50, 22 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]