Editing Great Renaming (section)

===Renaming===
The ''backbone providers'', ''the [[backbone cabal]]'', were instrumental in this reorganization of Usenet since they had great influence with respect to supporting a new newsgroup. Some suggest that members of the cabal had interests in bundling certain newsgroups into the ''talk.*'' hierarchy, so that they would not be objected to by their supervisors.<ref name="livinginternet.com"/>

These newsgroups were categorized into a series of [[hierarchy|hierarchies]], to make it easier for newsgroups to be created and distributed. The original hierarchies were ''comp.*'', ''misc.*'', ''news.*'', ''rec.*'', ''sci.*'', ''soc.*'', and ''talk.*''.

These hierarchies, known collectively as the "[[Big 8 (Usenet)|Big Seven]]", were open and free for anyone to participate in (except for the moderated newsgroups), though they were subject to a few general rules governing their naming and distribution.

Several other popular hierarchies remained on Usenet as well, such as the ''k12.*'' hierarchy, which covers topics especially relating to [[education]], [[school]]s, and [[college]]s.