uk.*
Britain's own Usenet hierarchy, with its own rules for creating groups and an argumentative culture that gave the Big 8 a run for its money.
In the 1980s British Usenet traffic ran through UKnet, the UK arm of EUnet, operated from the University of Kent and linking the country's UUCP sites. Discussions of purely British matters — trains, the TV licence, politics, the weather — earned a hierarchy of their own rather than drowning among American groups.
uk.* borrowed its process from the Big 8: a proposal was debated in uk.net.news.config, and a vote decided whether the group got created. It was every bit as procedural as the original and produced its own celebrities, its own feuds and its own FAQ. When the internet took over transport, much of the traffic rode on the academic network JANET.