On 12/12/02 4:52 PM, "Jimmy Wales" <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
That said, however, Cunc is still a valid voice
on the side
that says (in essence) that we shouldn't have any moderation --
a side that also includes me, Matthew Woodcraft, and Jimbo himself
(to varying degrees of strength -- Jimbo won't fight it if the rest want it,
Cunc would accept moderation by Jimbo, and I think so would I).
Whether we should moderate, and who should moderate, are separate issues,
but the latter does become moot if the former is decided negatively.
What do you think of my idea of my selecting a board of "approvers"
who don't reject posts, and then me logging in once a day (at least)
to handle the rest? This shouldn't burden my time unnecessarily, nor
should it slow the list down much, if we have enough approvers to keep
things moving along reasonably well.
The approvers would accept anything they think is good, but would not
reject anything. If they don't like something, they just leave it in
the queue. From there, I deal with it, either by posting it (likely,
I think, in many cases) or by rejecting it (with encouragement to tone
down the hostility or similar).
It's still a terrible idea. Qui custodiet custodies?
Moderation is fine for lists with a clearly defined scope, such as
job-announcement lists or dog-breeding tips. These wiki lists do not have
such a clearly defined scope. The only one that does is wikitech, and that
could be reasonably moderated.
Moderation for things like intent and irascibility and scorn is much more
difficult, and can only be done without ugly results by someone who is not
involved at all in the content.
It's not an entirely separate issue of whether we should moderate and who
would moderate, as none of the potential moderators or approvers would be
disinterested parties--rather, they're active participants, all with
individual biases and philosophies of how the world, or at least Wikipedia,
should work. And they can't all be correct or be all correct.
Attaching a time lag to posts--the "approver" strategy would derail
conversations and arouse resentments quite possibly even worse than mere
rejections would.
The only semi-reasonable moderation strategy is one like at Slashdot or
kuro5hin, where its a matter of people promoting or demoting posts, and even
that's flawed and better avoided. And note that isn't possible with a
mailing list.