[WikiEN-l] Time to reboot wikien-l

[William Pietri]

Bryan Derksen wrote:
> [...] IMO a
> "thoughtful and insightful posts only" rule for wikien-forum would
> either strangle discussion or be permissive enough that the list would
> be a near duplicate of wikien-open. A middle ground would be extremely
> hard to find in practice.


Here's my proposal for making that work.


We find a collection of people who are willing to moderate wikien-forum. 
Say, a half-dozen to a dozen.

People write in proposing new threads. If any moderator thinks the topic 
is interesting or important, they can volunteer to curate the thread. 
They may not participate in a thread they curate, and should curate in 
an NPOV way.

The thread's curator sends out the initial post. Any further comment on 
the topic is evaluated by the curator on quality, novelty, and tone, 
with a bias toward rejection. Posts that can stand on their own are 
heavily favored over point-by-point replies, especially argumentative 
ones. Replies that are thematically related are edited together into one 
message.

People who want to have back-and-forth discussions are encouraged to do 
that directly, and are asked to report back at the conclusion of the 
discussion. Similarly, sufficiently interesting threads on wikien-open 
may be summarized at their conclusion on wikien-forum.

The lists moderators are encouraged to give one another feedback on 
thread curation, with a focus on maximizing reader benefit. Readers are 
also encouraged to let the moderators know how they are doing. All of 
that takes place off-list.


The notion is to extract the interesting content from the argument. 
Right now the burden for that is on the thousands of readers, rather 
than the dozens of posters or the handful of moderators. This approach 
wouldn't work with a lot of communities, but since we already have 
plenty of people skilled in NPOV summarization, I think we could pull it 
off.


William



-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri