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