On 05/09/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
What I hear you saying is "This person is upsetting people, they've gotta go." That's rather paternalistic isn't it?
Being a moderator involves undertaking a balancing act of considerations between the annoyance effect of a list member and the substance of what that list member has to say. Generally we err on the side of non-intervention/non-moderation, mostly because we are lazy and don't want to create extra work for ourselves.
On 05/09/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 9/5/07 9:40 AM, David Gerard at dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
We keep the moderation light because otherwise it's a damn nuisance.
A "damn nuisance" to whom? Marc
A damn nuisance to the list moderators, to have to actually go to the effort of reading moderated messages and decide whether to let them through. Hence why we don't do it much. Which, I believe, is what you seem to want.
Moderation is a necessary evil. It is not often that we reject posts from the mailing list, but it is usually for a good reason. The WikiEN-l list administrators make up a (relatively) large and diverse group, by comparison to other mailing lists (such as wikipedia-l, which has one list admin). The potential for abuse of moderation is thus reduced.
Finally, to address your request to be able to decide which emails to read yourself, I understand your viewpoint (and it has been conveyed by several people before you in prior discussions about moderation, which were quite similar to this, only not 100 emails long). However, I'm not convinced your sentiments are matched by most WikiEN-l subscribers, and I don't think we would be kept as moderators for very long if we started allowing through a lot of the stuff we presently moderate.
~Mark Ryan