Jimbo already refused, leaving no one.
Who vetoed Axel, Lee or Magnus? (And I forgot to mention April).
Ed Poor
Ed Poor wrote:
Jimbo already refused, leaving no one.
Who vetoed Axel, Lee or Magnus? (And I forgot to mention April).
Cunc vetoed everybody except Jimbo.
Since the vetoing was in response to my suggestion to allow only uncontroversial people as moderators, so that one veto is enough -- but not counting a veto of everybody -- I'll say that vetoing everybody except Jimbo (as a matter of personal policy) can also be an exception. So I'd keep Axel, Lee, Magnus, and April on the table (as far as avoiding controversial figures like Larry is concerned), unless Cunc (or somebody else) says that any of these people is *particularly* objectionable to them.
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.
-- Toby
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).
This is actually better for the "no moderation" crowd because even I don't really have straight rejection power (usually) because any other moderator could well approve things before I even see them.
It seems like this would satisfy you and Cunc, even better than if I were a pure moderator, and possibly Matthew Woodcraft, too.
Additionally, those who accept the idea of moderation but have concern about the particular moderators will likely be more accepting if the moderators are only approving without rejecting. No single moderator would have the ability to prevent a post from being posted. Any moderator who bothers to log in can approve anything.
Two other thoughts: we're only talking about wikiEN-l, not the general policy list. And we can consider this an experiment. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. We can see how it goes and talk about it on March 1.
--Jimbo
On 12/12/02 4:52 PM, "Jimmy Wales" jwales@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.