I started reading the archives of this mailing list today because I wanted to run an idea by community members on this topic and wanted to see if this list was an appropriate place to do so, so for me this thread is serendipitous.

It seems to me that a new Wikipedia-inspired project could help address the many civility/noise problems of mailing lists, web forums, etc. A Wikimedia-derived variant could be developed specifically for conducting discussions and debates, where the participants together share the cost of moderation. Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View rule would be replaced with appropriate equivalents for civil and productive dialog (stick to the topic, be nice, don't be repetitive, etc.), and while users would not be able to alter a post they could flag a notably offending post with a 'takeback offer' and a reason, which would temporarily hide the post and gives the poster a chance to revise and resubmit. 'Meta-discussion' occurs on a separate page and eliminates the he-said/she said noise and disputes/'takeback wars' would be handled by the usual automated and community-based processes. To the degree that this changes behavior (and I think it has a powerful capacity to do so), overall moderation/'takebacks' would decrease over time so moderations costs aren't only shared, they decrease in aggregate.

One of the limitations I see is that enjoying the benefits of immediate noise reduction through the 'takeback'/revise mechanism requires a limited rate of update 'pulls' from an RSS reader or manual visits to the conversation's page rather than an immediate push of every message to your mail client. In theory this creates a delay that is problematic when participating in a 'hot' discussion but in reality there is already a practical limit to the speed and scale of a coherent discussion (a related issue, by the way, which I think a wiki-like process can tackle). Also, the cost of having your post hidden by a takeback offer is not fully reversible because the point may be moot by the time you get it back up. This provides some of the disincentive to write bad posts but also requires some controls to minimize 'false positives.' The human challenge would be a)whether or not people could accommodate themselves to 'takeback offers' as something other than censorship or violence- my sense is that they are more likely to accept it when the power to use the mechanism is shared and limited both normatively and systematically; b)whether the added 'heat' of participating in non-NPOV discussions would be too great for a self-organizing system to handle. Again, my sense is that similar mechanisms can work whether the collaborative aim is to produce an article with a neutral point of view or maintain civil and productive discussions.

Thoughts?

Austin Hair wrote:

/ In Buenos Aires I had multiple people ask (even practically beg) me to / / do something about foundation-l. One person said "fucking moderate / / foundation-l, already!"—to which I explained why I didn't think that

/>/ moderating individuals was a solution, but had to admit that I didn't />/ really have a better one./