I don't much like Ed's suggestion that we moderate people rather than posts. With a virtuous few exceptions, most of us have posted things to the list that would have been rejected by a good moderator.

The idea of having a list of people who need approval first would be *highly* controversial, and that's controversy we don't need. We don't need to give anyone more reason to think that there is a cabal. I support treating everyone equal in this regard, even if it means more work for the moderators.

There is, by the way, one implication of making WikiEN-l moderated but not Wikipedia-l. I think it's safe to predict the following sort of situation. Some people will no doubt try to post something on Wikien-l and when it is rejected, they will post it on Wikipedia-l and scream bloody murder about abuse of power.

This means two things. First, most importantly, we've got to ensure that moderators do *not*, in fact, abuse their power. (Never give the above-mentioned types legitimate reason to complain.) The policy has to be clear and decisions have to be rendered fairly and objectively. Second, we need to make it clear from the outset that if wikien-l *does* become moderated, that *does indeed* mean that somebody's going to have power that they didn't have before. That in turn means that we have accepted the associated risks, and a *few* mistakes are perfectly predictable, and moreover, within the bounds of acceptability.

LP/Camembert wrote:

...

I understand why people want the list moderated - there's been a lot of

tiresome crap on here lately (there usually is). But if you don't want to read a message, what's wrong with simply deleting it? Everybody can be their own moderator that way, without having somebody decide what they should and shouldn't read. <<

The problem is that the noise drives off the signal and even literally drives off prime producers of signal (e.g., posts from Julie and KQ would count as signal). Basically, there are too many children on the list, and there needs to be a few playground moms, or else the adults will want to have nothing to do with the list.

Larry