[Foundation-l] Use of moderation

[Samuel Klein]

Tisza, this is very well put.

On 9/11/09, Tisza Gergő <gtisza at gmail.com> wrote:

>  - the discussion space is divided by time, not by topic. What little topic-based

Yes.  put another way, 'there is no natural namespace to fill and
revise over time as all useful discussions are traversed'

>  - the moderation is not transparent: if someone claims being censured, there is
>  - the moderation is binary, and consequently too soft: there is no way to flag
>  - topics cannot be raised on multiple lists without splitting the discussion;

I hadn't thought of some of these.

>  - it is hard to include new people (who where not subscribed before) into a
>  discussion bacause the way replying works. (This is actually solved by gmane,
>  - there is no way to see how many people are interested in a thread.
>  - there is no way to determine consensus (even approximately). With many
>  - it just doesn't scale well. Already everyone is complaining about the traffic,


>  I always found it strange that Wikimedia, being one of the greatest facilitators
>  of online collaboration, doesn't have its own cutting edge communication tools.
>  Not only do the mailing lists suck, wiki talk pages are just as bad. I think the
>  logical thing to do would be to take back most of the meta-project
>  communication  to the wikis, eat our own dogfood, and develop a wiki-based
>  communication system that works (preferably in reverse order).

I cannot but agree.


>  LiquidThreads was developed for that
>  purpose, but it seems to have been largely discarded, with no significant
>  interest from the community, the foundation or the usability team - why?

This may be part of the solution, but there is more to your statement above.
LiquidThreads is receiving more attention now; Erik probably has the
latest status.


>  I think the foundation should invest into reviewing state of the art tools for
>  large-scale constructive/informative discussion (slashdot, stackoverflow,
>  ideatorrent, uservoice come to mind) and adding whatever feature needed to
>  LiquidThreads to make it stick. I think opt-out moderation based on some sort
> of collaborative scoring, some sort of voting or at least ranking method, and
>  thread summaries with a tag or category system are the norm nowadays, and
> of  course there would be need for a bidirectional email gateway.

This would also make [[m:LSS]] much easier to compile :)


>  - set up a clone of foundation-l which is heavily moderated, and where all
>  - make better use of Nabble (or some opensource equivalent), which already
>  - make some of the private lists readable to everyone. If the only reason for
>  their existence is noise, it is enough to control write access strictly.
>  - set up a public waste bin where moderated mails can still be read (thus
>  avoiding the censorship debates) but do not pollute the discussion otherwise.

+4.

Is there a page describing the private lists we use?
[[m:Mailing_lists/overview]] only lists oversight, stewards, and checkuser.

SJ