[Foundation-l] Use of moderation

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 6:51 PM, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote:
> For the record, I am one of those who did not speak up yet
> (ref Austin) who would hope some of our power posters felt
> less need to share every thought with the rest of us.
>
> In a public debate few people with a firm stance can be
> convinced to change their mind, so most polemical posts
> can only hope to win over undecided onlookers.
>
> Changes that that will happen also diminish fast as more
> and more readers lose interest in a discussion.
>
> I even fear that a new point of view after 20 replies
> on a thread has less change of getting across
> as many people already went their way.
>
> There was a time when I tried to see all sides of debate.
> Nowadays I tend to selectively read replies from people
> who might have something to contribute.
> To me that sounds like a bad signal to noise ratio.

I've read whole your email, unlike emails of many others. After a
couple of years here, I know well what a number of posters may
contribute about some issue and when they may say something
interesting to me. There are even some threads which I am not reading
and it is not because I think that I won't read there anything new or
interesting, but because I think that I don't need to know the content
of those threads.

But, I've got something on my mind.

We don't need a forum for communication, we need user-friendly
structured discussion and I think that we may make something like
that.

Clear wiki pages are not good for that because they are too
unstructured and structure has to be made by contributors. But, some
wiki-like technology may be a good idea (i.e. some MediaWiki
extension). Forums have a kind of that structuring, but it is not
enough good. They are too hierarchical and inflexible.

What do I want is something like:

* Wikimedia projects
** <general discussion about Wikimedia projects>
** Wikipedia
*** <general discussion about Wikimedia projects>
*** New Wikipedias (place for announcing new Wikipedias)
*** CheckUser issues (also tagged as Wikimedia Foundation->CheckUser issues)
*** Analysis of Wikipedia content (also tagged as Research->Analysis
of content->Wikipedia)
*** ...
* Wikimedia Foundation
** Board
*** Ting Chen (also tagged as Wikimedia
projects->Wikipedia->Chinese->Contributors->Ting Chen)
**** Ting's lecture during Wikimania 2007 (also tagged as
Wikimania->2007->Lectures->Ting; also: Wikimedia->Lectures->Tings
lecture during Wikimania 2007)
...
* Misc
** Chat about weather
** Chat about science
** Chat about Sarah Palin
** ...

And I want to be able to be subscribed via email just on topics
interesting to me. So, whenever someone adds a comment or make a new
thread about Analysis of content, I want to get email. I also want to
get info about newly created categories.

In that case, "list" moderators would have to actively categorize
threads, if writers didn't do that well. However, it should be a
wik-like model, where contributors should be able to categorize their
threads or even particular "emails" (or whatever the name for that
would be).

The main benefit from such approach would be possibility to see what
has been talked earlier about the same subject; as well as we would
have a knowledge database. If someone repeats 5th time the same thing,
it would be obviously trolling.

In other words, the concept would be similar to FriendFeed categorized
discussions. Foundation-l may stay as a proxy to that service for
those who are willing to follow everything and email replies to
foundation-l would go to a relevant thread.

Do similar concepts exist? Did I find hot water? :)