On 6/23/2014 12:56 PM, Katherine Casey wrote:
Actually, I think there's something to be said for downvoting. Not in the reddit "i disagree" sense, but in the slashdot/ meta filter "comments downvoted/flagged past a certain point will be hidden/deleted" sense. It would obviously take a lot of work to make that work within the media wiki software *and* the Wikimedia ethos, but it would probably save tons of grief and derails if the worst of the worst comments were limited by crowdsourced review.
There are definitely times it's needed. Maybe if there's some review process where a non-biased moderator can look and see if it's just an opinion that's unpopular or something really worth removing.