on 12/13/02 11:06 AM, The Cunctator at cunctator@kband.com wrote:
On 12/13/02 6:15 AM, "Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Suppose we commit to a very light moderation, by me, which you said you could accept, with others helping out by doing approvals of posts. AND we commit to setting up and testing a bbs system as you've proposed several times in the past.
We experiment -- wikien-l becomes moderated. wikipedia-l stays unmoderated and migrates to a bbs/email system. We later revisit the issue (March 1st, I propose) and see how it's working out in practice.
We can try that, but I'm not sure what good that would do. A lot of it depends on who the approvers are. Their biases/likes would determine who would participate, and what kind of participation that would be. And by creating a contrast between wikipedia-l and wikien-l we're implying that they're somehow different in tone and content, rather than focus.
Hopefully the moderators will consciously suspend their bias (those that they are aware of) and hopefully Jimbo will choose folks who have some self-awareness. This ought not be a way to continue the struggle by other means. It should be a list issue if that is the behavior we see.
One thing: we've had a lot of call for moderation, but little explication of what the direct issues are that moderation would solve. What exactly are these problems?
The sort of post which has a lot more heat than light. Constant harping on something. And although I havn't seen much of it here, spamming the list with off the wall stuff that has nothing to do with the list, either commericial or personal.
There would need to be a clear determination beforehand of what will be moderated. And things like "no personal attacks" are too vague to be a clear moderation guideline. Even "avoid topical discussion" is hard, because some degree of appeal to specific entries/topics is necessary for discussion of broad points.
Like pornography, one knows it when one sees it, a typical attack will generally include "stupid" blah blah, scatological references etc. Posts on topics are the same, when they start getting into the details, the debated issues, we all know it belongs on the discussion page of the article.
Fred