[WikiEN-l] Just to throw this out there...

[Peter Bartlett]

Erik wrote:
>On a wiki, we risk "flagging wars", and by defining what "can be  
>considered offensive" we are leaving NPOV behind.

One possibility is that each user has the option to give a page a score
: 1 meaning "Doesn't need filtering" through to 10 "Nearly everyone
would want to filter this". Then the overall 'score' for a page is the
average of all scores users have given it. Then someone browsing the
'pedia could choose to filter at a particular score e.g. browse at 0
(filter everything with an score of more than 0 i.e. everything!) to 10
(= filter articles with average score 10 i.e. nothing!). 11 viewing
configurations available to the user... I believe Google only has 3!

Because each person/ip could only cast one score per article (though of
course they could change their score as the article changes) "flagging
wars" would be difficult because it would require
ip-hopping/multiple-log-in to try to tip the score in a particular
direction. 

This idea may be computationally quite feasible... we already have to
store everyone who's watching an article... maybe we could store
everyone who's scoring an article too. (Watchlist has a tag saying
"article changed since you last scored" etc).

Obviously the idea extends to other scores too... instead of a "filter
score" you could have a "quality score" and users could browse only
articles that on average believed to be high quality. 

Obvious disadvantage : The filter is "1-dimensional" i.e. you can't
filter on sex, religion whatever... only on the score... so if religion
were to get scores of about 5 and sex 7.. to filter religion you would
have to filter sex too.. I don't know if it can be made to fit with team
certification idea.
 
Anyhow these are only implementational ideas. My personal view is that
any sort of filtering along these lines is going to take effort on the
part of users.. perhaps we should stick to writing the encyclopedia for
now!

Pete