[WikiEN-l] Moderation on this mailing list

[Marc Riddell]

on 2/22/07 2:07 PM, David Gerard at dgerard at gmail.com wrote:

> Put it this way: more than me has thought he's more than one of the
> recent posters with a remarkably low evidence:invective ratio.
> 
> The poster in question is no longer completely useless to the list. I
> think we're slowly training him to write things that are relevant
> talking points concerning the project.
> 
> I fear that's all we can really do. The fundamental problem is that,
> as long as email addresses are free, it's impossible to keep someone
> entirely off the list without getting really drastic and screening
> just about all messages. And that would in fact make a
> conceptually-moderated list, which would be a failure as a list.
> wikien-l has to be open, as Wikipedia has to be open.
> 
> Heck, I don't want that job as a listmod. I just want to clear the
> spam and help people who can't work the Mailman interface and so
> forth, and boot out troublemakers only as needed.
> 
> As the mailing list for a wiki, readers have to have some of the
> tolerance to stupidity they need to have to work on the wiki itself.
> Just as working productively with *complete idiots* is pretty much
> mandatory on the wiki, putting up with this shit to some degree is
> hard to avoid here.

David,

Extremely well put! You helped me a great deal when I first came to the
List. It was my first experience posting to any such list, and I didn't even
know where to place, or how to format, my messages. Now, to some people's
annoyance, I can focus on the substance ;-). You are a part of the chemo
that will hold back the cancer in the culture.

Marc Riddell