[WikiEN-l] Who's moderated?

[Mark Ryan]

On 03/09/07, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's pretty obvious when emails with earlier timestamps from one person
> come in at the same time as a bunch of later ones. It could just be a
> coincidental misconfiguration, but the facts fit.

That's exactly right.

We're not going to make the moderation list public, because (firstly)
there is no "moderation list", there is simply an alphabetical list of
the 900 or so email addresses which are subscribed to the mailing
list, with a string of options for each one (one of which is
moderation). Not everybody puts a real name in when they subscribe,
and those that do often put in their real name despite being
pseudonymous on Wikipedia. I am not in the habit of making private
email addresses or real names public just to satisfy people's
curiosity and demands for transparency.

Secondly, for long parts of the history of the mailing list, including
right now, all new subscribers to the mailing list are automatically
moderated upon subscribing. This is unfortunate but necessary, to give
effect to the purposeful moderation of others, who realise that they
can otherwise get around their moderation by just signing up with a
new email address. This means that people's first posts to the mailing
list often require approval, but when I come across such a moderated
post, I always check my list administrator log emails for them, and if
there is no reason there for them to remain moderated, I unmoderate
them at the same time as approving their first post. I also respond to
directly emailed requests from such users to be unmoderated.

A couple of times in the past few years I've gone through the list,
checked every moderated subscriber for their mailing list history
(date of subscription etc) and unmoderated a hell of a lot of them.
It's a lot of work and I'll probably get around to doing it again at
some stage. I have complete administrator logs of the mailing list
running back to when I became a list administrator in mid-2004, so I
have a lot of stuff there.

266 list members are currently moderated, out of the 901 list members.
Here is a breakdown by first letter of the email addresses:
A - 17
B - 16
C - 16
D - 17
E - 13
F - 7
G - 9
H - 11
I - 7
J - 22
K - 12
L - 7
M - 16
N - 11
O - 6
P - 9
Q - 1
R - 9
S - 21
T - 13
U - 0
V - 0
W - 19
X - 0
Y - 2
Z - 5

That's all the data you're going to get about who is moderated from
me. If any users find themselves currently moderated and wish to be
unmoderated, please email wikien-l-owner at lists.wikimedia.org. This
email address sends your email to all seven list administrators.

~Mark Ryan