[WikiEN-l] Who's moderated?

[Mark Ryan]

On 05/09/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> What I hear you saying is "This person is upsetting people, they've
> gotta go." That's rather paternalistic isn't it?

Being a moderator involves undertaking a balancing act of
considerations between the annoyance effect of a list member and the
substance of what that list member has to say. Generally we err on the
side of non-intervention/non-moderation, mostly because we are lazy
and don't want to create extra work for ourselves.

On 05/09/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> on 9/5/07 9:40 AM, David Gerard at dgerard at gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > We keep the moderation light because otherwise it's a damn nuisance.
>
> A "damn nuisance" to whom?
> Marc

A damn nuisance to the list moderators, to have to actually go to the
effort of reading moderated messages and decide whether to let them
through. Hence why we don't do it much. Which, I believe, is what you
seem to want.

Moderation is a necessary evil. It is not often that we reject posts
from the mailing list, but it is usually for a good reason. The
WikiEN-l list administrators make up a (relatively) large and diverse
group, by comparison to other mailing lists (such as wikipedia-l,
which has one list admin). The potential for abuse of moderation is
thus reduced.

Finally, to address your request to be able to decide which emails to
read yourself, I understand your viewpoint (and it has been conveyed
by several people before you in prior discussions about moderation,
which were quite similar to this, only not 100 emails long). However,
I'm not convinced your sentiments are matched by most WikiEN-l
subscribers, and I don't think we would be kept as moderators for very
long if we started allowing through a lot of the stuff we presently
moderate.

~Mark Ryan