[WikiEN-l] Moderation (was: Stick this in your music theory and smoke it.)

[Ray Saintonge]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>   
>> You can add to the advantages that it can also produce a "why did you
>> moderate *him*?" response from list members. I got an e-mail from the
>> other user you placed on moderation, and I was puzzled as to why he
>> had been placed on moderation.
>>     
> Yeah, for sure. Being list moderator is pretty much a no-win game: the
> best you can hope for is that no one notices your presence. Once
> someone starts posting in such a way that a few people get annoyed, or
> they start mildly breaking the list rules, then any action will be
> divisive. Either leave them unmoderated (continuing to annoy people),
> moderate them (cop flak for being heavy-handed), etc.
>   

List rules should be very few, and they should depend on common sense.  
And if it's only a question of "mildly" breaking rules doubts should be 
resolved in favour of the person making the post.  There will always be 
people complaining that the traffic is too high; there was such a 
complaint recently on the Wikimania-l, and the traffic there is much 
smaller than what we have here.

When the complaint is about being off-topic, then what exactly is 
on-topic?  Without a clear definition any moderation for this is 
inevitably subjective, unless the individual insists on continuing the 
topic ad nauseam.  For Jay's post about "music" I had no idea what he 
was talking about, and maybe few people did; I was content to delete and 
go on with the next e-mail.  Nobody else has addressed the contents of 
that posting, so it seems that but for the resulting discussion about 
moderation the thread would have quite rightly died an early death as a 
one-post thread.


>> You can also add "increases transparency".
>>     
> Good point.
>
>   
And transparency is what protects us from arbitrary and capricious actions.

Ec