[Foundation-l] Use of moderation

[Jonathan Kallay]

I started reading the archives of this mailing list today because I 
wanted to run an idea by community members on this topic and wanted to 
see if this list was an appropriate place to do so, so for me this 
thread is serendipitous.

It seems to me that a new Wikipedia-inspired project could help address 
the many civility/noise problems of mailing lists, web forums, etc. A 
Wikimedia-derived variant could be developed specifically for conducting 
discussions and debates, where the participants together share the cost 
of moderation. Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View rule would be replaced 
with appropriate equivalents for civil and productive dialog (stick to 
the topic, be nice, don't be repetitive, etc.), and while users would 
not be able to alter a post they could flag a notably offending post 
with a 'takeback offer' and a reason, which would temporarily hide the 
post and gives the poster a chance to revise and resubmit. 
'Meta-discussion' occurs on a separate page and eliminates the 
he-said/she said noise and disputes/'takeback wars' would be handled by 
the usual automated and community-based processes. To the degree that 
this changes behavior (and I think it has a powerful capacity to do so), 
overall moderation/'takebacks' would decrease over time so moderations 
costs aren't only shared, they decrease in aggregate.

One of the limitations I see is that enjoying the benefits of immediate 
noise reduction through the 'takeback'/revise mechanism requires a 
limited rate of update 'pulls' from an RSS reader or manual visits to 
the conversation's page rather than an immediate push of every message 
to your mail client. In theory this creates a delay that is problematic 
when participating in a 'hot' discussion but in reality there is already 
a practical limit to the speed and scale of a coherent discussion (a 
related issue, by the way, which I think a wiki-like process can 
tackle). Also, the cost of having your post hidden by a takeback offer 
is not fully reversible because the point may be moot by the time you 
get it back up. This provides some of the disincentive to write bad 
posts but also requires some controls to minimize 'false positives.' The 
human challenge would be a)whether or not people could accommodate 
themselves to 'takeback offers' as something other than censorship or 
violence- my sense is that they are more likely to accept it when the 
power to use the mechanism is shared and limited both normatively and 
systematically; b)whether the added 'heat' of participating in non-NPOV 
discussions would be too great for a self-organizing system to handle. 
Again, my sense is that similar mechanisms can work whether the 
collaborative aim is to produce an article with a neutral point of view 
or maintain civil and productive discussions.

Thoughts?

Austin Hair wrote:
 >/ In Buenos Aires I had multiple people ask (even practically beg) me to /
 >/ do something about foundation-l. One person said "fucking moderate /
 >/ foundation-l, already!"—to which I explained why I didn't think that
/>/ moderating individuals was a solution, but had to admit that I didn't
/>/ really have a better one./