[openbeos] Re: Website content moderation

  • From: "Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki)" <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:32:29 -0700

Hi,

Waldemar Kornewald wrote:
1) What is the criteria applied when moderating content?

Content must be concise, correct, easily understandable, and useful. If that's not the case you can improve it. I know, this is very vague. If you feel like some article is not good enough just make it better.

This has problems: some of this criteria is subjective, and therefore subject to interpretation, which can (will) lead to arbitrary changes and potentially to going back and forth between revisions. How is it different from a wiki?


2) The "Moderation" parragraph says: "After some time has passed (at
least one month) you may *delete* articles or comments which are
*useless*". How does a moderator decide whether an article has become
useless? Is there some kind of criteria or process?

An example: Someone added something like the following comment to my BFS2 RFC: "ZFS is the most buzzword-compliant FS." Now, this comment didn't add any value to the article. It contained no useful information and it was not a suggestion. Nobody needs such rants.

Another example:
Imagine an article leads to a flame war or off-topic discussions
(e.g.: OS X is better than Linux; you plan to visit your grandma;
whatever). In that case you may delete those comments.

If an article becomes invalid (e.g.: "how to use CVS" although we
switched to SVN) it should either be deleted or rewritten.

I didn't refer to anything special. I just tried to make clear that we
don't have to keep every comment. This is especially important for
RFCs and similar development articles which should not blow up with
comments because that would make it very difficult for the developers
to filter out the important information. It should also be okay to
summarize the essence of a thread into one single comment. But I'd say
that news or other non-development articles can be mostly kept
unmoderated.

This can also be quite arbitrary if you do not have some criteria (what seems useless to some may be useful to others). When it comes to deleting comments, some people may even take this as a form of censorship.


3) Who are the moderators, and how does one become one?

Well, those who have enough access rights to edit and delete content can do this moderation. You can become one by writing good articles, for example. Major wiki contributors (those who fix and improve wiki articles, regularly) can become moderators.
And who are the moderators?

Koki


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