[openbeos] Re: Website content moderation

Waldemar,

Waldemar Kornewald wrote:
On 9/30/06, Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki) <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
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?


I think it's just natural that you can't exactly specify this. I could
give you 100 examples and you still wouldn't know enough, but maybe
this gives you an idea. Please take a look at:
http://haiku-os.org/wiki/index.php?title=Getting_Haiku_Source
The wiki article even describes "subversion specials". IMHO, this is
going too far. If you're explaining how to get Haiku's source you
should only explain that and nothing more. Link to separate articles
for detailed information on how to use Subversion. We don't have to
reinvent the wheel on our website.

You have just confirmed yourself what I am trying to point out: that the way you want to build up content for the website is flawed. Anybody can change anything. I write something, and different moderators with different criteria can (and will) go and make changes without my knowledge.

You will never have a coherent message with such a methodology; not much different from a wiki, if you asked me, and I am sure people would feel deterred to contribute under such circumstances.

> 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. 

Well, "deleting comments" should be limited to RFCs. If some comments
are *obviously* useless (rants, flame wars, etc.) you can delete them.
Otherwise you should keep them or summarize a few comments if that
will help to do serious work with this article.

The obvious is obvious, so that's not a problem. The problem is when you get up yourself to subjective areas, and you can (will) get in trouble. What's a rant for you may not be for the person who posted the comment and possibly others.

Koki


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