[Seattle-editorial] Editorial control and power distribution

[BFGalbraith]

> Who besides me is clerking the wire?

I occasionally nuke stuff that is way out of line. 
However, I try to be as fair as possible, even to the
troll, and elimonate both sides of the offending
conversation.  Once in a great while I will nuke an
inapropriate item  that comes on the open wire.  I do
this totally annonymously, and if in the end I won't
be able to do it annonymously, I simply won't do it,
because quite frankly, my saftey and the safety of my
family isn't worth it - this aint the global launchpad
anymore you know!

I want to add here that I am not a journalist, and I
am not much of an editor either.  99% of the stuff I
post to the center column (which is most, not all, of
the stuff you see there now,) is straight off the
newswire, totally unmodified.  I think this is also a
form of newswire moderation, because it PROACTIVELY
rewards good material (instead of REACTIVELY
punnishing "bad, nody trolls.")  You can spank trolls
all day long, but it does not encourage them to be
good. 

However, with that said, yeah, our open newswire has a
lot of aggressive moderation that needs to be done,
and if you are doing it, great.  There are just some
things that Indymedia simply does not promote, out of
principle.

  

> I think the options going forward are to suspend the
> open newswire, 
> come to an understanding that is unmoderated in any
> way, or to 
> develope a completely anonomous proceedure. (What
> was the name of 
> the guy in Hollywood who did the censoring? I don't
> know either!) 


This is a good point, Joseph, because the annonomous
censor plan is the easiest to implement.  There is
another possiblity you did not mention, and that is to
have log-ins.  With the log-in, if they do something
innapropriate, we can just ban their log in, and they
have to go through the hassle of comming up with a new
one.  Of course, in the end, this would probably end
up being more work for us than for them.


> To let everyone know, It takes me up to half an hour
> with our 
> current system to read, edit, and hide stuff that
> can be posted by 
> someone with broadband in about 5 minutes. I have
> dial-up, share it 
> with me mum out in Mason county, and need to keep my
> home phone 
> available some of the time. 


I use NoCharge myself, and though it's faster than say
free NetZero, it is also about the same hassle for me
to edit the newswire at all.  This is why I choose my
battles very carefully, and usually don't bother
trying to moderate comments.  I totally agree with you
that we are going to need at least 2 or 3 other people
working on this problem for us to be able to moderate
the wire effectively. (Or perhaps only 1 or 2 people
if they have Cable/DSL.)



=====
-Benjamin 

"BFGalbraith"- bfgalbraith at users.sourceforge.net 
(H&S Project Manager- http://hack-and-slash.sourceforge.net)
Galbraith Games Website- http://www.squawkrpg.net/news
Why I am looking for another e-mail service:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html