Wiki Moderating Board Initial Issues / Agenda
- What is the wiki?
- a place for CMU affiliates to share information about CMU and PGH
- What isn't the wiki?
- a calendar
- a discussion board
- a marketplace
- What should the tone of the wiki be?
- Lacking real content, it's become something between uncyclopedia and readme
- Is this what we want?
- If not, does this still have a place, maybe in a "funny articles" section?
- Lacking real content, it's become something between uncyclopedia and readme
- What kind of content should be encouraged?
- campus history
- campus events (informative, not scheduling)
- stuff to do in PGH
- eateries, entertainment, ...
- student organization official pages
- descriptions of non-student-organization clubs and interest groups
- biographies of faculty and significant administrators (presidents, etc.)
- nice because most aren't famous enough for wikipedia
need to decide on threshold; maybe professors and admins >= VP only
- What kind of content should be discouraged?
- disparaging, flamewar-style commentary
- advertising for businesses or ventures
- anything violating CMU policies
- Who has read access?
- the world
- ...except to individually tagged pages (requiring andrew ID)
- Who has write access?
- anyone with an andrew ID
- ...except to individually tagged pages (requiring moderator rights)
- Power structure for moderation
- Moderating board (a few people appointed/elected by senate)
- Moderators (a larger group of interested people chosen by some board-determined selection procedure)
- Anyone else
- Typical moderator activities
- patrolling for violations of wiki policies
- reverting violating changes
- deciding which pages to restrict to CMU-only viewing and marking them
- deciding which pages to protect to moderator-only editing and marking
- blocking/banning misbehaving users
- implementing changes suggested on discussion page for protected pages
- Important procedures to work out
- restricting a page to CMU-only viewing
- restricting a page to moderator-only editing
- making someone a moderator
- taking moderator rights away from someone
- temporarily blocking a user
- banning a user
- Important issues to work out
- choosing which wikipedia policies to explicitly adopt
- writing policy documents
- publicly displaying thresholds for reversion, banning, etc.
- explicit discussion of censorship and "inappropriate" content
- Important facts to remember
- Collaboration is to be encouraged
- Will have difficulty getting people to contribute, don't give them a reason not to
- Most people are good-intentioned
- All changes are versioned and revertable, so openness is OK
- All changes have an andrew ID attached for accountability
- Collaboration is to be encouraged