I propose two strategies. First, it is possible to provide "known trusted source" tags next to a poster's ID.
That sounds like 'agent of the Ministry of Thruth' to me. I fully understand your intention to guide new users, i.e. here's someone you can trust and has a proven track record. A newbie will find that out sooner or later anyway. A badge could also work in a negative way by discouraging others from commenting or creating some sort of 'I have a badge, therefore I'm always right' mentality.
Back to topic, I think that the classic netiquette (Usenet/Fidonet/whatever) provides sufficient guidance: Don't offend anyone, and try to not be easily offended.
There is a route to do so. Such a label must be given democratically, and maintained democratically; such a label must confer ability, and active responsibility, which is checked simultaneously and on a regular basis by a significant number of users. That is, there is potential for damage, for misuse, and there is heightened visibility -- e.g. every action must be reviewed and approved by at least N people (and maybe N depends on a ranking, or other metrics). By diffusing responsibility, it at least makes the scope as broad as possible -- obviously one cannot avoid the echo chamber that is the community as a whole, but one can attempt to maximize into that scope.
It could be as eventful as holding elections from time to time, but preferably it would be an automatic process driven by meaningful metrics.
With no editing/reporting mechanism here outside of whole-ass moderators, it would be rather intensive for moderators here to get involved / facilitate such a process. I suppose we could create an "editor" class or something like that, not (directly) tasked with (but perhaps can still help with) spam and peacekeeping moderation, and which has some sort of report/flag responding responsibility, and the resulting action is edits to existing posts.
Tracking post history would be necessary, so readers get the superficial view first (and perhaps unregistered/new users don't see anything beyond this) but the history can still be read, the context understood, and edits made to improve it without losing the voice of the author or its meaning in the overall thread.
But it's still not something that makes a whole lot of sense in a stream-of-collective-consciousness forum; there are authoritative, factual threads here, but you have to
hate yourselfneed the information bad enough to dig through them and divine what the current state of knowledge in the thread even is. Perhaps we could force-volunteer contributors of such threads, and the threads themselves (chosen by election, say by accumulating enough flags over time? -- totals, rate, absolute or relative to thread size, take your pick), to add a responsibility to such topics -- "Congratulations, you've been selected to found/contribute to a wiki on [topic]!" perhaps.
The fundamental problem with user wikis is, nobody ever uses them, EVER, so at least forcing people to write them would be a start -- and backlinking it by editing posts cited in the wiki (oh, you have to cite the posts as well -- be responsible, show your primary sources, right?!*), would be one way to drive readership to them.
*Showing a post in context -- again, threads are messy, but at least this provides a means to navigate and cross-reference a thread. Equally important, it shows how the information originated, and if it was opposed at the time, or if it's been improved upon in subsequent posts (or edited if the earlier scheme were applied).
And still, it all needs to be done in a way that it's not a chore. Maybe wiki edits + post citations becomes a [slightly less-]Meaningless Internet Points counter, and maybe some responsibilities are made contingent on that. Power sources must be diverse and regularly checked -- no single mechanism should be a path to power, the greatest responsibilities should always be highly visible and revocable by persistent and collective action -- or of course mod/admin action, as there ultimately can be no
true democracy here*.
*That said, if Dave wanted (emphasis on "wanted") to put his money where his collective mouths [the forum, ha?] are, I suppose making an anarchist partnership/coop would be the radical
reductio ad absurdum of that. Which assumes there's even a way to measure the value of the forum; it surely has collective value, and I mean not just to active users, but the wider internet on top of that. Other than ad revenue, and maybe a certain fraction of donations, how would you even go about measuring that? Not at all being serious here, but like I said, just the logical endpoint of maximum
doing an anarchy. It's a sliding scale, and just interesting to think about extreme values and how they could even begin to work.
Speaking of collective action, mob mentality, might not be such a problem here?, with immediate feedback and community representation; but one must also keep in mind that creating these structures also creates their own incentives, and the community here is definitely large enough (i.e. >150 active users) that I can imagine cliques forming. TEA thread, case in point, I don't touch that at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are users that post there exclusively...(?!)
So, anyway. Lots of ideas, most of them either a ton of work that'll never self-sustain, or just a poor fit to the forum. I can imagine some ways it could be started, but it's hard to say if any of them would be motivating enough to sustain, let alone to be worth the implementation effort (or already exist as plugins, I have no idea?). For sure, it's hard to enforce any kind of factual check on
collective stream of consciousness, and a more rigidly structured format is almost certainly necessary (hence the glued-on wiki idea). Something like Stackexchange, does a lot of this (crowd sourced review, including open editing by pretty much anyone), but it does it from a strict question-answer format -- not even a free-form wiki as such, and explicitly not for social purposes. Still -- and again, as a point in the space of what's conceivable -- it's interesting to reflect on the ways these things can be done, and maybe along the way, we'll hit upon something we do really want to try.
Tim
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
