I want to say from the start that this thread is not intended to relate directly to this forum, is not intended to address (and I would ask that it not be brought up) policies and moderation on this forum, or in anyway intended to be a thread on this forum. A comment in another thread got me thinking about the trade-offs in general between different types of moderation styles in various types of web 2.0 communities. I haven't been a member of many forums and I haven't subscribed to that many blogs, but I have read around fairly widely and I do have some experience as a member of other sites. So I would like to illustrate the nature of my query with a few examples:
Two Blogs Diverged in a Yellow Wood Used in Dendroclimatology
There's a retired businessman by the name of Steve McIntyre. About a decade ago he started looking into two extremely influential climate reconstruction studies commonly referred to as MBH98 & MBH99. I won't go into this story in any depth as there quite literally is a book devoted to it and it is ongoing, but to make a long story short he became something of a name in the climate science community (published a few papers, advised on committees including the IPCC), and is generally hated by all the big name climate scientists. A group of climate scientist started a blog some time ago called realclimate which was intended to provide climate info for the public by actual climate scientists. McIntyre initially tried to defend his point of view at that site as he was being attacked but kept finding his commentary deleted. So he started his own blog climateaudit which is devoted to the issues, from mathematical to politics masquerading as science, with temperature data reconstruction.
How is this relevant? Well, he found himself in a blog on a pretty specific set of topics that was run by extremely knowledgeable specialists who had the capacity to judge whether contributions actually were informed enough to be so. However, it seems that a good many of McIntyre's comments were deleted because the scientists running the blog just didn't agree with him. More importantly, McIntyre decided to go a different way. Apart from personal attacks, deleting spam, and occasionally tidying things up, he doesn't delete anything. Were it not for the fact that realclimate is written by authors who have access to resources McIntyre does not, I'd say that climateaudit is simply a better blog because McIntyre was determined not to stifle contrary voices. Finally, just so this isn't construed as an anti-AGW bit, another blog by noted skeptic Dr. Roy Spencer (a leading expert in satellite data and a genuine climate scientist) also has a blog and didn't even allow commentary for some time. I believe it is still not a place to go for discussion.
So what are the pros and cons so far? On the one hand, if done correctly, guys like Gavin Schmidt over at realclimate have the background knowledge to make sure junk about climate science isn't posted and do a great job on quality control. However, it takes a great deal of self-reflection and control to prevent one's self from unintentionally silencing alternative voices by mistaking contrary opinions believed to be wrong for uninformed or flawed opinions.
I'm going to give to more examples but I think this is enough to start. I'm interested in peoples feeling about the trade-off between quality control to attempt to keep the level of dialogue (perhaps even if only regarding certain issues or on e.g., a forum dedicated to linguistics) vs. the freedom to be able to say anything you think (apart from the stuff all forums seem to ban like spamming or positing illegal information). Under what conditions should someone trying to encourage discussion on a blog or forum or similar web 2.0 medium to be at a certain level? Can this be done at all without ending up loosing, as realclimate did, a non-mainstream but extremely well-informed member like McIntyre? Would such a site have to, like Spencer's site, pretty much limit the discussion either to inane comments on a main poster or a discussion only among a selected elite? And although such issues are mainly a concern for online, similar issues exist in physical forums for dialogue and for online sites like Wikipedia which are meant to reach a certain caliber but have no real central moderation at all? Are there thoughts others have related to this?
Two Blogs Diverged in a Yellow Wood Used in Dendroclimatology
There's a retired businessman by the name of Steve McIntyre. About a decade ago he started looking into two extremely influential climate reconstruction studies commonly referred to as MBH98 & MBH99. I won't go into this story in any depth as there quite literally is a book devoted to it and it is ongoing, but to make a long story short he became something of a name in the climate science community (published a few papers, advised on committees including the IPCC), and is generally hated by all the big name climate scientists. A group of climate scientist started a blog some time ago called realclimate which was intended to provide climate info for the public by actual climate scientists. McIntyre initially tried to defend his point of view at that site as he was being attacked but kept finding his commentary deleted. So he started his own blog climateaudit which is devoted to the issues, from mathematical to politics masquerading as science, with temperature data reconstruction.
How is this relevant? Well, he found himself in a blog on a pretty specific set of topics that was run by extremely knowledgeable specialists who had the capacity to judge whether contributions actually were informed enough to be so. However, it seems that a good many of McIntyre's comments were deleted because the scientists running the blog just didn't agree with him. More importantly, McIntyre decided to go a different way. Apart from personal attacks, deleting spam, and occasionally tidying things up, he doesn't delete anything. Were it not for the fact that realclimate is written by authors who have access to resources McIntyre does not, I'd say that climateaudit is simply a better blog because McIntyre was determined not to stifle contrary voices. Finally, just so this isn't construed as an anti-AGW bit, another blog by noted skeptic Dr. Roy Spencer (a leading expert in satellite data and a genuine climate scientist) also has a blog and didn't even allow commentary for some time. I believe it is still not a place to go for discussion.
So what are the pros and cons so far? On the one hand, if done correctly, guys like Gavin Schmidt over at realclimate have the background knowledge to make sure junk about climate science isn't posted and do a great job on quality control. However, it takes a great deal of self-reflection and control to prevent one's self from unintentionally silencing alternative voices by mistaking contrary opinions believed to be wrong for uninformed or flawed opinions.
I'm going to give to more examples but I think this is enough to start. I'm interested in peoples feeling about the trade-off between quality control to attempt to keep the level of dialogue (perhaps even if only regarding certain issues or on e.g., a forum dedicated to linguistics) vs. the freedom to be able to say anything you think (apart from the stuff all forums seem to ban like spamming or positing illegal information). Under what conditions should someone trying to encourage discussion on a blog or forum or similar web 2.0 medium to be at a certain level? Can this be done at all without ending up loosing, as realclimate did, a non-mainstream but extremely well-informed member like McIntyre? Would such a site have to, like Spencer's site, pretty much limit the discussion either to inane comments on a main poster or a discussion only among a selected elite? And although such issues are mainly a concern for online, similar issues exist in physical forums for dialogue and for online sites like Wikipedia which are meant to reach a certain caliber but have no real central moderation at all? Are there thoughts others have related to this?