|From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu>
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin(a)wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org
|Date: Sun, 10 Nov 2002 17:45:55 -0800
|
|Tom Parmenter wrote:
|
|>People are confusing the Wikipedia (particularly talk pages) with the
|>Usenet. If non-participating "moderators" were willing to jump in,
|>delete nonsense from talk pages, and enforce civility, even incoherent
|>or ideological contributors can learn NPOV.
|
|I like the idea that people come from outside the discussion
|to impose civility in this fashion by moderating.
|We don't have to give people extraordinary powers for us to do this.
|(To a large extent, this is what Ed Poor has been doing the whole time.)
|These actions would be based on moral authority, not police force.
|
|
|-- Toby
Larry Sanger has been doing it recently, generally to good effect
(against me, as it happens). I would add that anyone doing this sort
of graybeard oversight will have to forego the luxury of sarcasm, even
in the comment line, and resist the temptation to chime in on every
little point. Those things reduce the value of the outside
intervention and make it seem less disinterested (neutral).
Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88