Collaborative moderation

See also: Collaboration | Moderation | Collaborative writing

AKA: Distributed Moderation

Collaborative Moderation (“many eyes”) is a concept known under various names and used in diverse ways. It is a concept whereby the efforts to ensure quality in an item are distributed among many people. Collaborative moderation occurs when two or more people determine what information other users with similar interests might prefer or find relevant to the context of the dialogue.

Forum

Slashdot uses the term “karma”

(Usemod’s “KuroshinMojo” page (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?KuroshinMojo) speaks of Rusty’s Concept (http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/3222/25/4121891/)) | Rack* ‘s Self-Moderating Forum

The idea that unwanted content can be made invisible or less visible very fast if enough people work together. It is practically applied on many larger websites, including Kuro5hin and Slashdot.

Typically only a relatively small percentage of a website’s users are willing to moderate comments or stories, so a site usually has to reach a certain size for collaborative filtering to become useful. The percentage of active moderators could be increased if latency issues could be resolved: Usually, you have to load a new page for the moderation to take effect. Moderation also requires identifiable accounts, but it may be hard to motivate users to create such accounts if the ability to moderate is the only incentive for doing so.

Related Links:

TakeDown.NET -> “Collaborative-moderation