AAPG Wiki:Moderation

Moderation is the approach and processes that implement the governance model. There are different moderation models that depend on the broader access and openness model. This page will explore only the moderation model appropriate for our access and openness model.

Moderation in the wiki may well be done by more than one group of users. See: Users.

Factors to consider

Moderation can increase quality
Too rigid or bureaucratic moderation can increase volunteer cost.
There is a limited pool of moderator person-hours at AAPG's disposal, especially from Subject Matter Experts
A moderation process that introduces unreasonable delay in flagging articles (e.g., approved), decreases quality since it decreases currency
Users have plenty of reasons not to use something new (see adoption is slow) and one reason is that people are generally wary of bureaucracy which can decrease ease of use
Given the limited moderator labor, we need to balance the desire for moderation against the desire for new content and proactive editing
Matt's experience is that the moderators are the content creators—they are the most engaged people
Our general approach is to use the Test of Reasonableness: from a user perspective, is it simple and non-legalistic?

Possible moderation approaches and features

These strategies could help decrease volunteer cost and also reduce the delay inherent in moderated pages.

Moderation entities

A moderation entity has the authority to review and flag articles. There are three different potential moderation entities:

Individual moderator
- Represent the more traditional approach where one specialist can review/approve/flag articles on their own
- Typical approach would be to assign and manage moderators centrally, via the AAPG office, rather like peer reviewers. This top-down centralizes approach might be a good way to start, but we believe it is too expensive (time, money) to maintain as the wiki grows, both for AAPG and for the volunteers.
Moderator group
- A group might be a small number (e.g, 5) of specialists with a specific subject matter expertise that would review articles independently or collaboratively and reach agreement to approve/flag articles
- Could still be assigned and managed centrally
- Could assign a moderator to specific pages based on his or her expertise. Therefore a young moderator might only moderate one page, whereas, an older moderator might moderator many pages. We believe this approach will result in a greater number of moderators and therefore will decrease the volunteer cost per moderator. This is an alternative to assigning pages to groups of moderators (e.g., a moderator group is assigned 10 pages).
Moderator network
- Create and facilitate moderator networks where each network could include perhaps to 10,25, or even 50 specialists with a specific subject matter expertise
- This approach would borrow from the Knowledge Network approach being implemented across the industry
- The networks would self-manage as much as possible, making decisions collaboratively, resolving disputes (perhaps an unlikely scenario), finding new moderators, getting help when needed, etc.
- This network approach is intended to decrease volunteer cost. It could work well for managing the SMEs (see Editors, above).
- The underlying technology could either be through MediaWiki or through other common collaboration platforms such as SharePoint. In the latter scenario, the fact it is a different technology could be made transparent to the moderators in the network. Functionality that would need to be supported would include: emailing from the wiki, user pages, perhaps discussion areas, etc,.

Autonymity vs majority vs unanimity

There are lots of ways to reach what might be generally called 'consensus' or agreement over what is 'good' in the wiki.

An autonomous model would give full power to individual moderators, who can review articles on their own. Others may or may not check or challenge their validations. This is the easiest to maintain and would result in the least amount of latency between posting an edit and seeing it in the 'public' wiki (assuming the individual moderator is available and responsive).
A majority model could apply to either the group or network moderation entities. The majority of whom must review and validate an article before validation. For a group of five specialists, agreement could reached with a majority of 3 out of 5. A network of specialists consisting of 25 specialists would need a majority of 13 in agreement.
In a unanimity model we may prefer that such a group or network would have to reach a unanimous, or at least a super-majority, before validation is given. However, this might be rather slow.

Un-moderated pages

We could determine if there are pages that would not need to be managed under a moderator process. For example, any user who has the privileges to create a new page could be allowed to flag it as a stub.

Moderator promotion

Typical moderation tasks

These need to be defined in more detail:

Editing

Decision: when a moderator makes an edit, the default is that the update is automatically approved

Other tasks

Administrative tasks and general maintenance, template bug-fixing, etc
Recent changes patrol
Copyright issues
Deletion requests
Categorization
Gardening (copyediting, adding links, wikification)
Flagging high quality articles
Flagging stubs
Maintaining portal pages, if any
Managing user issues (passwords, emails, profiles, etc)

Moderation processes and workflow

The flagged revision extension does not include any functionality for alerts or provisions for workflow so these will need to be added as custom code
Borrow as much as possible from the moderation processes used by Networks of Excellence

For new pages

Decision: all pages will be moderated
Determine the minimum number of moderators appropriate for such a page
Triage to determine appropriate list of moderator candidates for such a page. This triage process could be automated through scripts that are run each night, for example.
Send a moderator request to the list of moderator candidates
Keep the request open and send reminders until the minimum number of moderators have accepted
Begin the moderation process for the page

For revised pages

Staff is notified via some alert that a change to a prior approved page has been made
The task is added to the assigned moderators for that page
Alert the assigned moderators for that page.
- Decision: Instead of getting multiple alerts, one for each page changed, it was decided that a better approach would be to send an email to moderators that there is an open task on their moderator page. Each moderator would have his or her own page (i.e., moderator portal page) with a list of open tasks (e.g., a page that needs approval) and completed tasks. This way they would not have to receive an email for every update.
Moderators review the page, either approve or indicate it needs more work
Once one moderator approves the change, the page changes to an Approved revision
Other moderators for that page would receive an indication that the page was approved by his or her peer moderator in that group. This could also be done via the moderator portal page in order to reduce the number of emails to the moderators.

Feedback

Article Feedback Tool is a great way to get feedback from the readership.

Points to consider

Leverage the fact the professional pride is a major motivator for volunteering
Being listed by AAPG as an SME would be very powerful
Need to agree to certain standards for different levels of recognition
Potential levels of recognition - Fellow, Moderator, Contributor
Potential standards: # of edits, # of articles created, # of articles moderated, etc.
Recognition could also be determined in part by the moderator role played: leader, core team, extended team.
This program will need to be phased in through the pilot. For the initial pilot phase, there might only be one moderator per page - the leader. Future phases could add two more to form the core team, and another future phase could add two more (i.e., the extended members). Even further out phases could extend the moderator teams to moderator networks if appropriate.