[Bug-gnupedia] A system of moderation

[Imran Ghory]

Here are my ideas for how a open encyclopedia could exist having 
a reasonable level of articles without having to result to content 
biased censorship.

How a moderation system could work:

1) The user creates an article.

They can if they wish submit it to an editor who will try and improve 
it grammatically/structurely to make it more readable.

2) The user submits the article

They either have the choice of,

2-1) GPG signing the article and submitting it directly to the project
2-2) Submit it to a proxy group and if the proxy group decides to 
accept the article(on whatever criteria they desire) they can sign it 
with their GPG key and submit the article to the project.


3) The project recieves the article and it goes to a reviewing board,

The reviewing board votes on two things,

3-1) If they should accept or reject the article. They should be 
allowed to reject the article if it's is,

3-1a) Technically incorrect (e.g GPG signature broken)
3-1b) Clearly an attempt to abuse the system (e.g binary bomb or 
the like)
3-1c) It is spam (i.e it is clearly commercial)
3-1d) Unreadable/nonesensical
3-1e) Breaks any international laws which the majority of countries 
subscribe to (e.g. It's copyrighed)


3-2) They should also vote on a categorization of the article, i.e. if 
the article is clearly in an area which is factually debated then the 
article should be marked clearly indicating such.

4) If the article has been accept and given a basic categorization it 
should be added to a central database.

5) There should be multiple ways to access the database

5-1) There should be a search engine which searched all the 
articles. When the resulting articles are displayed users should be 
allowed to vote if they believe an article is factually incorrect. The 
votes should be record in the database and the vote tally be shown 
with the article. The search engine itself should not use the vote 
data and it should be provided solely for the benefit of the users so 
they can see what others thought of the article.

5-2) A dmoz like index structure could be set-up,

5-2a) At the highest level it will be controlled by one person (later 
called the "primary controller")
5-2b) From the top of the directory structure subsections could be 
created and controllers for these subsections appointed by the 
primary controller.
5-2c) The controllers of these subsections will have all the 
capabilities of the primary controller with the exception that they 
will only control their own subsection.

The controllers would be responsible for adding articles to their 
section of the index and also for creating subsections and 
appointing subsection controllers.

This will allow a tree like structure of trust with the ultimate 
authority with he person who started the index.

There could exist many of these indexes each favouring different 
types of articles and different styles of viewpoint. For instance an 
index could be setup which only dealt with non-controversial areas.

Imran Ghory