History:Moderation Improvements

Status: This Page is Glorious History! The content of this page either is bit-rotted, or has lost its reason to exist due to some new features having been implemented in MusicBrainz, or maybe just described something that never made it in (or made it in a different way), or possibly is meant to store information and memories about our Glorious Past. We still keep this page to honor the brave editors who, during the prehistoric times (prehistoric for you, newcomer!), struggled hard to build a better present and dreamed of an even better future. We also keep it for archival purposes because possibly it still contains crazy thoughts and ideas that may be reused someday. If you're not into looking at either the past or the future, you should just disregard entirely this page content and look for an up to date documentation page elsewhere.

Note that, though marked as history, this page may still contain valuable ideas to enhance the editing system!

Moderation Improvements

On the MailingList we've discussed a number of improvements/changes that should be made to the Moderation system. They aim is mostly to reduce the number of open moderations which is still rather high. This page will list all the changes that we've agreed upon, but haven't been implemented yet. Please don't add any new topics/improvements to this list -- I would like to focus on the near term feature changes in this page. Once some of these features get implemented, we will add more feature discussions.

General changes:

• Add a 'needs fixing' flag that can be set by a voter when voting on a moderation.
  • This should help voters vote yes for edits that are faulty but still enhance the overall quality & quantity of the data. It would also give moderators a hint which data needs more work/attention.
  • Details:
    1. Add a checkbox for 'needs fixing' in the show moderation page
    2. Add a search for data that needs fixing
    3. The 'needs fixing' flag gets reset when a new moderation for that data piece is entered.

• Add support for automoderators for a specific artist
  • The idea is that users who are subscribed to an artist usually care about that artists data. That means that it might not be nessesary to vote on their edits, thus reducing the open-mod count.
  • Details:
    1. It should be easy for someone to become an artist automoderator
    2. More details need to be hammered out

• We should finally change the nomenclature from 'moderate' (which is BadTerminology) to 'edit'.

Changes to AddReleaseEdits:

Many of the open mods are AddReleaseEdits and about 90% of them seem to be ok. Users that are subscribed to an artist get reports on the AddReleaseEdits for this album. So we thought that an AddReleaseEdit should pass if it does not get a veto from a subscribed user.

• For AddReleaseEdits for artists who have subscribers, the album will be voted on as normal. When the moderation expires and no one voted on the moderation, it is automatically accepted.
• For AddReleaseEdits that have no subscribers, accept the moderation and do not enter it into the moderation system, if the moderator is not a newbie.
  1. A user stops being a newbie when he has at least 5 successful AddReleaseEdits, and no more than 1 failed add album moderation OR
  2. 100 accepted moderations with less than 5% failed vote outcomes

Changes/improvements to CommunicationBetweenEditors

Its not clear that any of the issues have been settled yet. However, so far I can see that people seem to be more in favor or not using external mailing lists or forums. Improving the CommunicationBetweenEditors (moderators) by extending the note system coupled with email seems to be the correct approach. Agree so far?

• The probably simplest solution is to send mod notes to all interested parties:
  • the moderator
  • all voters
  • anyone who's added a note
  • (extended feature:) subscribers to artists may choose to get a mail for all notes attached to changes that relate to their artist.

No need for a mailing list as such, as this allows a public, archived, dialog to develop without either a) voters having to check back to look for notes, or b) the discussion disappearing into a private email conversation. In the end it would make the "Add Note" and the "Send Email" links merge into one.

Voting Changes

It was remarked that when a moderation expires, that the next vote carries all the weight. This may give too much power to newbie voters. Once we have a karma system in place, we can give different voters different levels of voting power. The people on the top of the karma chain could accept/reject moderations instantly and the the people at the bottom of the chain would need perhaps 3 votes to get a moderation accepted/rejected.

How reasonable does that sound?

Canned Responses

Perhaps we should allow voters to select a canned responses when they vote 'no' on an edit.

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See also: SurvivalOfTheFittest, AdvancedModeration