[Imc-uk-features] unhiding 374918

[ben]

"In general, posts meeting the following guidelines will be promoted:
* original, first hand reports on actions and other events
* good, original analysis"

"In general, the following types of posts will not be promoted:
* re-posts from other sources (blogs etc)
* announcements of events (unless with significant background/news content)"

charley wrote (refering to the above lines from the guidelines):
> that's just a couple of lines about showcasing "the
> best of the newswire" and "good posts" - then adding "original"
> reports or analysis - but it's too vague to mean anything. who
> decides what's "good"? are the mods editors now? "original" i can
> understand, but that's applied very inconsistently. generally, the
> posts that are promoted are the ones that the mods personally think
> are interesting and important, which is fine except that it goes
> against the principle of open publishing and is elitist, imho.

I'm also dubious about the value of the promoted wire but there are
guidelines and the way they are applied is not significantly different
from guidelines about hidding. Elitist? Yes, sure, same as the rest of
moderation. It's a small group of people who for whatever reason feel it a
necessary task and face the numerous barriers and hurdles in order to do
it. That said however, the guidelines on promotion are pretty clear, not
vague words at all unless you happen to cherry pick individual words out
of context as you just did. While I'm sure they could be improved, just
like the guidelines on hiding, those guidelines were agreed by what passes
as consensus in a diverse network the size of indymedia and these doing
the promotion seem to do a pretty consistent job of it.

> supposed to be quite loose anyway and i'm sure that one of the
> arguments in favour of setting up the promoted wire was that mods
> wouldn't have to spend so much time hiding stuff.

Maybe so but there is  major flaw in there. google news doesn't
differentiate between the promoted wire and the open wire. All posts in
the UK indymedia newswire are treated as coming from a legitimate news
source (not a blog) and appear in google news. If we take a slack attitude
to inaccurate nonsense appearing in the wire then that is reflected on
googlenews so that complete crap appears credited to indymedia. That will
do two things - discredit indymedia generally to those coming across such
crap, and risk google news receiving enough complaints that it decides to
remove indymedia from the google news search (as they have before).

We can't simply leave the open wire as a free for all just because we have
the promoted wire, at least not while the promoted wire is poorly
considered afterthought bolted onto the site as a bit of an experiment.

> some of the non-promoted posts are great, which is one of the reasons
> why i could never look at the promoted wire.

Indeed, and me to. The promoted wire is flawed. It is too slow in being
updated so people will always need access to the un-premoderated wire to
see the latest new posts as soon as possible. And since the promoted wire
specifically excludes most event announcements, again, people must have
access to the open wire. As it stands, few if anyone would choose to read
only the promoted wire so it fundamentally flawed and it's existence is no
reason to be slack about removing crap etc from the wire.

> about the guidelines, "not being understandable by anyone" is not
> actually in them - even if it was true. and you fail to explain how
> "uncorroborated speculation" falls foul of them as well.

374918 is inaccurate. that often happens when somebody indulges in
speculation. there is and always has been an guideline against inaccurate
and misleading posts that 374918 is such a post. It is blatantly false to
say that a burning car full of gas bottles could not have killed anyone.
Ask any fireman about their experiences with gas bottles in fires.
Although safety features in incorporated in gas bottles, just like fitting
seat belts, that doesn't entirely take away the risk of injury or death.
374918 is a rant which aims to twist the fews facts available to the
author (gleamed entirely from mainstream coverage of the event) to fit
their personal preferred scenario in which every act of resistance or
terror is staged by the government or similar agencies. In order to make
these events fit their scenario they've taken liberties with the truth and
so their posts fall foul of the guidelines.


Ben