Bad Karma for Wikipedia?

So now Slashdot and others are pointing out the downside of Wikipedia’s open nature: it’s not as authoritative as a publication that is centrally moderated. To some degree this smacks of the typical anti-hype that gets directed at any successful technology. It’ s just too tempting to bash on the guy who’s getting all the praise and attention.

On the other hand, there is a serious point here. Several years ago, a few websites, particularly Slashdot, realized that any system that decentralizes publishing also needs to decentralize moderation if it is to scale properly. For those not familiar with Slashdot’s system: each user is assigned a reputation score called “karma”. You get more karma for posting comments that get positive ratings from moderators. Eventually, you get enough karma to become a moderator yourself, which means you get 5 moderator points from time to time and 3 days to “spend” them by bumping up or down the score of a comment. When an article gets too many comments (a frequent occurrence since Slashdot is so popular), a threshold is automatically set so that articles below a certain score (typically 3 or 4 out of 5) are not even displayed.

The system works exceptionally well, both by making really good comments more visible and by quickly relegating flamebait, spam and other crap to the virtual dustbin. The startling thing, to me at least, is that this and similar systems are not more widespread. The logical explanation is that a) these systems are hard to design and implement and b) Slashdot is a site for geeks, so by definition its users embrace a complex moderation system that might bewilder the average web surfer.

It seems obvious to me that as self-publishing on the web moves beyond the simple discussion board paradigm to encompass more complex models like wikis, decentralized moderation is going to become more and more essential. Since Wikipedia is taking all this flak for failing to separate the wheat from the chaff, and since it’s so fabulously popular, it strikes me as the perfect candidate to test a moderation system a la Slashdot, but more generalized and accessible. There’s a growing amount of academic research and informed musings on this topic.

The fragility of Wikipedia is hardly surprising given its architecture. The real (and fascinating) question is how to fix this while staying true to its philosophy.

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