Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Interactive Prototype/Vandalism, privacy issues, spam, libel issues, etc.

Today, every editor has the ability to remove vandalism, violations of privacy, libel, purely attack postings, wikichat, and so on from talk pages. Flow doesn't allow that!?!

What I'm seeing is statements like "Administrators must be able to delete individual comments or entire topics"; "certain groups (presumably local admins) would have the ability to edit other people's comments, but most users would not have that ability". Do you have any idea how many thousands of posts are deleted (directly or via revert) every day from talk pages? Are you really seriously thinking that whenever an editor sees something wrong, he/she should summon an admin?

The larger issue is that wikitext, and diffs, establish accountability. Yes, any editor can delete another editor's comments, but do that more than once - after a warning, probably posted via template, on the editor's user talk page - and that editor is likely to get blocked. Yes, any editor can edit anyone else's comments - but it better be constructive and defensible, or

And that's the problem with Flow as it seems to be conceived - exactly the problem that has resulted in moderation on discussion boards, and for comments to blog posts, and to a lot of blog posts not even allowing comments - it takes a lot of work to prevent abuse. Wikis solve that problem by enabling any editor to be a moderator (remove abuse). And the ability to see exactly what an editor did (diffs) establish accountability - yes, editors have all this power, but they also can be held to task.

So, if we're talking grand design here, the software absolutely needs to meet three major requirements:


 * (1) A majority of the experienced editors (for example, those with rollback privileges) must be enabled to fix problematical posts; the system will fail catastrophically (spam, vandalism, abuse attacks, etc, on user talk pages) if only admins can act on problematical posts.


 * (2) It must be possible for editors to edit the posts of others, not just hide or delete them. For example, in an article talk page, some issues are potentially libelous; it's critical to remove the libelous part without just deleting the posting if a good discussion is to continue (and, obviously, to prevent editors from feeling that their posts are being censored).


 * (3) There has to be accountability when someone edits someone else's posting (or deletes it, of course). That is, there has to be an "audit trail" - which is what diffs are - so editors can be accountable. There also has be to be some way to scan the editing that other editors have done (that's one use of diffs, in history pages); otherwise "accountability" is a pointless word.

If Flow can't do (2) and (3), that's a deal-breaker, as far as I'm concerned. The English Wikipedia isn't a pristine world where 99.9 percent of posts are non-abusive. Rather, it's a very messy place, with lots of vandals and spammers and trolls and newly-registered editors who don't understand community norms and IP editors who often have zero understanding of - and zero commitment to - Wikipedia's rules. In such semi-chaos, (almost) every experienced editor needs to be a moderator of sorts, and moderation has to be more than just deleting problematical postings.