[Bug-gne]Moderators/ Censors/ Editors

[Tom Chance]

It is for the many reasons cited below  by Bob that we
need to think VERY carefully about the submission
process. Now we don't want a peer-review process
because that is what Nupedia has (darn them for
getting there first, you might say lol). We also can't
do it by having compulsorary editors as Hector and RMS
have stated. Somehow we have to deal with the
following problems:

1) The legality of hosting material in the US that is
illegal in another country, or vice versa - will other
countries try to prosecute our servers in free-er
countries? Cases have been mentioned here where that
sort of thing has happened. And if I put an article
with claims against Tony Blair up on a US mirror, and
he took me to court for libel, the US mirror of GNE
would still be in trouble, along with the whole of GNE
actually.

2) The "moderators" will have to deal with:
  * spam, adverts, binary bombs etc.
  * Possible libel
  * "harmful" articles (how to date rape, for
instance)
  * Illegal information (see above)
  * Discussion-board articles (article X is balls!)
  * Extremely poor language (unreadable)
  * Dialect (inner-city UK will be nonsense to French)

3) The moderation system will have to deal with:
  * Moderators imposing their relgious/moral beliefs
  * Mod's deciding who is "correct/educated"

So whatever system we employ, it has to be able to
cope with all of those problems. Somewhere along the
process we will need people who know about
international/national/regional laws. We will need
people who will tackle all articles from as unbiased a
standpoint as possible (or a mechanism to get rid of
bias). We will need people who can understand dialects
and who are good linguists so they can make sense of
"dense" text, who can then send the article back to
the author with suggestions.

It would seem a little odd to have all of this in one
group of people. Might I just suggest one system:

1) User submits article -> goes to moderator pool
     (user can submit it in "edit" mode, so editors
can read it, make suggestions on language etc. then
send it back to author who can re-submit).

2) Moderators pool consists of people running GNE,
people who have submitted a few articles, and anyone
else we deem "responsible" enough, who are committed
to GNE. They have a list of all article submitted.
They can read them, if they think its good, they give
it a vote. With 3 or 4 votes, it goes in. If, after
say 5(?) days it has insufficent votes, it is scrapped
and the author is notified.

3) When a mod votes for it, they can also tag it as
being questionable (in terms of legal, libel etc.
matters). If it is tagged as questionable, it goes
into the "expert" pool. I have no idea how we can have
a group of people judge articles on legal matters and
let them discard certain articles without ending up
with a biased resource. I can only think of giving the
"expert" pool a list of servers they can submit the
article to, and they send it to the one they think it
will be most "legal" on. But we could still get into
legal/libel trouble. The problem with libel is how
will we ever know if claims are true or not? We can't
exactly not allow anybody to submit an article
regarding somebody who is alive, can we!

Tom Chance 


--- Bob Dodd <address@hidden> wrote: > Just
to add more wood to the fire, how do we propose
> to handle material
> about people/organisations that are still alive? I'm
> thinking libel of
> course...
> 
> I'm not even suggesting that there _is_ an answer to
> it, other than
> avoiding the UK as a location for mirrors...
> 
> I guess this is one of those areas where Nupedia
> wins hands-down over
> GNE: their peer review process significantly reduces
> the possibility of
> libel. Not completely, but it goes a long way.
> Jimbo, do you have
> anything else in place to handle this, or have you
> just not had
> contemporary enough material to worry about yet?
> 
> For US (and much of the rest of the world...)
> readers, I'd better
> explain the British libel laws: Anything you say or
> write down about a
> living person or organisation, -you- must be able to
> prove in a court
> of law. All it reqiures to end up in court, is that
> the person you
> write about says "prove it".  The defendants are
> both the original
> author AND ANY PUBLISHER OF THE LIBEL. In our case
> that's GNE (and as
> of today at least, GNU).  It is the legal duty of
> the publisher to
> ensure the accuracy of anything he publishes. "Oops,
> sorry, innocent
> mistake" is not a legal defence... There are a lot
> of lawyers making a
> lot of money in the UK as a result.
> 
> The UK also has laws covering data protection, so
> that if we hold
> personal details on an individual, we must be
> registered with the UK
> government, and have a clear system by which we
> people can check their
> details for inaccuracies, and to insist upon
> corrections. So again, we
> need to be wary about the content of submitted
> articles. Or goi
> register properly with the Data Protection Registrar
> (actually they're
> very helpful people and they would go out of their
> way to help us stay
> legal).
> 
> Then comes medical records. It is an offence to
> publish a person's
> medical records without their consent (very
> reasonably: I assume this
> is true most places in the world). It's unlikely
> that we would ever
> receive such a thing, but sometimes medical research
> papers and
> unthinking doctors can inadvertantly give out too
> much detail of a
> trial or research project. We had a case a few
> months back where a
> doctor, talking about vCJD (the human version of mad
> cow disease) gave
> out so much detail about one of his patients that he
> (and others) was
> able to identify himself.
> 
> Next there are the obscenity laws, which are
> draconian in theor, but a
> little more relaxed in practice. It does mean that
> you have to be very
> careful with any material of a sexual nature, and
> anything involving
> "moving images" needs a rating code from the censors
> (yes, we have
> censors). 
> 
> Then there's our blasphemy laws. They're rather
> quaint and
> old-fashioned and protect only christianity, but
> they are technically
> quite draconian. Saying that the prophet Mohammed
> was a womanising
> drunk is legal: saying jesus christ was a womanising
> drunk would get
> you a small room with bars. Not that these laws get
> used much, but they
> are there if some politician decides to kick up a
> fuss.
> 
> And just in case you think I may be finished: there
> are further
> offences agains the state: breaches of the official
> secrets act (btw
> the meaning of the 'e' numbers on the side of food
> cans is an official
> secret...), breaches of confidentiality, and more
> excitingly treason...
> It's still a treasonable offence in the UK to call
> for a republic, or
> to encourage debate on the subject. Mind you, no-one
> has arrested me
> for that one yet :-))
> 
> There are also other limitations: you cannot
> normally list criminal
> offences commited by people when they were under the
> age of (I think)
> 12, or the names of victims in rape cases, or the
> names of anyone the
> courts choose to protect.
> 
> There is one last category: some people who make a
> nuisace of
> themsevles, normally becasue they are campainging
> incessantly against a
> specific individual, can be stopped by the courst
> from publishing
> _anything_ on certain subjects, and those orders
> also apply to
> publishers.
> 
> Anyone used to US-style first ammendment laws is
> probably amazed by the
> number of restrictions we place on free speech
> (there are probably
> more, those were just the ones off the top of my
> head), but the
> restrictions do exist and we are not the only
> western country with
> similar sets of laws. Of all of those restrictions
> listed above, it is
> the libel laws and direct court orders that affect
> us most, and frankly
> all I can suggest is:
> 
> Choose the mirror locations very carefully indeed.
> 
> That said, some of those laws exist for good reason
> (medical records,
> data protection etc.) and I feel strongly that we
> should incorporate
> some of their ideas into our submissions process any
> way.
> 
> /Bob Dodd
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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