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wiKiPedia: a GeNuiNe
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— miNus the editors
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you dial your filter up to show you highly scored messages, you
will generally get well-reasoned, or funny, or genuinely useful
posts in your browser.
This community moderation scheme and ones like it have
been heralded as a good alternative to traditional editorship. The
importance of the Internet to “edit itself” is best understood in
relation to the old shibboleth, “On the Internet, everyone is a
slushreader.” [fn: “Slush” is the term for generally execrable unso-
licited manuscripts that fetch up in publishers’ offices — these are
typically so bad that the most junior people on staff are drafted
into reading (and, usually, rejecting) them.] When the Internet’s
radical transformative properties were first bandied about in pub-
lishing circles, many reassured themselves that even if printing’s
importance was de-emphasized, that good editors would always
be needed, and doubly so online, where any mouth-breather with
a modem could publish his words. Someone would need to sepa-
rate the wheat from the chaff and help keep us from drowning in
information.
One of the best-capitalized businesses in the history of the
world, Yahoo!, went public on the strength of this notion, propos-
ing to use an army of researchers to catalog every single page on
the Web even as it was created, serving as a comprehensive guide
to all human knowledge. Less than a decade later, Yahoo! is all
but out of that business: the ability of the human race to generate
new pages far outstrips Yahoo!’s ability to read, review, rank, and
categorize them.
Hence Slashdot, a system of distributed slushreading. Rather
than professionalizing the editorship role, Slashdot invites con-
tributors to identify good stuff when they see it, turning editor-
ship into a reward for good behavior.
But as well as Slashdot works, it has this signal failing: nearly
every conversation that takes place on Slashdot is shot through
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