TheTVDB.com

I just read the "Hikaricore Fan Club" thread. I've not spent a lot of time on the forums, and I don't want to re-hash any kind of community vs moderators debate, but I did see a few concerns raised about the process of making edits and how they can frustrate everyone involved.

In particular, I noted that the community forum is primarily used for reporting bugs and making series requests, and that the forum moderators can spend a lot of their time dealing with users who have made bogus changes that need to be fixed. I also saw a few comments to the effect that series have been locked to prevent bogus edits from being made.

This is where I think we could really harness the power of the community, and with many hands make light of the work.

I'd like to suggest the adoption of the edit/vote workflow utilized by the Music Brainz project, which shares a similar goal of building a high quality community database. I think this could bring many benefits to this project.

The way it could work is:

1. Series would not need to be locked to prevent noob edits, reducing the frustration of users who want to contribute to a series but cannot.
2. Users would not be able to vote on edits until 10 of their own edits have been successfully applied, ensuring that all users have demonstrated that they understand and can follow the rules.
3. Edits would not be applied immediately but would go into a queue, reducing the need to administrators to "fix" problems caused by noob or invalid edits.
4. Votes would be "yes, this edit is correct information and meets our standards and guidelines", not "yes, I personally want this change to be applied", ensuring that standards are maintained and we end up with a high quality database.
5. After two weeks, edits with more "yes" than "no" votes would be applied to the database, allowing everyone a chance to have input.
6. Edits that achieve a consensus earlier than that (three unanimous "yes" or "no" votes) could be applied or rejected earlier, preventing untimely delays for obvious corrections or low quality edits.
7. A few trusted editors, known as "auto editors" at Music Brainz, could make edits that are applied immediately, allowing trusted and dedicated contributors (e.g. the project leaders) to make instant changes when required.

This process seems to work very well at Music Brainz. As a side effect, the forum could be freed up from the task of reporting and debating series requests, and focused on building a strong and vibrant community.

Here are a couple of links about the process at Music Brainz.

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/How_Editing_Works
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Introduction_to_Voting

Thanks for reading!

This wouldn't exactly work. It would still become a popularity contest. Most content does not actually need to be lOcked, just problematic stuff.

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Could you elaborate on the problems you see with the edit/vote workflow?

The vote is to determine whether or not an edit is correct and follows the project rules and guidelines, not as a measure of popularity. Users would need to demonstrate that they understand and can follow the rules and guidelines before they can vote.

This workflow seems to work very well for Music Brainz.

Cheers.

An approach like this simply isn't practical for our purposes. I could give you a pile of examples, but I think it should be obvious based on past arguments that many users of this site more often than not want things to be changed to benefit them instead of being accurate. All we need would need is a landslide of retards to vote that Terra Nova should be changed (even if they have been of sound judgment in the past it doesn't mean they will be in every case) and suddenly our listing becomes wrong.. Besides we keep telling all of you folks that the new site will nearly eliminate the need for locking in most cases due to the variety of new features it will offer. Be patient for it and while you wait post feature requests in the right place.. IE not General Discussion.

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The edit/vote workflow should prevent a "landslide of retards" from being able to vote, and there's a two week voting period that would prevent anything from "suddenly" becoming wrong.

If the same edit is made again without any new evidence of correctness, it would be seen in the edit history as having already been rejected, and without new supporting evidence it would be rejected again.

People who don't know or choose not to follow the rules would never get voting privileges. People who do demonstrate that they understand the rules, and then blatantly violate them could easily have their voting privileges removed. Although there would be no motivation for them to do this, as their invalid change would be corrected and they will only have lost the ability to vote.

Taking Terra Nova as an example, even if a landslide of users who do have voting privileges (and have demonstrated that they understand and can follow the rules) decided to break the rules all at the same time, and managed to get a bad edit applied after a two week voting period (they could probably very easily stop it before then), it would be very easy for an "auto editor" to correct.

The point of the vote/edit workflow is to harness the power of the community to approve high quality edits that meet the projects goals and standards, and reject those that don't. It is not about introducing popularity as a determining factor.

If you think that it is trivial for users to make bad edits with this workflow, I encourage you to visit Music Brainz and try it out for yourself.

Cheers.

I feel the overwhelming urge to punch something everytime you say "harness the power of the community".

Having said this, I still really don't believe this would be the right approach for TheTVDb, but that's just me.

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By "harness the power of the community", I mean lighten the workload of the few and simultaneously increase the quality of edits by exposing them to more eyeballs.

Apologies if I've used too many buzz words or catch phrases!

Cheers.

Opening up to the community.

It already is, we only lock series that requires moderators to come in and repair series.

What your suggesting is over complicated and wouldn't work for this environment.

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Almost every problem I fix is made by someone that A) hasn't read the rules or B) is only interested in what THEY want.
The other problem is that by the time we know of a problem a "vote" is only going to be on how it should be fixed. It wouldn't prevent the data from having been corrupted in the first place.

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I think the vote/edit workflow would prevent the users you speak of from making the types of changes you talk about to begin with, so you wouldn't need to waste your time fixing them.

Cheers.