What am I getting myself into?

January 25, 2006 8:14 PM

What should I know before deciding to take on the responsibilities of moderator for a wiki site?

I was recently approached to moderate a relatively new wiki site. I have no experience with moderating, but I am a member of the community the site is targeting, and am interested in the offer. I have a general idea of what the role of moderator will entail, but before I discuss this offer further, I'd like to have an idea of what questions I should ask. So what should I know and ask before commiting myself to this project?

posted by Felicity Rilke to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Well, first of all, are you being paid or are you volunteering?
posted by acoutu at 8:28 PM on January 25, 2006

Meatball Wiki
posted by bpt at 9:04 PM on January 25, 2006

Most successful wikis operate without true moderators (at least in the sense of moderators who review and approve posts). Will you be acting in the role of wiki founder? You may wish to take a look at Meatball's wiki life cycle, in particular their page on seed posting.

On preview: apparently bpt and I think alike...
posted by RichardP at 9:06 PM on January 25, 2006

Be sure to ask what controls there are on posting. If anyone can edit without even registering, you may spend a lot of deleting (reverting) junk/spam (if the site is reasonably well publicized).

Compare expectations ("high quality content", for example) with the tools/authority you will have ("must request permission of site owners, on a case-by-case basis, to ban/block a registered user from posting", for example).

If the "community" is tied together by professional links (for example, nature photographers), then your workload could be light. If, on the other hand, the community is geographical, and discussions/postings about things like politics and religion are permitted, then you may have to deal with users insulting each other, edit wars, and the like. That's a lot more work.
posted by WestCoaster at 10:33 PM on January 25, 2006

John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
posted by jaded at 4:34 AM on January 26, 2006

How much do you know about Wiki software itself? A lot of moderating a wiki can be fixing other people's mistakes in formatting and generally spiffing things up, developing templates and the like. If the audience is not very wiki knowledgeable, there might be a lot of that sort of thing.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:33 AM on January 26, 2006

Thanks everyone. I've been able to put together a few points to discuss, and I have a better idea of what to ask about. I'll update with my decision when it's made.
posted by Felicity Rilke at 11:12 AM on January 26, 2006