I would like to propose a new approach to filtering content in online debate forums;
a peer-review process.
This would be drawing on the same principles as utilized in scientific journals.
When a posting is submitted to a forum it would automatically be sent out to three
forum members, they would be asked to judge the quality of the post by a
defined set of criteria and be given opportunity to give feedback to the
author. Based on the review score the post would be either accepted and posted
or declined. The review would be anonymous in the sense that the identity of
the reviewers is not revealed.
This peer-review function would be intended for forums with high level of
participation. At forums such as those hosted by The Economist and NyTimes one
can find debates running into many hundred entries. With huge variations in quality it quickly
becomes very hard for the reader to follow. With peer-review you should be able
to weed out lower quality content leaving you with a debate that is easy to
follow, but at the same time gives everyone the opportunity to participate.
Such a peer-review process would in a sense distribute the moderator work to all forum
members. One would probably however like to leave some room for
moderator/editor intervention in case something that should not have been
accepted has been approved.
Such a debate would run slower than a conventional debate forum since you need time
for the peer-review, but I expect many would accept the trade-off for higher
quality. It would for example still be much quicker than submitting
letters-to-the-editor to a newspaper or magazine.
The review task would be a new task for forum members, but it would not be a very time
consuming one. One could link the number of review assignments a member
receives with the number of postings that a member has, so that more active
members have a higher review load. Again I think this is something I think many
would agree to if they perceive that it results in high quality debates.
Scientists accept the task of peer-review as something that goes with the
process of science.
I can think of a number of variations and refinements to such a peer-review scheme, what I
have outlined would be the basic implementation.
I do realize that it implementing this requires some work, but I do think it opens
up for debates with higher quality, more participation and greater readership.
Looking forward to hearing what you think about implementing this in Discourse.