h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

natalie

i dont like ot use the yikes button n hide ppl's posts

what im sayin is, is it ok for her to say what she has done, i mean as in her postion on this site to make them unproffessional comments as this is the 1st time i have encountered upon sum1 in her position on this site n feel it is disgustin behaviour in the manner she spoke to us on regradin this topic, basically flukin us and callin us children n havin no respect for the matters raised here

I respect your decision to not use the Yikes button - I'd certainly rather keep as much on the site as possible - but if you object to something someone says then the Yikes button is the best way to deal with it.

By the way, I failed to point this out:

<>

Mina does not work for h2g2 and hasn't since October. To that extent, she doesn't have a position different to that of you or any other member of the h2g2 community.

natalie

ahh ok, just thought if they were comments form sum1 from h2g2 then they r diabolical, wouldve expected an enquiry not to be fobbed off
ta

oh n y r our posts bein yikesed when they r not offensive or breakin rules but simply provin points n pointin facts? they dont like sum truth in this soi they hide them

Natalie post 1400:

"that I have clearly demonstrated weren't there"

No, they were there and I demonstrated that they were. I will make it clearer though.

You referred to your position on the staff and you did it earlier in the thread too (too hard to find with the search system). That is an invalid appeal to authority - a well-known mistake. It does carry some expectation of your opinion being more believable - and that is precisely why you did it. Otherwise, if you had had a valid point about just how in your work you went about avoiding the bias you would have made it. Instead you said that you reacted to yikesings on an individual basis (and recently you say again that you rely on people yikesing things) and I had to point out why this does *not* remove bias but enhances it because of the behaviour of those yikesing.

You referred to my position as "a user", in contrast to yours as staff, and thus enhancing the invalid appeal to authority. So I have been providing empirical evidence all along (in the form of explanations of why my views are correct and examples from the site demonstrating this) while you have been avoiding doing so and even allowing people to hide some of it.

Do you need me to explain the bias of the yikesing and moderation again too?

Natalie post 1403:

"Mina does not work for h2g2 and hasn't since October. To that extent, she doesn't have a position different to that of you or any other member of the h2g2 community."

If she doesn't have a different position then she should be receiving the official threats to suspend or ban her for breach of house rules, the defamation and mean-spirited posting which are obvious to the rest of us. Of course you are avoiding the point that she did similar things while still an ACE etc and member of staff. There is also the difference between who is removed from groups without warning and who is allowed to remain while doing the same or worse things. Double-standards and hypocrisy (being under-critical of one's self or one's staff in this case).

Then we have one of the posts I was actually addressing - Mina post 1335: "I'm not, and never have been, a moderator."

To explain the objection to that statement clear, here's a simple analogy to complete such as one might get on an English test:
Scout tools are for scouts and moderator tools are for _________.

Natalie post 1402:

"if you object to something someone says then the Yikes button is the best way to deal with it."

No, as it turns out it isn't. Some of us in this thread already know that other people's (staff and researchers) defamation of us is allowed to remain after yikesing and despite the clear evidence on site that it is both nasty and untrue. Sometimes after many days the defamation is removed but only once plenty of people have been allowed to see it and the thread has moved on so that no-one gets to see it was eventually failed and people who saw it retain and pass on the defamation again and again.

So we know that that route is unfeasible because of the inherent bias of those doing the final moderating whenever they or those they are protecting are involved. There is also the refusal to check the evidence with independent experts when applicable and the way that then continues the bias against those you have already incorrectly decided are in the wrong.

The simple and speedy alternative is a refutation. Yet true and accurate statements, supported by the evidence on site, which we post to make points and refute some of the lies and defamation are removed on the feeblest of excuses. This further demonstrates the bias and hypocrisy of the moderation as it is carried out in practice whatever you may say about it in theory or in an ideal world.

In an ideal world perhaps things would be automatically referred to a genuinely independent body. Instead the immediate recourse on site is back to some of the same people who are causing the offence in the first place (or their friends) and then to their immediate bosses who have already shown where their loyalties lie. The next stage up is still within the BBC.

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SEF:

I referred to my position as staff as it's only fair to explain the position I speak from - that I'm aware that it might lead people to imagine I have a certain perspective, and I have a say in certain decisions, but that I would endeavour to be as fair as possible and that is where my experience about judging what will and will not take up huge swathes of my day comes from. It would be ridiculous and unfair for me to take part in this discussion, against charges of bias, without saying that my perspective is from within h2g2 - it simply is. The 'empirical evidence' you have claimed to provide here is nothing but inference and saying 'it's a well-known mistake' does not make it otherwise. I could infer any number of things from many statements you have made but have chosen not to do so - it's an extremely slippery slope and not at all helpful for any constructive discussion.

As I have said many times, moderation queries are dealt with on a case-by-case basis and explaining the avoidance of bias would involve discussion of moderation issues on-site. Short of putting me through some sort of psychometric test of course.

The word 'moderator,' as I suspect you know, has a rather specific meaning on h2g2. Since there is a separate, non-BBC team dealing with moderation, we refer to those people as 'moderators.' I may well be wrong here - forgive me if I am - because I'm aware that you know lots about how h2g2 operates and presume that you know that 'moderators' and 'staff' are terms used to describe distinct groups of people here but to refer to Mina's statement again seems like pedantry designed to inflame and divert.

As for your other complaints, we are not at liberty to discuss who has or has not had official threats but I assure you that we try our very best to deal with moderation fairly. I can't discuss individual moderation decisions on-site but if something very offensive is still on the site then it's very likely that nobody has Yikesed it.

BN.

SEF:

Regarding the other posting about the moderation system - we regret that, though reactive moderation brings with it a lot of freedom, it does mean that certain people will see things before they are failed. That's a basic part of the system which I don't think most people in the community, having fought so long for a reactively-moderated site, would like to change.

Secondly, bias is, you state 'inherent to human decisions.' We *try* to be as impartial as possible, but I'm afraid these things are not an exact science as (gosh I'm getting even more repetitive) so many of these things are nowhere near clear-cut.

What I will say (again) though is that this is a rare site in that Researchers can discuss these sorts of issues and are given explanations as to why various decisions have been made - and (again as I said earlier) this is largely due to the efforts of the h2g2 staff, past and present, to keep it that way. We genuinely value constructive feedback.

Natalie post 1411:

I think some of the empirical evidence was presented in response to your much earlier post which I now can't find easily because search doesn't work that way (single thread, single user etc) and of course in other posts, some of which have been hidden. Tell me which bit (ie evidence of what) you want repeated.

"I can't discuss individual moderation decisions on-site"

That's the real trick isn't it though. It is a convenient get-out for you not presenting evidence and when we do so we are moderated and threatened.

The word MODERATOR does indeed have a very specific meaning - or should do to you. For other people on site, they take it to mean everyone involved in the moderation process. They usually assume this is just the staff they can see on the site and whose names are on the emails (Mina being one of those) and who visibly act on site (as in the post I pointed out). They are frequently surprised when I, you or others point out that the first line of moderation is actually now external contractors. So, no, the common understanding of moderator is more the staff with the power to confirm or overrule (using moderator tools) than any external agency. The very specific meaning on site is as I indicated in the first sentence of this paragraph.

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i have noticed its ogne rather quite in here
bit too dodgy for them all to not post owt nowadays, after all the defending, maybe they just run out of excuses n defences!!!

really enjoying the chit chat.i believe that nobody is in the wrong.

baaaaa

OK I've back-tracked now and found the previous post of Natalie's at 804
F65728?thread=326395&skip=800

"it actually IS less time-consuming to be impartial"

I pointed out why it wasn't - that by not taking into account the true history (as opposed to the fabricated one) and context you are not being impartial at all. Cross-checking and getting independent evidence of whom is actually telling the truth when you tend to automatically believe those in your "tribe" takes longer.

Also when someone is stalking one or more people and yikesing posts preferentially, you are getting a distorted set reported. That has happened even in this thread with the phantom yikeser. You have someone going through the thread yikesing all the points made by one side because they don't like them and ignoring the genuinely offensive things said by the other side. It can happen retrospectively too - as with a post removed for giving away personal details but made before the time that the person it named changing their name!!! You should also be able to see how much they then disliked being referred to by number although it was safer from the point of view of not being unfairly yikesed and they even resorted to it themselves.

So all over the site, a few stalkers are pursuing a few victims and preferentially yikesing their posts. Examples of this are most clear when more than one person says something almost identical in close proximity on a thread and only the selected victim's post is yikesed.

Some empirical evidence:

It happened to me when Peet gave away the signing up time of someone who had obviously only joined the thread to cause trouble but somehow he got the number wrong so I corrected it. If it was incorrect to say anything at all then both should have been yikesed. If it was supposed to be for giving away private information then it wasn't true because NewUsers is supposed to be public information. In that case the post was unhidden much later - because the allegation, whatever it was, was false (as I maintain they nearly all are). However, that doesn't mean what happened was right. It proves absolutely the existence of biased stalkers who are plausible enough to get the first line moderators to act.

Then we have the farce of Peta giving away secret information in an attempt to justify yikesing my non-secret information, ie something publicly listed on Jim's account - and the staff have gone on record as encouraging people to keep track of what the team are doing (please don't make me search for that post/page too as I know you know this to be true). The unfairness was compounded when she misrepresented the email she had actually sent. This is not something which can realistically be an honest mistake. She probably expected it to go unchallenged - moderation decisions not being discussed on site and all.

Another from the large collection of biased or absurd behaviours is Mina yikesing just my post explaining how to do something she wanted and not the 3 or 4 other posts nearby saying the same thing (or discussing it) in different ways. That was as an ACE/Guru since in her staff capacity she could have just asked someone else behind the scenes whether or not it was OK.

At various points in time you find pages being yikesed for containing images while other pages containing the same images (or similar address ones) are left untouched. More evidence of someone deliberately stalking certain people (and going in pursuit of other people from their messages).

Going back quite a bit further we come to the staff repeatedly moderating my page for containing TABLE art while actually advertising the same sort of thing themselves in the ongoing announcements on behalf of someone else! This is the sort of the which needed to be put in the announcements or rules for everyone to know what is and isn't OK.

That announcement thing applies to the other images too. If a set turns out to be OK then there should be an onsite place where this is announced for all to see. If a set turns out not to be OK then there should be a similar announcement and an SQL check of pages done to make sure *all* current users of them are warned (NB *not* threatened since there is clearly an element of doubt). The same thing goes for other links or banned words. Doing it offsite just allows certain people the opportunity to abuse their privilege by displaying concerned omniscience while indulging in more preferential yikesing.

Another little bit of moderation unfairness is in whose post gets edited to remove an unsuitable word or link while someone else's gets removed entirely to hide all the valid points they had to make. Some of which then get plagiarised by the yikeser.

All rules must be visible to all and be applied fairly to all otherwise you are deliberately setting the site up to be unfair.

Reply to Natalie Post: 1400

But the e-mail sent 'from the mods' contains a text, if you do not agree with this you have a chance to reply.

No way would I expect an "automatic" fix. - Infact the opposite - a real person that can look beyond acting on one post.

The mods mail would appear to operate to tell us what we did wrong - fine, but for goodness sake, if we ask how not to be in that position again, or wonder what the hell the mods are on...

An answer once in five would be nice?

Otherwise, why not delete the text, saying we have a right to reply.

The above issue relates to the yikes button.

Having 'thread' problems is a different issue. Having thread problems caused by an ACE is a matter of ACE conduct - we could do with a thread to talk about that. ... DOH!