Cornell University Law School Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository Cornell Law Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship 4-2015 The irV tues of Moderation James Grimmelmann Cornell Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub Part of the Internet Law Commons Recommended Citation James Grimmelmann, "The irV tues of Moderation," 17 Yale Journal of Law & Technology 42 (2015) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell Law Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE VIRTUES OF MODERATION James Grimmelmannt 17 YALE J.L. & TECH. 42 (2015) ABSTRACT TL;DR On a Friday in 2005, the Los Angeles Times launched an experiment: a "wikitorial"on the Iraq War that any of the paper's readers could edit. By Sunday, the experiment had ended in abject failure: vandals overran it with crude pro- fanity and graphic pornography. The wikitorial took its inspira- tion and its technology from Wikipedia, but missed something essential about how the 'the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" staves off abuse while maintaining its core commitment to open participation. The difference is moderation: the governance mechanisms that structure participationin a community to facilitate cooper- ation and prevent abuse. Town meetings have moderators, and so do online communities. A community's moderators can pro- mote posts or hide them, honor posters or shame them, recruit users or ban them.