Editorial filter of Indymedia

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday November 20, 2002 16:57 by Eamon

Maybe we could take a leaf out of IMC Philladelphia's method of rating Indymedia content and sidelining persistent spammers who continue to put inane and often irrelevant articles on the newswire.

From IMC Philladelphis....

What is the Editorial Collective?

The creation of an Editorial Collective for this site is our attempt to build an open and democratic editorial system. Anyone at all can participate as an equal citizen of this information sharing community. We hope that we can harness a great untapped resource -- the excitement, interest, and commitment of readers -- in order to enhance a useful news site that we can trust to keep us informed.

The system is simple: it begins when you express your opinions about articles with a simple rating: 1, indicating poor, up to 10, indicating excellent. Our site will then simply average the ratings of the Editorial Colle ctive and use that combined rating to make decisions about article layout. The section under an article looks something like this:

Poor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Excellent
Reason for this rating:

We encourage everyone to indicate not just how they feel about the article, but why they feel that way. We also make all ratings public. Why? Editorial decisions shape the way we see the world: they determine which articles are presented to us as most important or interesting, and therefore implicitly which issues and events we should care about most. These decisions are fundamentally important to the mental and ethical life of our society.

In a democratic society, we want to hold those who make decisions for our collective benefit accountable for those decisions -- therefore the site will display all individual ratings, along with submitted comments, if one clicks on the rating itself, as displayed in the newswire. Corporate media is rarely held accountable for editorial decisions. We're often forced to make due with hollow media that satisfies neither our spirit nor our intellect. As an alternative, we propose this participatory editorial process, free of financial pressures and threats of censorship, in which the reasons behind editorial decisions are openly displayed and discussed.
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Participating in the editorial collective is easy. The first step is to sign up for a user account. We will ask you a few questions about yourself, but providing that information is absolutely optional.
You can go to the registration form by clicking here or the button at the top of the page.

After you sign up, you will be e-mailed a password for your account. Go to "Login/Join" (the link is on the top of the page) when you first come to the site and enter your username and password. Once you're logged in, you will see the rating controls after the stories and comments you read. If you have any questions about the editorial collective, e-mail them to the Editorial Collective list: webeditorial@phillyimc.org. You will be invited to join as you sign up.

This is an exciting experiment for us -- we hope that democratic editorial processes can open up new horizons for independent media.