Signal to Noise, part II

Robot Moderator?
Image via Wikimedia CommonsA while back, in my post Attacking the noise, I described ROBOT9000, automated moderating technology introduced at one of xkcd's IRC channels as an interesting experiment. Apparently the idea has legs.

While reading a very interesting New York Times piece on trolling, The Trolls Among Us (which, by the way, "outed" several trolls, giving their real life identities or information sufficient for a determined person to track them down.... perhaps more on that later... the topic has come up on various WMF wikis and discussion groups) I ran across the tidbit (on page 7 of the piece), that ROBOT9000 has come to 4chan.

Sure enough, there is now a moderated subforum at 4chan called ROBOT9000 (or /r9k/ ).

Dan must be proud!

I for one welcome our new robot masters, if they can improve signal to noise...

Do you?

well well...

Hmph... maybe this FA thing isn't so bad after all. Hopefully I won't jinx things by saying that I think maybe the old girl is going to make it!

I can't really take all the credit, or even much of it, frankly. The collaborative editing on this article is nothing short of remarkable. Compare the difference (121 edits so far, and counting) before and after and see the edits by everyone using this nifty tool. (1)

So, no question for you today. Just happiness. The old girl deserves a great article. She got a raw deal, scrapped after 44 years of faithful service and nothing much saved from her.

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1 - Another great tool is the external link checker, which is a very sophisticated tool, good for spotting and fixing all sorts of problems!