Week 7: Taking the mop

The transition from contributor to moderator, and the first thing every new mod team discovers about writing down its own rules

19 April 2027

Wikipedia calls administrator tools “the mop”, and insists the role is janitorial rather than editorial. This is a useful fiction that everybody sees through. Deciding what gets removed is deciding what the place is.

Today the cohort writes the rules for the course sandbox, and you will discover what every new mod team discovers in its first week: the rules you can state are not the rules you want. You want a place free of low-effort posts. You can write “no low-effort posts”, which means nothing and will be appealed by every person you apply it to, or you can write a rule with a threshold in it — a word count, a link ratio, an account age — which is enforceable, gameable, and will catch things you did not mean to catch by Wednesday.

Then you will encode some of it in AutoModerator, which has no judgement at all, and the gap between the rule you meant and the regex you shipped becomes somebody’s bad afternoon.

Rule-writing is legislative drafting with none of the training and all of the consequences. You have two hours.

Outline#

• the mop and the fiction of neutral janitorial power
• vague rules, bright-line rules, and who each one protects
• sidebar, wiki, pinned post, removal reason: four places a rule lives, three of which disagree
• AutoModerator as a legislature that cannot be asked what it meant
• rules the cohort will have to live under until week 12