| Ka-pi96 said: I don't think that would really work. It would be difficult to keep the quality up and to prevent trolly stuff from being posted. Sure you could have editors checking stuff before it goes up, but Machina already does that for the writers anyway. It's not an instant process and he has to take the time to look through things and make any necessary adjustments. You mention that sometimes news is on the forums before it is posted in an article, but I've seen times where it was in an article ready for edits/approval before it was in a thread too. User submitted ones are still going to hit that hurdle. Hiring more editors as you propose is an option, but what are the chances they can instantly make user submitted articles not only correct and to the point but also have a cosistent layout across VGC and have all the correct references in the right places? IIRC some of the writing team are able to self edit/publish their stuff but that takes a long time and is pretty rare. So yeah, the editing job that needs to be done is a pretty big task, especially if the number of articles is going to see a substantial increase. And worse it's a pretty thankless job too. |
Well what the Editor admins are doing isn't what Machina does at all. There job would be to look for good articles, not edit everything. They'd be the middle man between a poster and Machina. They'd pick the first well-done news article on a specific subject, edit what they think needs to be edited for final review, and submit that.
Machina himself wouldn't be reading through all of the user submitted content. He'd just be reading the editor-approved content. If they are doing their job correctly, it should be no different for him on his end than it currently is now. By the time the article reaches him, all of the curation and 99% of the editing will have already done.
As for the articles being written, there would be strict guidelines being placed on how the article should be done. Users would go in knowing that the more stictly they adhere to these guidelines, the more likely their articles will be chosen by an editor for publishing. If you're a user wanting to break news before anyone else, you're insentivised to write your article with the utmost quality, because if you don't someone elses article will be selected over yours. I use the word "editors," but what they really are are curators. Their job is primerily to chose the best articles and discard the others - It's not to edit everything. That would be unreasonable.
If there are a dozen really badly done articles submitted about some division news, none of them will get picked. It's quality over quantity. The "editors" are just their to sift through the nonsense and find the quality. The easy to understand guidelines on top of the inate competition formed from wanting your article to actually get chosen would be what naturally raises the general quality of these user submitted article.
One could say that being a mod or Game DB admit are "thankless jobs" too, but people are still happy to do it.
