From: Cicero's Assassin
To: Mr. Aaron Peckham, founder, urbandictionary.com
October 26, 2007
Dear Sir,
As a longtime user and recent editor of the Urban Dictionary, it grieves me to inform you that your creation, the Urban Dictionary, is in dire peril. Although I am a great admirer of your work and the vital resource you have created and steered through years of tumult and frustration, I feel compelled to bring to your attention serious structural flaws in the UD, a site among the most respected and frequented on the entire Web, which, if left unchecked, will almost certainly lead to the stagnation, obsolescence, and untimely fall of this our most precious repository of modern wit and dialect. I wish to make it clear that in writing this letter I bear you no ill will, and as a token of my respect I offer several suggestions to amend the functionality of the UD without sacrificing its mission or its reliability.
Before I begin please allow me to briefly state what I know about the current UD editing process. As I understand it, the previous editing regime allowed every single submitted definition to be published, and editing consisted of volunteer editors confirming or denying the deletion of questionable defs flagged by other users. To counteract the biased deletion of legitimate terms, UD switched to the the current program, which enlists volunteer editors to either approve, deny, or abstain judgment on all new submissions to the UD. Submissions are placed in the queue upon submission from any person who can prove they are not a spammer or bot, i.e. respond to an email confirmation, with heretofore undefined terms given preferential placement in the queue. I acknowledge this information may be inaccurate, but in my own defense let me state that what I have written here is not easy to come by. My first suggestion for the Urban Dictionary is to make its editing process more transparent, a solution easily reached with the inclusion of a Frequently Asked Questions link on the site.
The UD suffers from, let us be frank, an overabundance of inexperienced submitters who waste staggering amounts of their time defining as many of their friends' names and vicious, completely fictional sex acts they can come up with, completely oblivious to the rather vague submission guidelines on the site. I realize that frequent, easy submission by the multitude is the life's blood of UD, but in the interest of maintaining the motivation and sanity of dedicated editors allow me to suggest several easily-implemented steps to alleviate the Sysiphean task of keeping the editing queue under control. Firstly, great amounts of editors' time is wasted approving or denying replicate definitions by the same submitter. Simply prohibiting submitters from writing multiple definitions of the same term within a week's time would alleviate this greatly. Making this policy clear to submitters will further encourage quality, as each submitter will have only one shot to have their def approved. Secondly, I think it is safe to assume that any submitter failing to include their defined term in their example sentence is incapable of producing a definition worthy of the UD. All defs submitted which do not implement the defined term should simply be deleted before they ever reach the eyes of editors. Furthermore, many definitions currently ranked as the best definition are ranked that way due to their relative age, not relative quality, and this reveals a weakness in the user voting system. A simple fix for this problem would be to make the "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" system an average over the past few months, rather than a numerical count. After all, the lousy definitions entrenched on the first page will still get more votes up and down than the great definition on the fifth page that no one ever sees.
As far as can be discerned from the "cleanup" and "cleanup calendar" links in the editor's branch of the UD, no definitions have been removed for inaccuracy or maliciousness, as of this letter, in months. As I have stated before I may be misinformed due to the lack of transparency in the internal operations of UD, but if this statistic is true then there are more serious issues at stake than the uncontrollable editing queue. To highlight this problem, let me direct your attention to the UD entry for bastardisation (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bastardisation ), the majority of definitions for which are directed not to the word itself but rather the poor definitions available for the word. Humorous, certainly, but is this the kind of resource your valiant editors are fighting for? I offer a radical solution to fight this creeping menace.
There are editors working on the UD, and then there are Editors. Some of the brave volunteers here are simply more dedicated to quality than others - after all, at least a majority approved the definition of Brian (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brian), although the leading definition violates at least one-third of the submission guidelines. To counter this and other nonsense entries, I propose a tiered editing guild to be established as soon as possible which would track editing dedication and reward its members with greater privileges the longer they were active. Novice Editors would be those who had revised no more than 1000 entries, and the brunt of the queue would fall to them. The Novices would be the first line of defense against ridiculous sex acts and the like, two "reject" votes from this tier warranting immediate deletion. Above 1000 decisions, the Novice would graduate to Apprentice Editor. This tier would not need to view any submissions which had already been declined at the Novice level and could spend their time approving or denying more refined, but still questionable, entries. Apprentices would also be presented with submissions to the Deletion Queue, to keep, delete, or abstain judgment. The Deletion Queue, a new addition to the UD's functionality, would be the sole responsibility of the Editors, the class of truly dedicated volunteers who had not only judged over 5000 entries but also maintained a high approval-to-publication ratio in their decisions (for instance, a dedicated vandal would not be able to simply fast-click through 5000 definitions, marking all as "approve" or "reject" in order to reach Editor status, as their approval-to-acceptance ratio would be much too low), confirming their commitment to fair, accurate, and up-to-the-minute definitions. In addition to providing the final confirmation vote to every submission, Editors would have the privilege of adding definitions to the Deletion Queue where deletion of spurious definitions would be conducted by consensus vote among Editors and Apprentices.
Mr. Peckham, in outlining this plan I bear full knowledge of its implications; creating a de facto aristocratic class among the stalwart volunteers seems to be in direct opposition to the very charter of the Urban Dictionary. Although I cannot vouchsafe against all negative ramifications of my ideas, please do not let their foreignness and scale deter you from taking action where action is so desperately needed. Sleep on my suggestions, and please run them by whatever governing council makes these decisions for the UD (who are those guys, anyway? Transparency, sir, transparency!). As this seedling plan takes root in your mind let me show you a glimpse of a bright and glorious future: Urban Thesaurus. The upper tier of Editors would rove the UD bestowing metadata on definitions, linking synonyms and antonyms in an ever-expanding web of shared language and knowledge and keeping the UD the most relevant and useful resource for expression in today's information age.
Yours very respectfully,
-Cicero's Assassin, www.xanga.com/Ciceros_Assassin
October 26, 2007
