Wikipedia official policy versus Slashdot moderation

Nicholas Carr’s “Now let’s bury the myth” follow-up to his “The death of Wikipedia” cites a passage from a 2003 Wired article “The book stops here,” describing a so-called Wikipedia "power pyramid":

At the bottom are anonymous contributors, people who make a few edits and are identified only by their IP addresses. On the next level stand Wikipedia's myriad registered users around the globe ... Some of the most dedicated users try to reach the next level - administrator. Wikipedia's 400 administrators ... can delete articles, protect pages, and block IP addresses…”

The governance system described has attributes similar to the moderation and threshold system currently in place at Slashdot:

How does moderation work?...moderators are given…a number of points of influence to play with. Each comment they moderate deducts a point…Moderation takes place by selecting an adjective from a drop down list that appears next to comments containing descriptive words like "Flamebait" or "Informative."…All comments are scored on an absolute scale from -1 to 5. Logged-in users start at 1 (although this can vary from 0 to 2 based on their karma) and anonymous users start at 0…

Do Editors Moderate?...The Slashdot Editors have unlimited mod points, and we have no problem using them….The editors tend to find crapfloods and moderate them down: a single malicious user can post dozens of comments, which would require several users to moderate them down, but a single admin can take care of it in seconds…You can argue that allowing admins unlimited moderation is somehow inherently unfair, but one of the goals of Slashdot is to produce readable content for a variety of readers with a variety of reading habits. I believe this process improves discussions for the vast majority of Slashdot Readers, so it will stay this way.

Which is a more open system, Wikipedia or Slashdot? Join the conversation: “Talk Back" below to share your thoughts.