Krach42's Journal: This why slashdot moderation fails...

The first post to the Red Cross article is: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=176887&cid=14682756

And it gets a score +5: Insightful, what for? for saying this about the Red Cross:

Hard to defend the trademark...

That'll be an interesting trademark to defend:

1. Its been used in games for two decades now with nary a lawsuit. You have to actually defend a trademark to keep it.
2. The developers used it in the first place because they routinely saw the symbol in military movies and TV shows emblazoned on the medical jeeps.
3. Its a symmetrical red plus-sign on a white background. I'm sure its possible to create a more generic symbol but I can't think of any off hand.

So, here's the problem with this comment, and the failure of the slashdot moderation system.

It's *WRONG*. The Red Cross and other protected symbols are a matter of international law, specifically the Geneva Convention. It has nothing to do with TRADEMARK, it has to do with the necessity to setup an Internationally Recognized Symbol that can be trusted to be authentic and actual, that can be used to identify those that are neutral to a conflict.

Next thing you know, someone is going to get rated +5: Informative for saying that "SOS" is protected by copyright law, or somethings stupid like that.

Unfortunately, there's no solution to this problem. You can't actually spam enough truth into a slashdot article to get it back to the truth once it's running off on a tangential falsehood, and the moderators, and people with moderation points are generally going to apply them where their lay opinion drives them to put it.

It should be noted that this is completely different from the Wikimedia principle, where people are only driven to provide input when they know a fact to be wrong, or believe a fact is correct enough to place into the article. You don't get crackpot arguments over tangential falsehoods, because there are more people ready to correct information than there are people unintentionally misleading people.

It's still frustrating, because when the whole slashdot crowd is chattering about some stupid wrong prospective, no one can make our your yelling that says "HEY! YOU'RE ALL RETARDED AND HAVE IT WRONG." Grr....