Orrin Bloquy's Journal: Metamoderation, take 2. Please read this.

The idea of positive moderation is to make it possible to float the cream to the top for people who choose to filter for a specific category. Being nice to every non-troll post you find is well intentioned, but dilutes this.

There's an actual difference between Insightful, Informative and Interesting, and metamoderation leads me to think a number of slashdotters with mod points find these terms vague enough to be interchangeable, since they're all positive moderations.

Insightful: articulates a perspective which otherwise might go unconsidered. Let's break that down into three parts bceause it seems obvious, but it isn't.

"articulates" -- explains in context, in detail.

"a perspective" -- a viewpoint, not merely an opposing opinion or a cynical barb.

"which otherwise might go unconsidered" -- insight usually makes you go "ah, I hadn't thought of that" or something like it. It isn't someone merely making a point you agree with better than you could, yourself.

Informative -- facts about the subject at hand, like personal experience or a link to an external resource which either enhances its point, puts it in perspective or outright refutes it. Because Informative is a less subjective moderation, a torrent of replies which disprove the post's information is likely to get that post's Informative mod metamoderated Unfair, so if you don't understand the subject well enough to know whether the poster's talking out his/her ass, save your mod points.

Interesting -- As often as not, something useful which doesn't fit into the above two categories. In a thread about HD capacity ceilings, a link to research on the theoretical maximum speeds of magnetic media is technically diverging from the subject at hand, but not enough to qualify as Offtopic. It's Interesting.

If something is informative, don't mod it Interesting. If something is merely interesting, don't mod it Insightful or Informative.

Lastly, reposting an entire article from another site like Wikipedia (instead of, say, linking to it) is more often than not obvious karma whoring. I metamod those down because it's an attempt to confuse quantity with substance and because I end up wasting time scanning for some substituted trolltext in the body. Don't do it. Excerpt, excerpt and link or just link.