The mission statement of the Content Committee is:

The Content Committee will preserve and maintain the integrity of the mathematical content of PlanetMath.

PlanetMath.org trusts in the civil behavior of its members, and we all hope that the members can work together and collaborate as a team in the honorable goal of creating “math for the people, by the people”, but always under the standards detailed in the PlanetMath Community Guidelines. The members can (and should) propose corrections to entries via the system in place, and can also discuss changes of entries in the forum. However, if the usual channels of cooperation fail (corrections and forum discussion), an arbitrage by a third party may be necessary. The Content Committee provides this kind of arbitrage (and again, it should always be the last resort) in order to ensure that the content of PlanetMath follows the standards mentioned above. In most cases, the Content Committee will produce a set of recommendations, suggestions and constructive criticism that will be passed on to the author of the entry in dispute. If the author refuses to make the suggested changes or does not comply with the recommendations, then the Committee may take further action (see below).

All official action of the Content Committee, such as sending out official messages, reclassifying entries, and deleting entries (if necessary), will be carried out under the user name ContentCommittee (which is the user name of the Chair of the Content Committee, see below) and the actions will reflect the decision reached by the committee in the matter.

1. 1.

   The Board of Directors shall appoint an initial Content Committee. The procedure for choosing subsequent Content Committees will be decided later, likely in connection with membership.

2. 2.

   The Content Committee will be formed by one Chair person and a number of committee members. The role of the Chair will rotate among members of the committee. The Chair only has two special privileges:

   1. (a)

      access to the “ContentCommittee” user account (but shall only use it to express the views of the committee as a whole), and

   2. (b)

      in the case of a tie in any vote (and only in case of a tie), the vote of the chair is the tie breaker, by counting as two votes.

3. 3.

   The Content Committee shall make its official decisions roughly by the following general guidelines (to be refined later):

   1. (a)

      an issue $Q$ is raised on date $t$

   2. (b)

      within $d$ days from $t$, members of the Content Committee can respond to issue $Q$ by email or posts in the Content Committee Google Group

   3. (c)

      if $Q$ has a simple yes/no answer, then the majority of the responses from the Content Committee is the “decision” of the Content Committee. In the case of a tie, the Chair’s response is the “decision” of the Content Committee.

   4. (d)

      if $Q$ has more than two answers, then the decision by the Chair will be the “decision” of the Content Committee. Of course, the decision by the Chair should be based on the responses from the responders.

   More on the decision process can be found in the next section.

As mentioned in the Mission Statement, the purpose of the Content Committee is to preserve and maintain the integrity of the mathematical content of PlanetMath. The main body of this content is the PlanetMath Encyclopedia. As such, maintaining the encyclopedia entries is the main function of the Content Committee. Maintaining the entries is done in two ways:

• active maintenance - by sporadic but routine checks of PlanetMath entries

• passive maintenance - by resolving disputes arising from several parties with conflicting opinions regarding entries

The following rules should be applied with regard to maintenance of entries:

1. 1.

   Active Maintenance - Any sporadic and routine checking of the PM encyclopedia by a member of the Content Committee is considered “active maintenance.” Any members of the Content Committee may perform active maintenance. If a problem entry is discovered, the discoverer will alert the rest of the Committee members. The decision will be made according to the decision process specified in the previous section. If, however, no responses are received by the deadline, the “decision” shall be made by the member who made the initial alert.

2. 2.

   Passive Maintenance -

   1. (a)

      If two users have a dispute regarding matters of content such as, but not limited to, disagreements about corrections which they cannot resolve amongst themselves, then they may ask the Content Committee to resolve the dispute. The Content Committee should always be the last resort and, before contacting the committee, the users should try the correction system and/or a discussion in the forum.

   2. (b)

      A user may request the arbitration of the Content Committee by sending a PM-mail message to the user ContentCommittee (the account that the Chair uses to communicate to members of PM).

   3. (c)

      When a user finds that an entry does meet the criteria set above, said user may ask the committee to take appropriate action. This action may take one of the following forms:

      1. i.

         Do nothing. Leave the entry in its current state.

      2. ii.

         Propose changes to an entry to bring it to satisfy PM standards. If the author does not comply with the requested changes, the committee may decide to take one of the actions below.

      3. iii.

         Reclassify an entry, and potentially change points that are attached to the entry (Please see the PM Point System for more detail on this).

      4. iv.

         Join ownership of an entry with the author, and add a first line which informs the community of the current situation (such as “the content of this entry has been disputed, see attached comments below”).

      5. v.

         Take ownership of an entry and make it invisible until changes are made.

      6. vi.

         Delete the entry.

   4. (d)

      Upon receiving notification from a user about a dispute or a questionable entry, the Chair shall begin a proceeding as soon as possible. Ordinarily, this should happen a day or two after the complaint is received but, if the committee is too busy with other work or otherwise not able to take action immediately, the Chair may wait until the committee is ready to begin.

   5. (e)

      Once the Chair has officially announced that the committee shall investigate a complaint, the following will happen:

      1. i.

         There shall be a three-day period during which the committee will discuss the matter and may, if it chooses to, solicit input from the community, particularly those involved in the matter being discussed (such as disputants or authors of entries under consideration).

      2. ii.

         For the next four days, there will be a response period during which members of the committee may respond

      3. iii.

         At the end of the four-day period, a decision will be made in the following manner:

         1. A.

            If the responses are binary (yes/no answers, etc…), then the “majority rule” applies, where “majority” means

            • No Change, Proposal of Changes, Reclassification, or Joint Ownership: over 1/2 of responses

            • Takeover or Deletion: over 2/3 of responses

            In the case of a tie, the Chair’s decision will be the final decision.

         2. B.

            If more than two responses are possible, then the Chair, based on the outcomes of the responses, makes the final decision.

         3. C.

            If there are no responses by the end of the four-day period, the Chair will make the final decision (either to take actions or not to take actions).

      Note that the above the size of the committee may vary with time. No member of the Content Committee who is party to a dispute or the author of an entry being investigated may vote in the proceeding.

   6. (f)

      Any member of the committee who is not disqualified by the above clause may ask for an extension of the discussion period or of the voting period. The reason for this extension must be given explicitly and the extension may be no longer than a week. If two other members of the committee who are also not disqualified second such a motion, the proceeding will be extended.

   7. (g)

      If a user places a frivolous request to the committee, the user will get a warning from the Chair. If a user places a number of frivolous requests or harasses the Chair in any way, the Chair may inform the administrators of the site and the user may be penalized in a number of ways which depend on the gravity of the situation.

• Who serves on the Content Committee?

  Anywhere from 8 to 20 members who have contributed content which is deemed of ‘quality’, ‘ideal’ or ‘standard’, by the Board of Directors, and the community in general.

• What makes a person eligible to be on the Content Committee?

  Regular involvement on PM, contributing ‘good’ content according to the standards (this includes entries, corrections, and posts), being a nice member of the community, not being prone to flame wars.

• Can people be nominated to serve on the Content Committee? If so, how?

  Anyone can nominate another user to the Content Committee Chair (CCC). A user can nominate (volunteer) himself/herself to serve in the Committee. The Committee will then review the application and come to a decision.

• Can people be removed from the Content Committee (CC)? If so, how?

  Yes, if a CC member is not responsive, or not suitable for a productive discussion, then the Chair may issue a warning to the member. If this fails, the rest of the CC members can call for a no confidence vote on a particular member (quorum of 3/4 of the committee, threshold 2/3). If the vote succeeds then the CCC can ban or unsubscribe a member from the CC Google group.

• Approximately how much time per week will it take to fulfill weekly expectations of the Content Committee?

  Hopefully not much. The CC should respond to specific requests. Most issues should be resolved by the corrections system and the CCC should encourage users to use other strategies before calling for help from the CC.

• What is the procedure for resigning from the Content Committee?

  Formally, the CCC needs to be notified. Out of consideration, informing other members of the CC is highly encouraged. If the CCC wishes to resign, he or she should inform every member of the CC and should serve until a new CCC is elected.

• How do users file such recommendations to make the Content Committee aware of them?

  Send a message via PM to the ContentCommittee user.

• What action can be taken if a user makes multiple recommendations that are frivolous? At what point should such a user receive a warning?

  This is addressed in the harassment portion of Chi’s other collaboration.

• What should the Content Committee do with entries that they vote to be deleted? Should they actually be deleted? Should they be kept invisible? Should some other way of documenting the current content of the entry be used?

  All of these are viable options and will be done by the Content Committee depending upon how the members vote the entry to be deleted (i.e., whether the committee deems that that entry can be edited in a timely manner—approximately 30 days—in order to be restored or not). One option is to have the user name ContentCommittee post to entries that are made invisible and then, if invisible entries are restored, they can be restored under a new canonical name (and the old entry deleted) so that the ContentCommittee post is also removed.

  Another option is to roll back a questionable entry to a form of the entry that the Content Committee deems acceptable if such a form exists.

  Entries that are deleted should be documented somehow. This process needs to be discussed further. We may not need to document the entry itself as there is a backup.

• How can a CCC be “impeached”?

  If the CCC abused his/her power, he can be removed by members of the CC or by the board or by the president, and a new CCC can be elected.

• How can a new CCC be elected?

  The role of the CCC rotates among the Content Committee members, every $x$ months ($x$ will be determined once we see how time consuming this position actually is).

In order to fulfill its mission statement, the Content Committee not only needs to address concerns raised about questionable entries, but also encourage entries of good quality to be added. Here are some suggestions as to how this can be done:

• The Content Committee could officially recognize exceptional entries.

• The Content Committee could officially recognize a person who frequently contributes entries of good quality.

• The Content Committee could place point bounties on requests that it deems to be urgent.

Speaking of requests, the Content Committee could possibly help out with overseeing that requests are fulfilled:

• Members of the Content Committee can sift through the requests to see if some have been fulfilled unwittingly. Such occurrences can be made known to an admin or the CCC, who can then mark the request as fulfilled.

• The Content Committee can look at requests that are filled but unconfirmed. If the filer of the request is unresponsive, the Content Committee can vote on whether the request has been fulfilled. Again, either an admin or the CCC can mark the request as fulfilled if the Content Committee deems it as such.