2014 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

Question

In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation. Participation is completely voluntary.

The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

Here's how it'll work:

• During the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, September 29th at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.

• We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.

• This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.

• At the end of the phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.

• Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing 10 questions in total.

• This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this new process, feel free to post as a comment here.

Answer 1

Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8).

• How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
• How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

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• In your opinion, what do moderators do?
• A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
• In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

Answer 2

What can you do as a moderator to be welcoming to new site members if their questions or answers are flagged?

Answer 3

short n simple,

What Unique Value will you add to SFSE as a moderator compared to your current member role ?

Answer 4

Other than yourself, and existing moderators, who of the other nominees is most worthy of a moderator position?

Is it possible to prevent degradation of quality in questions and answers as the membership grows, and if so, how?

Answer 5

We often have questions that for good reason when they're posted receive a lot of comments to help solve the problem. In these situations, frequently an answer is never posted to either summarize the comments or post the solution.

I strongly suspect this causes those questions to get overlooked when they show up in a Google search with no answer having been posted even though there may be much useful information to be found in the comments therein.

What do you plan to do to see that these questions are appropriately preserved for posterity; ensuring they'll show up in a useable manner when searched in the future?

Answer 6

How much time do you believe you have available each week (on average) to devote to managing this forum and how do you see yourself allocating that time among the responsibilities you'll have as a manager?

Answer 7

How, if at all, do you see the 3 forum managers dividing up some of the responsibilities of managing this forum between the three of you? Do you see the need for or envision there being kind of hierarchy? How do you anticipate communication to happen between the three of you? Do you expect that one of you be the "point person" with StackExchange?

I'm curious to know what each of your views are on this since the three who are elected will need to work together and cooperate for the good of this forum.

Answer 8

What follows is a two part question. I've compiled a few statistics to help provide some insight that may be useful toward helping you respond to my questions.

Total users: 6947

Users by Reputation

• 30 or more: 2581 (37%)
• 11 or more 3753 (54%)

Voting in the current quarter:

• Ranked Users: 164 Approx 4-1/2 pages of users who've cast 11 or more votes
• Pct of Total Users Voting in Quarter: 2.36 %
• Total Votes: 11621 votes

Page 1

• 36 users
• 8452 votes
• 73% of total
• mean: 234 votes
• median: 177 votes
• cutoff: 69 votes

Page 1 AND Page 2

• 72 users
• 10034 votes
• 86% of the total
• cutoff: 30 votes

72 users out of the 6947 members of this Forum (1 %) cast 86% of the votes so far this quarter at the time I collected these statistics! With that as background, my interrelated questions are:

a. What do you see that you can do as a Moderator to encourage new users to both vote up the helpful answers they receive and accept answers when questions have been solved; in essence educating them on how SF.SE is intended to work?

b. What will you do to encourage voting in general? The StackExchange model relies on self moderation, which also relies on members gaining reputation. Without upvoting of questions and answers, as a Moderator, you're not going to have the people you're going to need to assist you with the work that needs done as this Forum continues to grow; particularly now that it's out of beta and significantly additional reputation is necessary to obtain moderator privileges.

Answer 9

EDITED

I have five questions in total. I hope at least a few of them will make the final cut.

I managed a forum on Compuserve for WUGNET from 1999 to 2001, so have at least some idea of what its like to do the job you're asking us to elect you to. That was a time when the Internet was still in it's infancy compared to what it is today, but I think it still provides me with a unique perspective on the task you're signing up for along with an understanding of questions I think important to ask of you..

Kudos to each of you for deciding to toss your hats in the ring and asking us to consider you for this position. There's much responsibility and hard work involved but many rewards to be found as well.

Here's my 1st question:

I don't know exactly how StackExchange manages their forums, but its my understanding that you'll be our representatives to interface with them. This is an added responsibility that we won't always see through the direct efforts you put in here in the forum. My question with respect to that is how do you view your role as our representative with the StackExchange organization and are there particular talents, skills or personal attributes you have that you'll be bringing to that role which will be helpful to you and our Forum? Additionally, is there anything you hope to accomplish in that role to our benefit?