2020 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

Question

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

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Electrical Engineering is scheduled for an election next week, May 18, 2020. In connection with that, 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.

Here's how it'll work:

• Until the nomination phase, (so, until May 18, 2020 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.

• If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.

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

• At the start of the nomination 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.

• Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, typically 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 process, feel free to post as a comment here.

Answer 1

If you look at the front page and see a question from a new user that clearly cannot be satisfactorily answered in its current form without additional information would you instantly close it or leave it be for a while? Can you explain why you'd take that particular course of action?

Answer 2

Last autumn was the most turbulent time the network has experienced. The SO company was controversially firing mods - ending up in court, coming up with a negatively received and heavily criticized Code of Conduct, a similarly poorly received moderator re-instatement process. There was also a sudden re-licensing of all content and several popular community managers were fired.

For those who have been living underneath a rock: Firing mods and forced relicensing: is Stack Exchange still interested in cooperating with the community?

My question to the candidates: With most of the issues from the above linked thread remaining unresolved, what made you think the situation has improved significantly in the past 6 months, to the point where you are even willing to run for moderator yourself?

Answer 3

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 4

If a large part of the community disagrees with a particular action you took (migration, closing, ...), but you still feel, deep in your heart, that you made the right decision, how are you going to address this?

Corollary: If the community clearly says (e.g. by a poll on meta with a clear vote result) that it wants to interpret some rules differently than what you wish, what position would you take?

Answer 5

What sort of time per week would you be able to dedicate to moderation and would it be something where you'd be in a position to keep your eye on things for a large portion of the day or would you be limited to after work / school / weekends etc? It might also be useful to know your timezone and any other information about your availability.

Answer 6

Stack Exchange sites can largely be moderated by regular users with sufficient reputation. If you've performed a relatively low amount of work handling review queues and voting to close / reopen questions in the past it can make it hard for the community to evaluate your moderation style. If you fall into that category can you explain why you'd like to be a diamond moderator when you haven't performed much community moderation in the past?

Otherwise if you feel that you have done your fair share of moderation either here or on other SE sites feel free to highlight the work you've done.