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 March 3rd at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 3:00 pm EST 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

How would you respond to the accusation that our site is unfriendly towards "newbies"? Do you consider it a real problem? If so, what steps are you prepared to take to curb any perceived unfriendlyness?

Answer 2

(Duplicated from the SO questions for moderators as I feel it is an important and applicable one here.)

• As a moderator, your votes become binding. Actions you used to take like flagging, closing, and deleting will take effect immediately without any input from any other users or moderators. How will you adapt the way you currently flag and vote to deal with this change?

Answer 3

According to the FAQ Arduino is explicitly on topic on EE.SE:

which include electronics, physical computing, and those working with microcontrollers, Arduinos and embedded systems.

But there is also Arduino.SE in Beta. What characteristics in a question on EE.SE would make you decide to:

• migrate an Arduino related question or leave it on EE.SE
• close an Arduino related question

What is your view on migrating questions to "competing" stacks?

The above question specifically mentions Arduino because it is explicitly mentioned in the EE.SE FAQ, but a somewhat similar challenge goes for Raspberry PI for which many questions are on topic on EE.SE. Some programming questions are a good fit for SO.EE, similar issue.

Answer 4

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 5

• Is there a particular issue or problem on the site that, as a moderator, you believe you can address? What is it and what steps would you take to resolve it?

Answer 6

If you had the ability, is there anything in the site that you would change? How would the mod privileges help you in that?

Answer 7

Sometimes, a new user doesn't understand how the site works. They will ask questions that are off-topic, they ask for product recommendations, their posts don't have enough information to be answerable, etc. They will keep asking questions, not stopping to ask why their posts were closed, and will quickly accumulate multiple closed questions.

Assuming the close reasons are accurate (the questions should be closed), how would you handle a new user that asks several questions that get closed in quick succession?

Answer 8

As a moderator you'll be able to instantly re-open any question put on hold by the community, when would you feel that was appropriate? Can you think of any circumstances where it may actually harm the person asking the question rather than help them?