2019 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.

Academia is scheduled for an election next week, September 16. 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 September 16 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 at 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

As a moderator, I find that comments are a tricky thing to deal with. Under what circumstances will you delete comments?

Note that there are lots of flags that comments are obsolete/no longer needed.

Answer 2

What is your stance about the current scope of Academia Stack Exchange and how this is enforced?

• Should we close any question that does not strictly comply with the current scope?
• Should we be lenient and keep open questions that can potentially generate good answers even if borderline off-topic?
• Should we narrow or broaden the scope?

Answer 3

What question or answer of yours on meta best exemplifies your philosophy on moderation? Why do you feel this is the best example?

Answer 4

What is your time zone? What is the time period you are available for moderating our site everyday? Please specify the answer in UTC format.

[Blatantly stolen from scaaahu in a past election.]

Answer 5

Academia.SE frequently has questions rise high on the Hot Network Questions (HNQ); often these questions are on more controversial topics than the mean question here and attract visitors from across the SE community who otherwise don't participate here.

What do you think the moderators' role should be with respect to HNQ list questions? How do you think presence on the HNQ list should affect moderation decisions?

Answer 6

Do you have any previous experience as a moderator, either on Stack Exchange or on other kind of communities (e.g. newsgroups, forums etc.)?

Answer 7

Extracted from this answer with multiple questions to allow individual voting

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 8

New users and posters tend to struggle more than experienced users. What would you do as a moderator to improve the onboarding and also improve the welcome felt by new posters to Academic SE?

Answer 9

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 10

Extracted from this answer with multiple questions to allow individual voting

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?