2017 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

Question

Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election starting next week, January 23rd. In connection with that election, we will be hosting a Q&A here for 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:

• Until the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, January 23th 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.

• 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.

• At the end of the collection 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 (up to) 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

Here's a question based on an experience I have had a couple of times on another site now. It'd be interesting to see the responses to this, and I feel that it would reveal the type of moderator that each candidate could become.

---

A question from the site has got into the Hot Network Questions, and has attracted several joke answers which have attracted quite a few votes. The answers technically solve the problem, but are clearly not serious and probably won't be very useful. What would you do in this situation?

Answer 2

The scope of the site is generally the result of a consensus. As a moderator, you are expected to participate and to lead that continuous definition.

How do you feel about enforcing definitions on which you do not necesarily agree?

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?

---

• 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

Do badges/reputation matter in retaining the interest of SE Users? If you think not, what other things might help to do so? If you think they do, what is the thing that is not currently recognised/awarded but ought most to be?

Edited to add: in response to @goldilocks, the last part is a hypothetical question here, as, they rightly point out, badges and rewards are determine SE wide and are not something within the scope of Moderators anyhow! 8-)