2016 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, March 21st 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 process, feel free to post as a comment here.

Answer 1

We have a significant problem where a question lacks some critical details - the details required to formulate a good answer, absence of which may restrict few users from considering posting a detailed answer. Those details are usually the Android version and Android device name, but not limited to them.

Consider the fact that users often have to invest/waste their time into seeking those details - the details, which should have been provided by the user already or could have been asked from them via technical means.

Since the beginning of year 2016, there have been two attempts to change the tides. The attempts can be seen at:

• Adding a template question to the Ask Question box
• How can we ensure that users include relevant detail when asking a question?

These attempts are a good improvement onto a similar attempt made years ago. Unfortunately, the older one was lost in the shadows and the recent ones failed to take off for an unbeknownst reason.

There exists clearly a problem to deal with, so:

• What stance do you have on this issue?
• What do you propose or have proposed to deal with this issue?

Answer 2

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 3

Moderators are given the power to unilaterally delete posts. Given this ability, how would you approach answers that are objectively low-quality (vague, short, etc) but are an attempt to provide an answer?

Answer 4

Are there any existing policies or rules that you think should be amended or removed? Are there any new policies you would like to see added?

Answer 5

You close a question that's clearly off-topic and the user comes to Meta, not to ask what they did wrong, say you're a [mean word here]. How do you react?

Answer 6

Even though we've a clear consensus on Should users (non-Moderators) approve an edit made by a user posing as the author of the post? you can still find two or three regular reviewers who do not go by that consensus and wrongly approve such edits.

Other problem is with reviewing where careless or superfluous edits gets approved, most likely to increase review count.

How do you deal with such reviewers or with their reviewing? If you don't see a problem, please tell us why do you not find such reviews a problem at all.

Answer 7

If you're a regular here, you would have soon realized that we have a huge [quite an] issue of crappy migration from one of the larger SE sites. That site deals with questions posted by enthusiasts and power users of computers.

• What is your stance on crappy migration?
• Do you've a preemptive solution? If yes, what is it?
• What do you suggest to regular flag raisers and close voters to do with such crap?

Answer 8

Like every other site, we also suffer from lazy answers. The problem has been discussed here: Half line answers -- what would be the best course of action(s) to deal with them? The problem is different from this issue which is about lazy guesses or lazy opinions. None of the solutions to the original problem have gained support (through votes) that can be considered as will of the community at large.

Consider the fact that no consensus causes or may be causing ambiguity to mortals from flagging those posts - mortals, who are the major reason moderators are able to keep the site clean or keep a tab on quality of posts.

Since there is no denying that there exists a major problem to deal with,

• What are you going to do with answers similar in nature to the examples listed in that question?
• What clear suggestion for dealing with those posts do you propose for ordinary users of this site?

Answer 9

How do you define Android independent questions? The only available answer to the linked question doesn't seem to solve the original problem stated in the question.

Consider the fact that the result from the discussion on the linked post appears to be more or less helpful to those who have been regular to this site for more than a year. Too much is left on a user's experience which is definitely not good for any site dealing with significantly lower number of middle/high reputation but active close voters / flag raisers.

Here are some questions:

• Do you think a good attempt can be made to draw a hard line to understand what makes or would make a question Android independent or does that answer suffices?
• In any case, how do you define what makes a question Android independent, in a manner which any ordinary user can use to judge a question?

You may opt to address these related arguments:

I think a question that's relevant to our site about using an Android app doesn't magically become irrelevant when the publisher releases an iPhone version of the app (source)

---

One thing I find odd about this drive to close questions about cross-platform apps is that it's always about mass-market social or message apps. Nobody ever suggests closing questions about Google Maps even though that's also on iPhone and a website.
I think it's really an objection to certain particular apps, and the fact that they're cross-platform is just a pretext. (source)