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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, August 17th 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 new process, feel free to post as a comment here.

17 Answers 17

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What is your stance about identification request questions? What should be done to improve our guidelines and requirements from identification requests?

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Adapted from Scifi.SE's collection thread:

While you don't have to know the subject matter to be a mod, it often helps. Are there any major tags with which you have little to no experience? What will you do in the event that a questionable flag was made in an area where you have little expertise?

(This is particularly important to our site since a large fraction of our questions comes from long-running shounen series like , , , , etc. Since all these series inhabit the same genre/demographic, it is very possible that prospective mods who don't like that particular genre/demographic may have no knowledge of these series whatsoever.)

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    +1 to this. I constantly have trouble in the review queues dealing with Naruto posts--they're often not in great English, and due to my lack of knowledge of the series, I often can't tell if the core ideas of the post make any sense or not. Any moderator will have to deal with lots of these, so that domain knowledge could be very important.
    – Torisuda
    Aug 12, 2015 at 17:10
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    +1! At least 2 out of 3 moderators should have a wide range of watched/read titles & genres. Candidates, please share the range of genres and eras that you're competent in (for example: “For the past 20 yrs, I’ve watched/read all manner of genres [except hentai & horror], titles from differing decades, representative works of classic mangaka, and [with an open mind] genres I didn’t even expect to like; I’m acquainted with all anime exported to the U.S. up through the year 2000 regardless of genre; and I intentionally tried out just about every manga magazine I could, from...
    – seijitsu
    Aug 12, 2015 at 23:31
  • ... Shounen Sunday to RunRun to josei to seinen. When I co-founded an anime club, the titles we screened were carefully categorized by genre and time period and then voted upon within those, so as to make sure that no fan went through their college career claiming to be an anime fan without having at least given classic Gundam or Rose of Versailles a try.”) Let us know how you've educated yourself about the breadth of the artform. Since shoujo comprises such a major corpus of the realm of anime, I believe that at least 1 of the moderators should be well-versed in it in order…
    – seijitsu
    Aug 12, 2015 at 23:32
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    ... for this SE to move forward in growing into a reputable and authoritative information resource on anime and manga over-all: where questions about genres other than the current JUMP shounen series rise in number and quality, where moderators have a general competence regarding the content of many genres, where experts educated in various genres feel comfortable without feeling marginalized or that nobody really cares if they're contributing or not.
    – seijitsu
    Aug 12, 2015 at 23:32
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    @seijitsu It might make sense to post something like "please share the range of genres/etc" (or whatever question(s) in particular you want to ask) as a separate answer on this post.
    – senshin
    Aug 13, 2015 at 0:02
  • @senshin per your request and some up votes on my comment, I've separated it out as another answer.
    – seijitsu
    Aug 15, 2015 at 10:07
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You have been elected moderator of A&M SE, with two other nominees.

The other moderators are heavily pushing a new change to the site policy, but the community itself is split on the issue. You personally don't think the policy should be changed, but the other moderators are insistent it must be altered and repeatedly bring up discussion of change.

How do you deal with this situation?

Context:

there are a few issues (most obviously id-requests, but there are definitely other items) that some potential moderators will have a strong stance on. I think this situation may arise depending on who is voted in.

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  • (I presume I can propose questions despite running)
    – Toshinou Kyouko
    Aug 12, 2015 at 7:25
  • I did and it's been up for a day but you'd only get a slight advantage if it's chosen (because someone may have a much better answer then you)
    – Memor-X
    Aug 12, 2015 at 8:03
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    Good line of thought. A variant on this question that I'd more like to hear answered is "The other moderators are heavily pushing a new change to the site policy and you personally agree with them, but the community itself is split on the issue. How do you deal with this situation?" In other words, "As an elected representative, should your actions strive to reflect the wishes of the community, or were you entrusted by the community to act against the majority consensus at times for the sake of the greater good?" and "How would you attempt to change policy if others are split on the matter?"
    – seijitsu
    Aug 13, 2015 at 0:52
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With A&M, there has occasionally been a tendency for some posts on Meta to fade into obscurity and be forgotten / never dealt with.

Also, our meta policies are scattered among many Meta posts from various dates, making it hard for users to know what is current.

Do you feel this is an issue? How would you deal with this?

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    For me meta awareness and organization is a big issue right now, probably the biggest one with the site, and yet almost no one seems to be trying to do very much about it. The amount of meta duplication recently has been pretty absurd, and it seems like no one even remembers any of the old discussions, instead trying to re-solve the same problems we've already solved...
    – Logan M
    Aug 12, 2015 at 8:19
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    It's made meta essentially unusable except to the few people who have followed everything from day 1. Instead we end up with unclear policies and people trying to wing every decision. Going forward, I hope to see more duplicates marked as such and more meta awareness in moderation (both from mods and non-mods), and I hope the newly elected mods will be able to aid in this.
    – Logan M
    Aug 12, 2015 at 8:20
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    @LoganM If you want to mark some things as duplicate, you could just do that. I, at least, check the meta review queues every so often and would be able to finalize any duplicate closures you trigger.
    – senshin
    Aug 12, 2015 at 22:23
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    @senshin When I notice duplicates in the future, I will try to mark them. Unfortunately, I'm not on the site as much as I used to be, and often by the time I see the post it's already been around for several days and sparked some discussion. Moderators get notified of new meta posts immediately, and are thus in a strong position to act unilaterally, assuming they themselves are familiar with meta. With all that said, duplication is just one symptom of the general disorganization of meta, and not necessarily the most problematic one.
    – Logan M
    Aug 13, 2015 at 7:09
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Splitting this one off, since I think it's important:

In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

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What should responsible moderators not do with their power? What behavior have you disliked in moderators (on any SE or elsewhere) that you vow you'll never do?

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    MODABUSE is best abuse.
    – кяαzєя Mod
    Aug 15, 2015 at 23:03
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Borrowed from Movies.SE's collection thread:

What current policies do you believe are too strictly enforced (either by mods or the community)? Which do you believe are not enforced strictly enough?

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Site promotion and (new and old) user retention has been an issue we've struggled with since the site's inception. Occasionally, we toss things at the walls to see what sticks, but that's not an effective long-term strategy.

As a candidate, do you have any prospective (long-term and/or short term) strategies or ideas the deal with this issue (both within and outside of the Stack Exchange community)?

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  • So far I haven't heard from anyone discussing this in the Campaign Café what concrete steps you would take. I believe the main reason it’s hard to attract & retain users is that when a fan first looks at the site, either they 1) search for a question as a test (to see if this SE covers the kind of info they're looking for) and navigate away if it doesn't, or 2) thinks it looks interesting as an idea and starts to ask/answer some questions, but finds it difficult to wade through both ID requests and mainstream JUMP shounen requests to find anything they're an expert in (it seems like the ...
    – seijitsu
    Aug 15, 2015 at 23:31
  • …only way to search is to run a search for each specific title they know well, but that’s tiresome & will likely pull up a lot of "Sorry, we don't actually have any questions so far about that series" results or there's a handful of low-quality questions about that title but the selected answer is often opinion w/o citation and is dead wrong); so they get discouraged because the idea of SE is nice but the reality is that, so far, this SE is not comprised of a community of gathered experts in anime & manga. That's not to say there are no experts here at all, but they're few and far in...
    – seijitsu
    Aug 15, 2015 at 23:31
  • …between, so when a new user who is an hardcore expert in a genre or in specific series browses to see how this SE is handling their area, they realize it would be too hard to try to fight against the numbers of non-experts who are answering questions incorrectly (with higher rep). This is why I don't feel comfortable to invite the shoujo experts I know personally, or any of my Japanese subculture friends living in Japan to join: in the current state, they'd take one look at the classics, shoujo, josei, children's, etc. Q&A offerings and turn away for good. What are your concrete proposals...
    – seijitsu
    Aug 15, 2015 at 23:31
  • …for handling 1) opinion-based answers that're incorrect but get up voted by other non-experts (in some cases, even over clear, objectively correct answers with ample citations <— this looks very embarrassing to experts considering whether SE is useful & worth investing any time in vs. a hopeless cause) and 2) how to increase the quality & quantity of questions outside of mainstream shounen given the demographic of users we currently have? If you’re not personally very knowledgeable about titles from other genres/decades than your favorite ones, how would you concretely counter the status quo?
    – seijitsu
    Aug 15, 2015 at 23:31
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    @seijitsu these are good questions and points to bring up, however this meta is for general questions, not a Q&A for a candidate. If you want to discuss all of these in detail, I'll be more than happy to do so in chat at a time per your convenience.
    – кяαzєя Mod
    Aug 15, 2015 at 23:50
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From CodeReview.SE's collection thread:

A user has an issue with an action you, as moderator, took; calling you out on meta, a chat room, comments, or otherwise. How do you handle this?

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Power users who enjoy posting the most questions and answers don't simply equate to being the same people who are best-suited to routine, unthanked, humdrum administrative tasks. What experience (other than your contributions on this SE) do you bring to the table that demonstrates your competence as a moderator/admin?

Some ideas to share with us: in your job, internship, volunteering, club/org, website/forum/mailing list/social media, have you

  • performed repetitive administrative tasks... and enjoyed it?
  • organized and categorized material?
  • copyedited others' writing?
  • provided customer service?
  • fielded questions about rules and protocols?
  • moderated heated disputes?
  • handled a person who didn't care about following the guidelines?
  • had to delete offensive content or ban a user?
  • avoided making top-down decisions even when you had the power to do so, instead opting to return some decisions to voting by the members at large?
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    This is very important to consider. It's exactly why I wouldn't consider running for moderator myself--I help out in the review queues, but I don't particularly enjoy it, and I'll occasionally try to engage with a user whose content is below par, but I don't particularly enjoy that either. That's the bread and butter for a moderator.
    – Torisuda
    Aug 13, 2015 at 6:34
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What is the range of genres and decades (from early classics through to the present) that you're competently knowledgable in? How have you intentionally educated yourself about the breadth of the anime and manga artforms?

I believe that at least 2 out of 3 moderators should have a broad variety of watched/read titles and genres, for the sake of 1) possessing general competence in assessing the content of questions/answers across many genres, and 2) for this SE to move forward in growing into a reputable and authoritative information resource on anime and manga over-all: where questions about genres other than current JUMP shounen series rise in number and quality, and where experts educated in various under-represented genres feel comfortable joining without feeling marginalized or that nobody really cares if they're contributing or not.

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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?
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A user who had posted some high voted questions/answers here has had some terrible experiences on other Stack Exchange Communities, as a resault they are now being self-destructive to them on a whole (ie. deleting their questions/answers, un-accepting answers, revenge voting, unnecessary flagging, destructive edits).

What would be your course of action not just to the user but to the content they created on Anime and Manga?

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How would you attempt to change policy if you and the fellow moderators agree on an issue but other members are split on the matter?　As an elected representative, should your actions strive to reflect the wishes of the community, or were you entrusted by the community to act against the majority consensus at times for the sake of the greater good?

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From CodeReview.SE's collection thread:

"Moderators don't vote. They decide."

Making binding decisions instead of voting will be a paradigm shift for nearly all of the nominees. How do you plan on making this adjustment?

0

From CodeReview.SE's collection thread:

As a moderator on Anime & Manga you will also become a moderator on all of chat.stackexchange.com - which has rooms for most sites (all except Stack Overflow and Meta.StackExchange).

A heated discussion is flagged in "The Suspension" chat room which is associated with BridgeBuilding.stackexchange.com - there is swearing and name calling.

What do you do?

0

A particular series tag / type of question seems to attract one-line answers.

How would you encourage users to give more detail than just a single sentence / link?

Similarly for attracting one-line questions.

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    This is heavily context-dependent - that is, it depends on why the answers being given are short. The answers to some sorts of questions ("what is the name of this thing", e.g.) are inherently short; this doesn't necessarily make them bad. Likewise, though some one-line questions happen to be bad, one-line questions aren't inherently bad.
    – senshin
    Aug 13, 2015 at 17:25
  • @senshin I'm not saying that all one-line things are bad, but I think from the context of my question you can assume that the items in question are not particularly useful, even if they are correct
    – Toshinou Kyouko
    Aug 13, 2015 at 17:59
  • 2
    Sure, that's fine - I'm more just suggesting that it's going to be difficult to answer this question with much more than "Well, it depends on...".
    – senshin
    Aug 13, 2015 at 18:04

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