2017 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

Question

Anime & Manga is scheduled for an election next week, July 10th. 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.

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, July 10th 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 current.

• 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. 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, 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

How much do you know about the following series: Naruto, One Piece, Fairy Tail, Bleach, Dragon Ball?

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The reason I ask is that these five franchises have the following characteristics:

• They together make up about 25% of our total questions to-date and 35% of our total question views, so being able to moderate them is important.
• Questions on these topics appear to be poorly-written more often than questions on other topics, which makes moderating them more important. (This is gut-feel; I don't have numbers. It might just be that I notice poorly-written questions on these topics disproportionately often.)
• The sum total of my knowledge of these franchises is that I've played one of the Naruto fighting games, and hence I often have difficulty distinguishing between "a pile of utter garbage" and "a poorly-written but reasonable question". Our other moderators aren't as useless as me in this respect, but it never hurts to have more hands who know about these things.

Knowing about these series is by no means a requirement, of course. But if candidates A and B are identical except that A has an encyclopedic knowledge of Naruto while B has an encyclopedic knowledge of (say) Doraemon, I would vote for A.

Answer 2

My question to the wannabe-moderators is the following :

What are, in your opinion, the current issues our StackExchange is facing and how do you plan to address them if you were elected as a moderator?

Answer 3

One thing I have noticed is that most of our Mod Team do not appear in the main Chat Room, to the point that most can't being be @ pinged.

While Chat is optional it does provide a platform to contact Mods and discuss policies/decisions as opposed to using custom flags or posting on Meta and it does make a Mod more approachable.

As a Mod would you become more active/participate in Chat? if not how would you open yourself up to being contacted outside of flagging and Meta Posts?

Answer 4

I like @Memor-X's question from the 2016 election:

we have a number of community events from annual events like Conspiracy Santa to one off events like EU A&M Meet up.

Are there any other Events you would like to see occur to help bolster community cohesion, attract more users to the site and/or increase activity and participation on the site?

With an additional modification from myself:

apart from the idea of events, are there any other ways you would encourage the community to grow and collaborate?

Answer 5

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 6

What example can you point to, either here or on another site in the network, that is most indicative of your moderation style? How would you adapt it to fit for this site?