2017 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

Question

Mi Yodeya 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.

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If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

Answer 1

What is something about the character or policy of the Mi Yodeya that you'd like to work to improve as a mod, and how would you work on it?

Answer 2

Why do you want to be a moderator?

Answer 3

What is something new and/or unique that you can bring to the moderator team and/or to the site? (eg. active at unusual times, familiarity with a certain topic, past applicable work experience, extreme love of waffles, etc.)

Answer 4

Purim Torah season is a time when moderators here end up having to use personal judgement a little more than they usually do. As a moderator, how would you tend to steer the direction of our annual Purim silliness (compared to how it's been in the past, I suppose): keep more of it around since it's just two weeks or cull mediocre or borderline jokes to keep things somewhat focused? Something else?

Answer 5

Tell us about a time (here or elsewhere) when you managed to successfully spur a group of people to positive action that wasn't required of them.

Answer 6

Mi Yodeya sometimes struggles with posts that are not from a mainstream Orthodox perspective. We generally follow the approach we worked out here for questions and answers from other movements, and we tend to delete posts that ascribe authority to non-Jewish sources/ideas. That said, there's still a lot of room for interpretation, and sometimes discussions get heated and flags build up quickly. As a moderator you'll be called on to adjudicate. Please describe your approach to these challenges and your comfort with enforcing the existing policies.

Answer 7

I have frequently found that a number of new users are intimidated and discouraged to continue on this site because of moderators closing questions or putting them on hold. While we do publish our policy in the guide, the language there may be too wordy or ambiguous to many new users. Even with carefully readig the policy, the decision to close or put a question on hold is often voted on by several users often without adequate explanation. Sometimes, moderators take action without waiting for the vote.

Comments sometimes help clarify things, but, I sense that often, it has discouraged new users to persevere and stay with our site. They may get intimdated and leave.

What actions would you do as moderator to encourage users to stay?

(I have my own ideas, but I want to leave this question somewhat vague, for now.)

Answer 8

Comments: bane of any site that wants to maintain a good signal:noise ratio, harmless, something in between? What do you think about comments and the moderation thereof on Mi Yodeya, and what would you like to change about it?

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

I'm uncertain how often moderator elections occur, but I gather that it's every 3 years?

I'd like to suggest a somewhat "novel" idea. I think moderators should be subject to an annual review, similar to what happens in the work place. Feedback can come via several ways, subject to moderator and, perhaps, community agreement. Performance could be partially measured via any complaints or compliments coming from users; activity level (e.g. how often are they monitoring questions and taking some action), and / or a survey submitted to the community or a selected group from the community (By "Community, I mean Mi Yodeya members.)

As a moderator, would you agree to this type of review and accept feedback from other moderators and / or other users?