2020 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

Question

The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

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Chinese Language is scheduled for an election next week, June 29, 2020. 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.

Here's how it'll work:

• Until the nomination phase, (so, until June 29th 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 currently.

• 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.

• 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

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 2

I feel question closure is applied inconsistently, the listed community-specific reasons and the on-topic page are outdated, and it's generally hard to find what's on-topic and off-topic. I further feel this vagueness inhibits non-diamond users from self-moderating.

Question: Should we change (or reform) closure at Chinese.SE? And if so, how?

Answer 3

Question: Should we be encouraging users to be more active voting? If so, what can we do?

Voting is the lifeblood of a Stack Exchange site. Upvotes are a form of appreciation ("thank you!"), they give users the reputation required to self-moderate, and since it pops up in their inbox, it's reminds people that Chinese.SE is an active site. Downvotes are the quality control, and are also important, making people hesitant to post rubbish.

See Voting at Chinese.SE.

Answer 4

How will you deal with abusive behavior towards you as a moderator?

I've certainly been accused of a number of things, as have the other co-Mods here. Accusations of abuse of power, neglect or unjust treatment come up quite frequently. Following protocol can sometimes leave individuals feeling triggered. How will you handle being called out just for doing your job?

Answer 5

Chinese is natively spoken by people from all sorts of backgrounds. Contributors who answer as native speakers may be unaware that what they consider as idiomatic usage may not be another native's idiomatic usage, and differences in these sometimes devolve into long discussions that are more confusing than helpful. Discussions like the ones under the answers of the following question

• https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/39639/in-立下了汗马功劳-how-should-i-understand-立下了-set-up-汗马功劳-war-exploits/

have popped up multiple times (albeit infrequently).

How do we [encourage contributors to new questions or answers to clarify their content] or [modify existing questions and answers] such that differences in idiomatic expressions do not devolve into long discussions?

Answer 6

Sometimes there is a push for questions/answers in Chinese, related to the "immersion" experience. However, we might end up with questions where the groups of people "those who can read the content" and "those who are interested in the content" don't overlap.

Question: Should diamond moderators take steps to encourage posts purely in Chinese?