dROOOze
- 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?
The community should always be grateful for valuable answers, and the potential suspension or loss of a source of valuable content is always regrettable. However, note that truly valuable answers are capable of inspiring other users to learn more and improve the value of their own content; the positive impact of a disruptive user is often overestimated, especially if users of the community have their own drive to self-moderate and self-improve.
If reminders and warnings have not been heeded by this disruptive user, then ♦-moderators have the responsibility to take necessary action, including temporary or permanent suspension, to minimise further negative impact on this site.
- How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
Moderators should be in constant communication with each other about decisions on the content on this site. I expect that, if a ♦-moderator's decision on a post raises concerns in other ♦-moderators, discussions and a consensus will be made between them, and if necessary, a disagreeable or hasty decision can be reversed (with sincere communication by the responsible ♦-moderator).
- In your opinion, what do moderators do?
As a baseline, ♦-moderators primarily ensure the smooth operation of the Stack Exchange sites. As the sites are first and foremost user-moderated, elected ♦-moderators should only step in when user-driven moderation fails to be sufficient for smooth operation, such as in arguments between other users. If necessary, ♦-moderators should be making final decisions on matters in a way which is agreeable to the other ♦-moderators, and even more importantly, which harmonise with the rest of the community.
However, ♦-moderators also have the responsibility to journey with Stack Exchange sites and make sure that they stay true to their core philosophy - that is, to generate high-quality, reusable content. Other users and the content they generate provide the dense layers of icing and decoration on top of the cake, so to speak, but do not make up the cake's foundations, and ♦-moderators should lightly but constantly remind the community of Stack Exchange's qualities, features, and core vision, preventing disruptive content from building up, lest a deluge of unwelcome additions overwhelm our user-driven and ♦-moderation capabilities, sounding the site's inevitable death knell.
- 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?
I do not believe that my interactions with the users and content on this site thus far have gone against the site's core purpose since my participation, so I'm not concerned by previous content attached to my user ID. If there are concerns about my content, I expect the user-driven moderation procedure to filter them out, and I will be happy to correct, remove, and/or apologise for something in the past that I am responsible for.
- In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?
Most moderation tasks are indeed able to be accomplished with 10-20k reputation. However, at a higher level, I view Chinese SE as suffering from two kinds of problems which are unable to be addressed in a reasonable amount of time without ♦-moderator intervention: (1) an increasingly large number of poorly-worded questions by learners of language basics which are not actively reviewed and closed with a reason of question duplication, and (2) overconfident, opinion-based answers with disruptive nationalist overtones which should be removed immediately. As a ♦-moderator, I will be in a better position to help the community solve a constant influx of these two kinds of problems.
- 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 low-quality content. Should we be encouraging users to be more active voting? If so, what can we do?
At an earlier time in this site's history, I would have agreed to active voting. After graduation, we should look at our participation more responsibly: rather than actively encourage voting, I'd actively encourage responsible voting, which is much more than just clicking an up or down arrow. As part of the larger goal of self-moderation, responsible voting includes flagging, duplicate-checking, and voting for closure and deletion.
Most importantly, I'd like to emphasise that not voting after seeing content should have semantic value - questions which are not voted on should be viewed as a worthy addition to our site because they have not been asked before, but which have not shown any research effort. Answers which are not voted on should be viewed as true in their content, but which again have not shown any research effort or references.
To keep Chinese SE generating high-quality content, I'd actively encourage users to responsibly vote. If you are not upvoting a question you're about to answer, please take the time to ensure that a similar question has not been answered before. If you are not downvoting an unhelpful answer for fear of offending the answerer with negative reputation, vote the answer for deletion.
- Some users feel that question closing 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; a vagueness that can inhibit non-diamond users from self-moderating. Should we change (or reform) closure at Chinese.SE? And if so, how?
I'm personally unaware of any significant issues relating to inconsistent question closure - I'd encourage users to actively participate in our meta site if they have any concerns. If anything, not enough questions have been closed.
However, there are very good reasons to be concerned about our outdated policies surrounding question closure - as a frequent user, our current policies seem to be consistent but unspoken among existing users, which is extremely unhelpful and often causes confusion among new users to the site. The question-closure policy needs to be updated, especially to reflect our character-identification and translation policies, and I would also actively push for notifications of these policies to be visible in the question-asking interface.
- Moderators will sometimes be accused of a number of things: 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?
Serving the community as a moderator is top priority. Personally, I would always separate a disruptive user's actual concerns from their impolite speech and actions. The former needs to be addressed like any other concern. The latter needs to be dealt with like any other disruptive user, and I would deal with the user in the same way as in question (1). To self-quote,
If reminders and warnings have not been heeded by this disruptive user, then ♦-moderators have the responsibility to take necessary action, including temporary or permanent suspension, to minimise further negative impact on this site.
Addressing concerns and moderating disruption are independent - they can be done in tandem.
- 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. 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?
As the user base of Chinese SE increases, especially with native speakers, this inevitably will become a long-term moderation issue with no clear solution based even on cited references. As part of a larger effort to self-moderate, I would actively encourage users to check over their content, discourage users from throwing around a "native speaker" status as any form of justification, and encourage answered to be prefixed with some kind of relevant background to the answer:
- "As a speaker from the mainland, I feel that..."
- "In Taiwan, the idiomatic way to express..."
- "In Malaysia, the Chinese community tends to say..."
In particular, these sorts of notifications should be visible in the answer-posting user interface.
- 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. Should diamond moderators take steps to encourage posts purely in Chinese?
An "immersion experience" does not appear to be related to the smooth running of this site or part of the core philosophy of Stack Exchange sites. It seems to be specifically tailored towards the benefit of one group of people: the language learners, and as such, I don't feel like this is a moderation-specific issue.
More generally, the goal of Chinese SE thus far is not to hand-hold a constant influx of learners for them to go from HSK-1 to HSK-9, then help them achieve a native-level immersion environment. While I accept the usage of the site in this way, I feel like ♦-moderator participation to actively encourage this learning journey creates an environment where the site will be frequently misused, veering away from a core philosophy of generating high-quality, reusable content.
As a single, unified Chinese language site discussing all sorts of language topics, including finer points of the Chinese languages, we are happy to help learners in a way that benefits all users of the site and not take ♦-moderation steps to encourage one form of usage more than another. If and when ♦-moderation steps are necessary to manage a large amount of content specifically relating to learning, that is actually a signal for Chinese SE to split in the way of MathOverflow vs Mathematics SE or English Language & Usage vs English Language Learners.
