2021 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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English Language Learners Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2021-10-18. 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 2021-10-18 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.

• 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.

• We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:

  • 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?

• The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.

  • 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?

• 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. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.

  • We will post the final questionnaire on the Election page. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.
  • 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

What are your criteria for what makes a good question? What qualities cause you to upvote questions? What qualities might cause you to downvote a question?

Answer 2

Sometimes people post comments on ELL that attempt to answer a question, in whole or in part. How would you handle these comments?

Answer 3

What do you think is the most important issue that the ELL community needs to work on, and what would you do as moderator to address it?

Answer 4

Some native-speakers on ELL have a view that native-speakers understand more about the subject-matter in questions than learners—who may have been learning about English and English grammar for many years.

Some native-speakers users also think that native-speakers are the best judges of what makes a good answer for learners. Are native-speaker users a better judge of good answers for learners than learners themselves?

Answer 5

This question is about your site commitment and involvement.

Users may feel that they want moderators who understand SE English Language Learners in particular and how it works.

Many sites now have moderators that moderate on five or six sites. How many other sites do you moderate on? Is this one of your top two sites in terms of reputation? Why are you a good candidate for English Language Learners in particular?

Answer 6

Generally what is your stance on comments? For example:

• Do you consider comments ephemeral and nearly always distracting? Do you agree that they should be deleted if they do not ask the author to clarify?

• Do you believe that a long discussion under an answer or a question does more harm than good, and must be deleted once someone raises a flag? Why?

• Do you consider that discussions, as long as they are on-topic, should be left alone? Why?

• Should lengthy discussions be migrated to chat? When?

Answer 7

Do you think there is a race problem on online platforms? Do you think it is a problem across StackExchange where there's evidently an educated-class skew? What about ELL? What would you as a moderator do to address it?