My name is Napoleon Wilson (but don't ask me why), and here are my answers:
As a moderator, your votes become binding. Actions you used to take like flagging, reviewing, closing, and deleting will take effect immediately without any input from any other users or moderators. How will you adapt the way you currently flag and vote to deal with this change?
Being a moderator comes with a certain responsibility and representation. However, flagging, reviewing and closing should already be done with the highest responsibility by any user. I only flag, and delete-vote when the situation is absolutely clear to me and will thus still continue to do this, just more effectively now. However, close-voting sometimes can have far less clearly defined rules which are prone to a slight bit of proper judgement by each individual. This doesn't mean one is to freely close-vote anything without thinking about the consequences, but that there are margins for certain questions wherein a reasonable consideration can be made by each user individually. The fact that 5 users have to agree on this makes this a viable democratic mechanism.
Now when a single vote is completely binding you have to be completely sure that it is perfectly aligned with the rules of the site and have to take personal responsibility for this, especially when closing it right away without any other users having the chance to evaluate it. This means that in certain situations where it isn't entirely clear, I'd rather leave the decision process to the community, at least at the beginning, possibly still helping with comments and pointers to relevant meta discussions. This doesn't mean I'll refrain from close-voting out of a fear to take responsibility but that I would deem it more appropriate for the community to reach a conclusion in unison in such marginal cases rather than a moderator making the judgment call right from the start.
While M&TV has a large userbase and many visitors, the meta participation is relatively low and discussions are usually held within a small active core group. Do you see this as a problem? If yes, how would you try to improve the situation as a moderator?
I tend to see this as a problem, since on the one hand it sometimes results in a lack of the necessary critical mass to make important decisions and on the other hand it might look like the site is ruled by a distinctive clique whereas it should actually be ruled by everyone. Add to this that low meta participation isn't a particularly good sign of an engaging userbase concerned about the site.
However, there are IMHO only small steps that can help to tackle this. Whenever a user is dissatisfied with something (say, a closed question), encourage them to bring it to meta or participate in a possibly already existing discussion on the matter. On the other hand important meta discussions might more often be made 'featured' in the community bulletin for main site users to notice that there is something going on behind the scenes that requires their attention.
Likewise some more community building efforts might help to rise user awareness of the community as a whole and in turn inspire them to engage more in those rather maintenance tasks and care about the development of the site. The most obvious things coming to mind are challenges, or a blog, or things as simple as encouraging people to join chat. While the more serious community building efforts necessarily require existing community contribution, I'm always eager to help with such things from the technical and organizational side.
How willing are you to commit time to this site every day to ensure that everything is seen by at least one mod in a relatively decent amount of time?
I already commit time to this site practically every day and a significant part of that time is moderation, so I don't see a big problem in this regard if site activity doesn't downright explode in the near future. I usually check into the site over the whole day till night, sometimes more and sometimes less, but always at least a few times during the day, skimming over new questions and review tasks.
How you are going to handle spoiler complaints? People here have submitted many complaints about spoilers and a new user can give a big spoiler very clearly. So how are you going to handle this?
First of all, we have in our statute that except for question titles spoilers are allowed. I will thus make any effort to remove them from question titles but am not too inclined on enforcing spoiler hiding in questions/answers if it wasn't the intent of the original author. Rather on the contrary, if I notice that spoilers are used to a degree where they deface a post into a plain yellow block, I might try to improve them by reducing spoiler markup to a minimum, yet respecting the OP's desire to not disclose everything. In addition to that, some time ago a user proposed to hide spoilers for unrelated material (i.e. not the movie asked about) if requested and I think this is a good idea. So if there are spoiler complaints in this regard by other users, I will try to improve 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?
A 20k user is already pretty effective. The day to day work is mostly consisting of edits and the occasional close-vote or flag. The former is already perfectly doable with even far less than 10k rep and the latter is also not too ineffective once enough users contribute. However, close-voting and deleting entirely inappropriate stuff can be done much faster without having to wait for 4 or 2 other people to chime in. It also helps greatly with more maintenance-oriented tasks, like deleting old inactive ID questions or cleaning up comments, something which normal users can't do at all. In addition to that, it also helps with the rarer extraordinary events and their technical organization, be that challenges, blogs, chat events or larger one-time site maintenance undertakings. Those are rarer in occurrence but usually require more than just trusted user privileges to be handled effectively.
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?
First of all, I'd assess the nature of those flags and arguments and if they are indeed to be seen negatively. In either case I'd try to calm down the situation by my own comments. If a pattern becomes apparent there is however not much that could and should be done apart from judging each individual discussion anew. Afterall it is the internet and in the same way as people might not always be the politest, there are also enough misunderstandings and easy offenses. That doesn't mean flags are to be ignored in those cases, but that any possible misunderstandings are to be cleared.
If a user really continues to show inappropriate behaviour despite a positive content-wise contribution, one can only try to address him directly and remind him that it doesn't do good to the site, which he'll hopefully be interested in after having given so many useful contributions to it. If all else fails, a suspension is the last line of defense and to be used when really necessary, but this of course comes with the danger of repelling that user completely from the site. We had such an event in the past where an avid user and great contributor went postal, colloquially speaking, and ultimately abandoned the site completely (though, without even letting it go as far as a suspension) and this was surely not a good thing for this site. But apart from constructive discussion there's usually not so much that can and should be done there.
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
First of all, I'd ask the respective moderator about the reasons for his decision if not obvious from the comments. If I really strongly disagree I'd try to reason with him and if we can't come to a conclusion (be it me or him bowing down or a compromise), the obvious choice is a meta discussion and taking the community to help make a decision. While that might slightly undermine all the moderators' authority when they're publicly arguing about something, it is better than leaving a major argument about a site policy unresolved and afterall moderators are also just (faulty) human agents of the community consensus.
A new user has arrived and doesn't really understand the way the Stack Exchange system is supposed to work. They're complaining that people keep editing their posts and a roll back war has started on a question that they've asked. You need to step in and moderate the situation. What actions do you take?
First of all, I'll first try to calm down the situation in comments along with assessing each of the users' standpoints. There are situations where edits have to be done and where new users need to understand how the site works and that posts aren't entirely their own and this understanding has to be helped by politely guiding the user to the tour and to meta if necessary. But there are also situations where the rules leave some more room for authorial control by the original asker and an editor might have gone too far. This also has to be addressed constructively. But whoever is more right and whoever's edit is to "win" (or a compromise between both edits), the new user has to be guided to an understanding of the intricacies of the site. If that fails however due to an unwillingness to adapt to the site's workings, more serious measures are in order. If the question is by all means not maintainable in an appropriate form due to repeated rollbacks then it might have to be deleted or the user even temporarily suspended after a respective warning if he poses active harm to the site.
This site generates a lot of identification questions. The general consensus for a while has been to keep them, but that we need to enforce some quality rules on them. What is your personal opinion on the identification questions we receive on this site?
First of all, my personal (and possibly quite extreme) opinion is that those questions have nothing to give to this site and are a burden for it, even more so they are the biggest and most dangerous problem the site has to fight with. There might be the occasional good one but overall they are a steady (and rising) stream of uninteresting clutter. They have nearly zero long-term information value and you won't ever look into an ID question that has an accepted answer. Add to this that, in contrast to each and every other kind of question, they are not salvageable content-wise without the help of the original asker. But even worse, they make this site look like a mere quiz show and actively dilute the brand of what this site is about. On the long term their viral nature will only result in a further rise of those questions and an exodus of avid users and interesting non-ID questions, which will ultimately contribute to the qualitative and thematic deterioration of this site, turning it into a place lacking any appeal to people interested in engaging questions and in the broader development of the site.
So much to my own rather pessimistic opinion. As a moderator I am supposed to enforce the will of the community as a whole and not the policies I deem appropriate, and for now the community has deemed those questions on-topic. So I won't run around and kill each and every ID question. However, this will not stop me trying to encourage more quality in this question category. I will try to bring poor ID questions to notice and enquire users for more detail. Likewise I will also resume the existing maintenance task of deleting old inactive ID questions, which has decreased in the past and which I have tried to help with recently by appropriate moderator flags. I will also never lose sight of the broader picture of the site's future and will address the matter of ID questions in more serious meta discussions if the situation seems to get worse.
What current policies do you believe are too strictly enforced (either by mods or the community)? Which do you believe are not enforced strictly enough?
In recent times I have begun to get more open to more subjective questions or even list questions to some degree. This doesn't mean I'd propose every kind of subjectively argumentative question, but I think sometimes people are a bit too fast in close-voting interesting and intriguing questions which might just be phrased a bit unluckily. I'd rather see more openness in this regard and more editing on those questions, may it even be accompanied by close-votes and reopen-votes after proper editing. There have been quite some questions which I happened to edit into reopenability but I'd like others to chime in there a bit. I also think that sometimes people flag as "not an answer" a bit too fast, at least I've seen that in the past, when 10kers had more insight into the flagging queue and I often had to cast "invalid flag"-flags. If something is a totally unreasonable or ungrounded answer that nevertheless tries to provide an answer, it is to be downvoted, but it is an answer. (Though, this might also come from a mere misunderstanding of the low quality review queue and it's admittedly misleading "Looks Ok" button.)
On the other hand I'd yet again come back to my pet topic and would like to see people voting more actively against poor identification questions, especially when I, in my possible future position as a moderator, will naturally step more to the background in situations that are not 100% clear-cut. Though, I also think that this has improved as of recently.
