2018 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

Question

Movies & TV is scheduled for an election next week, October 15th. 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.

Unlike the previous election back in 2015, this time the Q&A question collection will be provided one week in advance of the actual elections. This will allow users some extra time to evaluate their decision on whether to nominate, as well as let them provide answers to the questionnaire during the nomination phase itself.

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, October 15th 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 at 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.

• 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

The site has core cadre of 'die hard' members and, because of the popular subject material, attracts a lot of casual passing users. How would you use the role of moderator to encourage new users to contribute to the site more?

Answer 2

Being a moderator you will be able to close questions on your own and override other community votes. Will this change how you vote to close questions?

Answer 3

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 4

A user has posted a question that was quickly closed as being Trivia. The user however disagrees believing the question is valid, on-topic and not "trivia" and proceeds to post their frustration in the comments and on Meta, dismissing the opinions of others trying to help, etc.

• How would you determine if the question is Trivia or not?
• How would you defuse the situation?

Answer 5

How are you going to cope with the additional workload of being a moderator in comparison to your activity as a normal user asking and answering questions? To which degree do you feel your new moderator duties might decrease your rather content-wise contributions to the site? How will you balance that if necessary?

Answer 6

What area do you feel the site could use the most improvement in and do you have any possible ideas for trying to tackle that issue?

Answer 7

If you got the hypothetical power to change anything about this site without any repercussions, what would you change and why?

Answer 8

(somewhat) recently there was a policy change in which Identification Requests were made off-topic, however a group of users were not happy with the decision citing concerns of not having a say in the matter.

As a Moderator you will be seen as the apart of the team implementing and enforcing new policies such as updating help pages and/or close reasons, mod closing and/or deleting questions and answers. To ensure that the community is on board with proposed policy changes, what would you do to get more people to "have their say" in such discussions? Do you believe that this was missing in the Identification Request policy change debate?

Answer 9

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

Current moderators are generally very active on Meta. Do you continue to be active on Meta discussions or would you prefer to be in incognito i.e., perform moderation activities without posting much on Meta?

Answer 11

How would you handle/mediate disagreements on matters of policy, scope, etc. between different subsets of the community including yourself?

For example, how would you deal with situations where:

• you feel strongly that some class of questions should be off-topic, but meta discussion and general voting practices indicate that the community finds them useful and good quality?
• meta discussion on some issue is strongly divided, and this is reflected in main-site voting, half of the community voting one way and half another, potentially leading to close-reopen wars?
• consensus among highly active users (e.g. the small subset of the userbase who are active on chat/meta) differs from the views of the larger userbase as reflected by votes?

How important would your own opinion on the issue be when handling such debates?

Answer 12

Would you care to diversify this community to receive active participation from non-english movie industry & cultures around the world? If yes, what would be your first step?

Answer 13

Since Movies and TV SE is still a new in the game, we are somewhat smaller community compared to some others in SE network. Considering that, how would you plan to encourage more people to join and stay and be a active member?

Recently we saw that increased arrival of new users, but most of them didn't seems interested in staying here and be a part of the community. What can you do for this? make new members interested in here and make them part of the active community here? (Most of the new users were looking for answers on questions that we consider off-topic here.)