Why do the moderators of this community think they are more HOLY than others?

Question

Seems like moderators like to think they are more 'holy' than people who are coming here to help other people find answers to questions.

Example:

What passages support that God once walked the earth as a man?

David Stratton, wax eagle♦ have deleted my answer to this question stating: If your entire answer is a quote, it is not an answer

When it was completely a valid answer.

Where I come from, an answer is an answer, whether its your answer or whether you lead someone to the answer, it's still an answer. And the answer I provided was directly from this url, which is a VERY valid answer to the question. http://messianicjewish.net/aboutmj_jewish.shtml#question5

This Christian discussion forum, (or Question and Answer site) is not moderated properly, and gives this entire community a bad name towards its purpose.

This place needs new moderators who aren't power fiends that aren't trying to display that they are more 'holy' than others, is the same reason people don't goto church anymore.

This community sucks. Go to Yahoo! Answers, where people aren't trying to display that they are more 'holy' than others. Even though its' not a Christianity section, its a Religion section, where the principals are much closer to Christianity than this wannabe site.

Answer 1

Welcome to our community.

I got to work this morning and was checking out an answer I had written yesterday and noticed your answer underneath it. It didn't look quite right (it didn't address the question, didn't really make much sense in context) so I grabbed a bit of it and googled it, only to find that the entire thing was cribbed from somewhere else on the Internet. That's not how we do things here. We write our own answers and use quotations for elsewhere to support our arguments. Like we would if we were writing a research paper.

Typically, when I find a plagiarized answer I take a look at the rest of the user's posts to see if it was a one time issue or if it's typical of their contributions. I inspected the rest of your history and found more of the same. I deleted your answers that were plagiarized and left the one answer that was original content, even though it was low quality. You had a comment from a moderator there already indicating there might be some problems and suggesting you fix it. I figured I would give you a chance instead of just deleting that one.

The reason I delete plagiarized answers is because it's both not fair to other contributors and because in honesty, it's not the kind of content we want here and though I'm not supposed to care (it's not technically my problem), I really don't want to subject this site to potential copyright violations. Also, in general, plagiarized content doesn't directly address the question and is not typically a clear, concise answer.

No one is suggesting they are more holy than anyone else. However, we have standards here, the moderators are charged by the SE community team (because we haven't had elections yet) to enforce the policies that we set here on our meta site and in general have been set for the entire stack exchange community (one of these is that we don't want plagiarized content). We have set up these rules both with the basis of general stack exchange policy and also specific policies set by the users of this site. One of those rules is that just a quote is not an answer, you have to provide some original content.

As far as wanting a new set of moderators? In short order we will be having elections and every single one of us will have to stand for election if we would like to continue in our positions. This will be our first election and will be the only time the entire moderator staff will have to stand.

Last thing, we are not a Christian site. We are a site about Christianity run by a secular company. Most of our contributors are Christians, but not all of them. Those of us who are Christians do our best to provide a good witness to our friends who are not. That said, there is a place for law and discipline in Christianity, enforcing the rules of this site has little to do with our religious beliefs.

You are welcome to continue to contribute here, provided you can follow our guidelines, that means making it clear when you are quoting (use the blockquote format please), citing your sources (link to the website or cite the book you are quoting), and providing your own original content stating why the sources are relevant and directly answering the question.

Answer 2

I can guarantee you that none of the moderators here, or even the more long-term users here would close/delete a question/answer because we think we are somehow more holy than the person that asked it.

You seem to be taking the deletion of your answer as an attack against you, or at least you're taking it very personally. My vote to delete certainly wasn't personal. It was based solely on the fact that your question doesn't meet the site standards.

The site standards are very straightforward. They're described in the FAQ, they're described in the About page, and also on the META site. There are a whole series of questions here that are tagged as FAQ questions that exist solely to help new users learn the site guidelines.

The fact is that this isn't a Christian site. This is not a discussion forum. It is a question and answer site with a specific purpose: To help people learn about Christianity - what it teaches, what the various doctrines and denominations are, etc. It's not what most people think when they see the site. Most people say "Oh, a Christian question and answer site! I can learn the truth about God, how to get saved, whether or not evolution is true, how to prove God exists" and so on.

Almost every single new visitor to the site misunderstands the purpose of the site.

And that's where the moderators come in. That's why those of us who have been around for a while and do understand the guidelines take time out of our busy days to write helpful comments. We usually don't just vote to close or delete, unless someone has already put a comment as to why the action is being taken. If there's not a comment, nine times out of ten, we'll leave a comment explaining exactly why we've voted to close or delete, so that you can improve your answer, and also to help you become better. As you learn the rules, the quality of your posts will improve, and you'll learn more and do a better job of educating others. We do it, not to persecute people that post low quality content, but to help them along.

That said, every so often we get users that simply don't care about the rules or guidelines. They think that somehow they know better, and that the guidelines are either stupid or don't apply to them. We try to be patient, we try to explain, we try to help, but some people can't be helped. They simply don't want to take the time to learn the site guidelines, and basically just whine and complain and cause problems.

What that happens, the moderators are forced to step in and, for example, put that user on probation, or ban them from the site. Not to persecute that user, but to keep them from disrupting others.

• Just like a grade school teacher would send a disruptive student to the principal's office so that he can't disrupt the other users.
• Just like a police officer may need to arrest someone that is disturbing the peace, or harassing others, or simply refusing to follow laws or guidelines.

It's not personal. Nobody thinks they are holier than you. Heck, I think I'm a vile sinner with no good in me, and it's only due to the grace of God that he hasn't sent a lightning bolt to send me on my way.

But I do want this site to be an enjoyable site for everyone. I do know what happens when the site guidelines slip. You would be amazed at how bad the questions and answers get if the guidelines aren't enforced. I was here to see it, and it took a lot of community effort to clean it up.

You can bet that I'll do my best to try to help users learn and excel, and grow, but I'll also be one of the first to close or vote to delete questions and answers that don't meet the site guidelines, because it needs to be done. it's not personal, and it's not because I have some vendetta against anyone.

It's because I care about the success of this site, and I care about keeping it constructive, useful, and pleasant for those that do bother to read the FAQ and try to follow the rules. Because good participants shouldn't have to read through a lot of complaining, or a lot of low quality posts to find the good ones.