2014 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

Question

In connection with the moderator elections, 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.

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:

• During the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, June 23rd 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.

• This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.

• At the end of the 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. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.

• Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, 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 new process, feel free to post as a comment here.

Answer 1

To borrow one from @Daи last year:

Give an example of how you have helped a new user whose questions or answers were originally not up to site standards.

Answer 2

A promising new user (let's call him Saul) who has already demonstrated a knack for answering questions wisely decides to answer a pastoral advice question. Another user flags the answer for deletion because of the Pastoral Advice Questions policy. Even though you agree with the advice Saul gave, you delete his answer. Now Saul is questioning your decision in chat. What do you do? Would you do anything differently if you thought the advice bad?

Answer 3

New users frequently post broad/opinion-based/pastoral questions. This isn't a big problem, except that new users also frequently answer those questions before they can be closed or put on hold. What can be done to help new users know what kinds of questions should be answered?

Answer 4

Our theory of moderation reads:

As a moderator, your actions now represent the community, so you will be held to a higher standard of behavior. You are an ambassador of trust, with the same sorts of rights that the official development team and community coordinators have.

Sometimes the policies that the community has agreed upon in meta are at odds with our own personal standards. If that's the case for you, which policies do you disagree with and how would you go about changing them? If you agree with all of the policies, what would you do if another moderator set out to change one of the site's accepted standards?

Answer 5

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 6

How would you explain the importance of having a site that documents the beliefs and views of Christian religions from a secular perspective to a user who believes it is more important that we try to address "Truth"?

Answer 7

How would you explain the idea of a "Truth" question to a user who seems to be having trouble understanding the distinction and purpose of the site? How do you explain the problems that trying to tackle "Truth" questions would cause?

Answer 8

How would you differentiate between someone who is trolling the site and someone who is attempting to participate but getting too emotionally vested in what they feel to be "True"? Does this distinction matter in how you would handle the situation? How would you handle each situation?

Answer 9

A fresh question hits the home page that clearly does not have a narrow enough scope according to our guidelines to garner high quality specific answers. There are not enough clues for you to just edit and fix the question. Do you think it should be closed and why? When would you close it?

Answer 10

If you already have 10k or 20k rep you will no doubt have found all the tools you have at your disposal to participate in moderating this community. How have you found yourself suited to those activities and how do you think your participation would change as a diamond mod with a bigger hammer? If you haven't gotten there yet, in what way do you expect the role to be unique and not just a shortcut to cool gizmos?

Answer 11

How would you handle a potential user who is not happy with some of your action and is losing interest in participating? Would you try your best to keep him/her or simply ignore his/her feelings?

Answer 12

Where do you draw the line in the gray area between non-denominational questions seeking "biblically-based" answers and the widely-unacceptable "truth-seeking" questions?

Answer 13

If you had the power and influence to initiate a change for the better here, what would it be?

Answer 14

Why do you want to become a moderator in Christianity.SE?

Answer 15

What are the qualities/attitude/characteristics that an Ideal Moderator should have?

Answer 16

There are many questions which would have the same answer for every (or almost every) denomination, branch, movement and perspective. How should they be scoped and tagged?

(This isn't strictly a question about moderation, but because scoping and tagging is sometimes controversial on this site I think the moderators should have clear opinions on this.)

Answer 17

How will your moderation style be similar to or differ from our current moderators?