In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers.
Due to the submission count, we have selected all provided questions as well as a couple of our back up questions for a total of 11 questions.
As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes. Because many of these questions are fairly long, feel free to shorten the citation to the questions in bold when answering. Please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written, and also including a link to your answer on your nomination post.
Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.
Good luck to all of the candidates!
Oh, and when you've completed your answer, please provide a link to it after this blurb here, before that set of three dashes. Please leave the list of links in the order of submission.
To save scrolling here are links to the submissions from each candidate (in order of submission):
How do you handle flags from minority sects claiming abuse in answers critical of their doctrine?
Most of the time, answers aren't critical of a doctrine that they don't like, they're just abusive, but occasionally users from outside of a particular denomination will post insightful things that may actually be overtly critical of a sect.
We have a rule that the answers must represent the perspective asked for, but we don't have a rule that answers must be supportive of the perspective asked for, on the contrary, the rule, if it is a rule, is that they should be neutral. If the facts laid out, appear to point out inconsistencies in a doctrine, do you take the side of the flaggers who don't want holes punched in their doctrine or side with the answers, owing to the fact that they've written a well researched post and used nothing but objective language, sticking to the topic.
How do you balance Christian need to evangelize with the encyclopedic nature of this Q&A site?
While we certainly can't prohibit non-Christians from becoming moderators, it's highly unlikely that one will be elected given that high rep users on the site are almost entirely Christians and high rep users are almost always elected moderators.
If you are a committed Christian, what do you do to stick to the overall goals of the Q&A nature of the site?
What percentage of a post needs to match the OP to be considered an Answer?
Given the fact that a lot of our users like to soap-box a bit, what do you do about flag handling for Not an answer (NAA) when users post three good paragraphs and use the last one to make some sort of a commentary? If someone flags the answer as NAA how do you respond?
How strongly do you support the SE objective of having a high signal-to-noise ratio?
One of the few things that makes SO and SE sites better than the rest of the internet has been the focus on maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio.**
Explain how important that is to you, and how it influences your perception on the role of a diamond mod.
How do you deal with other moderators?
- How do you deal with other moderators in seeing a potential argument developing in the comments, especially if it is not your personal denomination?
- Can you work as team player, yet work with other moderators seeking council and insight in particular difficult areas?
- How do you as a team leader, working with other moderators try to keep a veritable Christian influence with obnoxious behaviour?
How do you discern, and then guide, the denomination/tradition scoping level appropriate to a question?
Some questions (mostly exegetical, but some doctrinal) have historically been answered the same way by a group of denominations thus making too restrictive scoping to risk turning away potential answers from other denomination adherents, or worse, to "invent" unnecessary differentiation. For example, on some questions Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have answered them the same way and similarly on some other questions Evangelicals of all stripes (Reformed, Wesleyan, Pentecostal) have answered them the same way.
Some questions (like baptism) do need more specific scoping but a lot of OP, especially those new to Christianity, are not even aware of the choices and how the choice will impact the answer. Or they may adamantly want a Biblical answer. There is also a risk of alienating them if they need to supply more than they are prepared to provide. How would you guide the OP and the community members interested in the question to refine it so it can be part of the valued collection in C.SE while maximizing interest & participation?
How do you deal with the broad spectrum of questions, the majority of which are about 'Christianity' as a subject, but are not 'comparative'?
The site attracts a lot of attention of a general kind - general biblical questions, general questions about Christianity, as such - yet the stated, official purpose of the site is very specifically 'comparative' Christianity (the asking of questions about what certain, specific groups of Christians believe and say and do).
Do you regard the site as having a wider spectrum of usefulness than its specific, stated purpose and how do you propose to either accommodate that or to discourage it ?
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?
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?