Kusalananda
- A common issue with volunteer posts like moderators is for the volunteer to simply not have enough time to devote to his or her mod duties. This isn't a theoretical question. It's not restricted to SE, either. It's a common issue with volunteer work. And I've seen situations in SE (and indeed elsewhere) where most of the work fell to a subset of moderators/volunteers because the remaining ones were not very active. In this situation, there are at least a couple of ways to go. (I can't think of any other alternatives, but there might be.) [A] Do nothing. Carry on being a mod to the extent of ones diminished capacity [B] Resign, citing lack of time, other commitments, whatever. In your opinion, what is the better choice, [A] or [B], and if [B], what is the level of threshold activity that would make you think that it was time to give up the post? How would you quantify activity for this?
At this moment in time, and for the last few years, I do not volunteer any significant amounts of my time to any other project.
If circumstances change in such a way that I (or others) feel that my effectiveness as a U&L moderator starts to suffer severely, then I would consult with the other moderators in the team to see whether it would be better if I resigned (option B) or whether they thought it would be okay for me to carry on (option A) with the view that circumstances may change again later. At that point, it would presumably depend on the general health of the U&L community and the workload on the moderator team (and on how much hassle it would be to replace me).
- While it says on the tin, at the Stack Overflow blog: A Theory of Moderation, that the moderators should do as little as possible, we're having an election because the site has "grown and it would be nice to have a larger team" (paraphrasing terdon from chat), so I assume that there'll be moderator tasks for you to do. If you plan on spending about the same amount of time on U&L, what other U&L activities (such as Asking, Answering, Editing, or Reviewing) that you currently do today do you see yourself doing less of when as a moderator? How much time do you think you'll spend here at U&L?
I'm likely to spend about the same amount of time on the site as before (this varies from day to day, but I will be available almost every day; I currently have a 432 day "uptime").
My time here has been mostly taken up by looking for interesting questions to answer, answering them, and reading other people's answers and questions. If elected, I would answer less questions. I'm hoping that I would let the moderation tasks take the time they need to take.
I've been a bit caught up in the excitement of finding interesting new questions and answering them quickly, but I want to move towards a more relaxed approach. This may mean improving existing answers, and answering a few less questions myself.
- Do you have any visions or plans to enhance the U&L community? Specifically around community guidelines such as welcoming new users, as slm commented in their answer at "What’s it like being a Unix & Linux moderator?", but it could be around voting or tags or any other area where you see room for improvement.
slm clarified his "item #1" as
My comment around new users was more in people that are new to Unix & Linux technologies, not so much to our site. But there's def. room for improvement in how we as a site deal w/ people that are new to all of this.
Being able to look for information in manuals and on-line, and having the ability to (more or less) formulate what in effect constitutes a bug report (an U&L question), are things that new users to the site and users of Unix in general would be helped by having or learning. I've asked 30 questions on U&L, and answered over 4000. Part of the reason for that discrepancy is that I seem to be good at finding answers (which means I usually resolve my own issues). Some of my actual questions have later turned into bug reports for utilities.
Anything that guides or helps a user to ask good questions would be nice to have, and I'd go as far as saying that this would be good even if that makes it "harder" to ask questions (it signals the level of engagement that we expect from someone who asks a question). StackOverflow have, for example, tested question templates, and some variation of this may be interesting to try, or at least discuss.
I simply want to raise the quality of questions, so that we get less of the type of questions that says "I did something, but it didn't work".
Note that I never said anything about simple questions. In fact, I love some of the simpler questions, because once you start looking at the failure conditions (the assumptions that you need to make), you'll notice that it may not be so simple after all. They also usually make it easy to explain both fundamental and tricky concepts, which helps everyone, including oneself.
I would also want to do something about "silent downvotes". In my mind, a downvote on a question or answer should ideally be followed up with a comment, especially if it's clear that some effort went into the question or answer. I don't really know what to do about this.
- Have you ever identified questions from people attempting to cheat on school/university tests or coursework? What actions did you take? What actions do you think should be taken? How would having the extra voting weight of being a diamond moderator influence your actions in such circumstances? (See: 1 2)
Yes, a few times. I'm not consistent in my response.
The thing is, sometimes these questions are interesting. The professor (or whatever) sometimes obviously want them to solve the question using a particular set of tools. These tools are sometimes obviously the wrong tools (e.g. "use ls to identify the five newest directories and print their names out"). I would answer these questions as if a professional had asked it and it would be implemented on a live production system.
I sometimes ask with a comment what the issue is that they actually need help with (see my answer above about wanting to improve question quality), and if they don't return, I would downvote and/or vote to close as "unclear" (I've done this to non-homework questions too when the user don't give enough info, and doesn't seem to care). I believe that I've given, not a complete script, but all the separate components of a script (all the pieces they should need to complete the puzzle), as an answer at some point. I personally think this is okay as it should be available in their course work already.
I'm pretty sure I've answered homework questions as if they were any other question too.
Duplicates gets closed as duplicates, as any other duplicate.
I definitely don't want to ban homework questions on the site. What I would want to see is a careful handling of these, possibly through being stricter with the formulations of the questions ("use your own words", "tell us what issue you have with this assignment"). That would enable a totally different type of answer.
In general, I'd like to also somehow discourage "Try this:"-answers (not just on homework-like questions; "Try this" implies "I haven't really spent enough time on this to know whether it would work or not, and I don't know under what conditions it would fail."). The point of a homework assignment is to learn something (or to prove that one has learnt something), and we should be able to help with this.
What would that mean for me if I was a moderator? Hmm... I would probably be more interested in the formulation of the question, of what the person has difficulty understanding, and what the answers to the question looks like. I would possibly still answer the first type of questions mentioned above (the wrong tool for the job questions).
- 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?
Being a brand new moderator, I would talk to the other moderators about it first. They would give their opinions, and I would go with something like what they propose I'd do. Honestly, that's the most likely scenario the first time this happens. Or I'll let one of them handle it! Yeah, that's the non-conflict way out...
Now, what might they suggest? If it's a comment thread that gone haywire, delete it if it doesn't result in an improvement of the answer or question, or at least clean it up by deleting the useless argumentation. That has happened a few times. Call the user(s) into a private chat to talk about it? I could do that if the user was willing to. As a moderator I would be able to suspend a user temporarily. That would rather unfortunate I think, but if they kept on being extremely toxic it may hurt the community more than what their answers would "make up for". I really hope I have to wait a long time before suspending anyone, and I would never do that without the support of the other moderators.
I don't know really... I would just learn on the job I guess. I also suspect that every case would be different. There is no "user", there's "bob" and he's having issues with having his facts questioned, or with having his answers edited, or whatever it may be.
- How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
Hmm... How to resolve conflicts within the team of moderators? Why would you want to know about that? Oh, the old moderators are voting, aren't they?
We also have to assume that I somehow felt strongly about this particular question. Or maybe it was something else, like the suspension of "bob" from the previous question (which I felt was unfair)? Or the fact that homework questions suddenly starts being closed as "off-topic" by some moderators as soon as they appear?
As far as I've seen, the existing moderators are both mature and reasonable. There are bound to be difference of opinions, and these may be discussed if needed. I would not undo the actions of another moderator (if that was possible) just because I would have handled it differently. If it was something I felt strongly about, I would talk to them about it. This would go for things that may have been errors too. If something can and should be undone, it's better if it's undone by the person who did it, depending on the situation.
- Given that a diamond moderator can close a question with a single vote, how will you be construing the "Request for learning materials" closure reason?
The full reason is:
Requests for learning materials (tutorials, how-tos etc.) are off topic. The only exception is questions about where to find official documentation (e.g. POSIX specifications). See the Help Center and our Community Meta for more information.
I have had a few flags declined in the past when I've used this reason the wrong way. Each time, terdon has pointed to the literal wording of the close reason to me (in the chat). I now think I've learnt it and I find that I don't use it very often at all.
If I'm unclear on how to handle these, I will ask the other moderators, until such time that I don't need to any longer.
- On some other StackExchange WWW sites, question comments and answer comments are regularly deleted by diamond moderators for straying from the purpose of clarifying/improving the relevant question or answer. On Politics, for example, diamond moderators regularly step in when comments are abused to argue people's personal political opinions (example). Does this WWW site have an analogous problem needing diamond moderators to do the same, in your view? Where would the line be drawn, if there is a line at all?
I don't think we have too much of the opinion-arguing type of comments on U&L. What we do have is occasional long threads with users asking follow-up questions or doing the "it doesn't work" thing. I tend to try to halt these with a request for a new question as soon as I discover that the user is trying to do a "tutorial session" with me.
I do use the "no longer needed" flag on comments. It's a good addition.
We also have the-answer-is-in-the-comments issues, and I fully understand why we have that. Our questions can sometimes be answered with short pieces of code, or some terse advice. I've done this myself, even though I did complain about this exact thing on Meta a while back. This comes back to having high quality answers. I sometimes see other users pick up on such comments and turn them into answers. This is a good thing.
- Suppose a user expresses disagreement with you over a closed/deleted question or an edit to their post that you've made. How would you handle it? Do you think you always need to explain your moderation decisions to ordinary users and if not, where would you draw the line?
Yes, I do think that I should explain my decisions to users, especially when removing something that a user spent time and effort on, and when there are disagreements. Dialogue is important in these cases and if I've done something wrong I need to fix it. If a comment (in whatever form) is not enough, a private chat will do. Again, this will be dependent on situation and the people involved.
- On some other StackExchange WWW sites, it is routine practice to protect questions that come up on the Hot Network Questions list (a list that is, to put it mildly, controversial). Given that diamond moderators can protect a question with a single vote, will you be doing this for Hot Network Questions here? Please give your reasons for whatever your answer is.
I don't think I've seen a real issue with HNQs on U&L. Moderators can nowadays remove questions from the HNQ list, which is nice, but I suspect that would be rarely needed on U&L.
I would probably protect questions that start to gather an unusual amount of very low-quality answers, regardless of the reason this is happening (it sometimes also happens for very popular questions, or when a question has been tweeted or in some other way been advertised).