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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, August 1st 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 process, feel free to post as a comment here.

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  • I'd like to nominate @virmaior I see a way to nominate myself, but not somebody else. Is that intentional (to keep people who don't want to do it from getting hassled?) or am i missing something?
    – user5172
    Commented Jul 25, 2016 at 20:19
  • @shane It's more intentional that "Moderation has to be a thing you want to do", and the foremost way to pull that off is require the user to actually nominate themselves. You can reach out to them in Meta (some sites have an informal nominations meta thread they use to name people they would ask to run), or in the elections chat, and ask if they'd like to run.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Jul 25, 2016 at 21:10

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What do you think philosophy is or for the purposes of the SE? How do you think this SE should balance popular and technical uses of the term?

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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?
  • 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?
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How do you propose to deal with popular philosophy and (new) users who want to participate in a low-level discussion themselves? Think, for example, about quantum mechanics.

Related meta questions:

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In some respects, the word "philosophy" is a recipe for boat programming questions. What, if any, are good reasons for closing a question as off-topic as moderator of philosophy.SE (rather than waiting for users to vote)? What signals and/or internal rules do you plan to use to decide when to act unilaterly?

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A lot of the philosophical landscape is plagued by the conflation of opposing philosophy and bad philosophy. Where and how do you draw the line, in those fields where you have personally held positions, between something you "merely" disagree with, and something you believe needs to be downvoted, edited, or even removed for poor quality?

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