Who should our moderators be?

One of the essential questions we are supposed to ask ourselves as a beta site is who the mods should be. When a SE site first hits beta, a few pro-tem mods are selected. As the linked post states,

This is a temporary, short-term appointment. Moderators Pro Tem focus and expedite the essential needs of each new site. By the end of Beta, the community will be better suited to hold their own elections.

So, for now, we should take a look at who is interested in doing such a thing. Some basic rules to keep in mind:

• A person interested in being a mod posts an answer featuring username and the link to the profile, plus an optional why-me text.
• If you think someone might make an awesome mod here, nominate them and then poke them in chat and let them know of the potential opportunity! If you're nominated and aren't interested, please post a comment or edit the nomination to decline.
• Users express their support/negation by voting, and support words/doubts as comments.
• The SE team uses this information as a guideline of who to choose as moderators.

Ashley Nunn

• discussion
• moderation

Comments

• Joe: I'd wait a bit before making any decisions ... and those with high rep aren't necessarily the best moderators. Look for those who tend to vote a lot (I tend to look at their ratio of up/down votes, too), and who are active for a while ... you don't want someone who's going to be strong for a month, then move on to something else when it's lost its novelty.
• Anna Lear: @Joe No decisions will be made right away, but posts like this one are very helpful to us when we're trying to select the initial set of moderators. Things to look for are voting, editing, commenting... basically activities aimed at improving the site and helping it grow.
• 1. Alan Thomas II: How many moderators are we looking for? I'm a WikiGnome type who would like to handle flags as part of keeping the place straightened up but might not be as good at the discussion leadership and liason parts; a larger team can have someone like that, a smaller team needs more all-rounders. (I'll move this to its own question if there isn't a StackExchange standard answer already.)
• Anna Lear: @M.AlanThomasII We typically start by selecting 3 moderators.
• Wooble: I'd throw my hat in the ring, but since as primarily a Stack Overflow user I'd be inclined to close about 75% of the questions that have been posted so far as Not Constructive, I'm probably not in agreement with the community about the direction the site should go.
• dsalo: Decline as well. I'm actually not even slightly in agreement with StackExchange's ideas about what is and isn't constructive, so I'd be, shall we say, a destructive mod. Happy to keep answering questions; completely disinclined to ask any.
• 1. Alan Thomas II: A lot of the users here have graduate education in proper selection, not to mention classification and tagging, which will hopefully make this one of the more self-moderating communities. (It's a very tight-knit professional community in general, as well.) I'll give this a little while and then throw my hat in the ring if it looks like it's both needed and useful.
• Manishearth: @dsalo: Well, if you compare SE to various fora, then yes, the NC doesn't makes sense. But, SE is trying pretty hard to not be one of those rampant fora which are only useful to the OP and nobody else. That being said, sometimes I do feel that certain posts ought to be historical locked instead of being deleted outright.
• Joe: @dsalo : I never said I'd follow SE's rules ... I said I'd moderate. I'm all for finding creative interpretations in my favor for rules that I don't find to be constructive. (ps. typical tee shirts have a 'crew neck collar', therefore, they qualify as a 'shirt with a collar'.)

Answer by Ashley Nunn

I will happily throw my hat into the ring. (If I had an actual hat.)

I'm Ashley Nunn - I have been using the network for a while now - I am mostly active on Gaming, where I am a 10k user who loves to help out with the various tools and responsibilities and such. I believe in at least trying to leave comments along the way to help people learn how the SE network works. :D

I don't have a huge pile of library experience, per se - I work in Inter-Library Loans at the University of Waterloo while I work on getting my undergrad degree in English (if I have my way, it will be a Rhetoric and Professional Writing degree, with specializations in Digital Media and Global Literature), and eventually I want to go to U of Toronto to get my Masters of Information in Library Science and Archives and Records Management. Been working in ILL for about a year now. It's pretty much the most awesome thing.

So yeah. That's me. :D

Comments

• phette23: I think experience with SE is more important in a moderator than experience with librarianship. Happily upvoting you.
• 1. Alan Thomas II: Upvote: Both SE and library experience (and interest) and an excellent record on both Meta and Main.

Answer by M. Alan Thomas II

I'm M. Alan Thomas II. I was active on Unshelved Answers, I was active during the definition phase of this proposal, I even popped in occasionally during the (test of our) commitment phase, and now I'm active here. I've spent a little time hanging out on other SE sites in the interim, but this is pretty much the only one I've got an attachment to.

I'm a WikiGnome-type user. I'm more active on Meta than Main. My impulse is to comment and vote more than ask and answer questions. I've raised helpful flags. I've submitted a variety of retagging suggestions on individual posts, I've written tag wiki entries, and I'm the only person using the [tag-synonyms] tag here so far. Of course, with my reputation, all of that still requires authorization from others. (Even my questions on Meta so far are really just there to see if people agree that the moderators should do something.)

So. I'm never going to get rich, reputation-wise, writing brilliant questions or answers, but I'd like to help behind the scenes as this place works its way through Beta and beyond. Maybe someday, if everything is humming along smoothly and there are good candidates to take my place, I'll quietly bow out and go back to just pottering around, but right now I feel that someone has to work on all of those bits that everyone uses but no-one thinks about.

Obligatory "professional qualifications and associations" block: M.S.–L.I.S. from Ilinois, ALA, IFRT, LIRT, GameRT, OIF supporter, FTRF. Trained as an information scientist for academia, working as a reference librarian in a public library; go figure.

I believe that at least one of our three mods should be a professional, expert member of the LIS community, with or without SE experience, rather than someone who wouldn't qualified to ask or answer questions here but does have experience on other SE sites. Not only do we need at least one subject-matter expert to handle those moments when one is called for, but if the community is to determine for itself exactly how it is going to work—and other SE sites such as Programmers.SE and RPG.SE have made choices contrary to the global SE norms—then it shouldn't be moderated entirely by people whose purpose is to ensure that that doesn't happen.

Comments

• MDMarra: No offense, but just from seeing you pop up on the site here and there, I'm not sure that you would be a good fit as a moderator. Your professional qualifications are obviously good, but I don't think that you've got a good grasp on the inner working of the SE network yet. For example, you CW a lot of things, especially in meta. There's really no point to doing that. Also, you've taken some creative liberties with some edits on the main site. Edits should be used to clarify a muddled question or to correct obvious errors, not to re-write a question to have a different intent than before.
• MDMarra: Don't get me wrong, I think that you could be a very valuable member of the community, because of your professional experience, but if you take the rep from this site and A51 (which isn't a traditional SE site) away, you've only got 180ish rep from RPG. While rep isn't a good indicator of who would or wouldn't be a good mod, it is a good indicator of participation. It seems that you have almost none before this site launched, so it would be hard to support you as a moderator when you still seem to be figuring out the rules here yourself. Mods should know how SE works before appointment.
• 1. Alan Thomas II: I assume you're talking about http://libraries.stackexchange.com/q/691/345 and http://libraries.stackexchange.com/q/703/345 as to the edits; I acknowledged my error, submitted a reversion, and have volunteered to delete my question if the original is salvageable by the OP. And it appears that the OP has now salvage it . . . although he thanked **me** for my edit and being the only person who pointed out *how* to salvage it rather than just criticizing him. In other words, I taught a new user something rather than standing around and saying "That's not how things work here."
• 1. Alan Thomas II: Also, CW lowers the rep threshold for editing without approval and I've sometimes wanted to encourage unified answers rather than fragmented discussions. If I'm in error there, please teach me how things should be done and I will try to learn.
• MDMarra: CWs are an artifact from the early days of Stack Exchange. Originally, they were designed to be a way for "off topic" discussions. That was bad. They've mostly hung around for historical reasons and are primarily only used for canonical questions and answers. In normal usage, if an answer is only slightly incomplete, a below-threshold user can submit a minor edit for approval. If an answer is very incomplete, then users are encouraged to create their own, complete, answer. If low-rep users are encouraged to contribute to an answer that doesn't gain them rep, they'll never be able to edit.
• 1. Alan Thomas II: Yes, my prior experience has mostly been on SE 1.0 than 2.0. This site took so long to get out of beta because we had so few 2.0 users because very few of the 2.0 sites were of any interest to those in our fields. (And if I have few accounts, it's in part because I deleted those that I wasn't likely to use in the future, especially now that this is open; don't just count the numbers and assume you know the whole story.)
• MDMarra: In fact, a user below the edit threshold that has an edit approved is given +2. There is also a badge for using `/review` to approve and reject suggested edits by users below the threshold. The quality of content on SE is controlled by these checks and balances. Inviting anyone to always edit anything negates that and will, undoubtedly, lower the quality. Once a user has a certain amt of rep, then they're "trusted" for certain tasks. If they're below that, they should go through the approval process. Basically, there are very few legit reasons to CW anything nowadays.
• MDMarra: Sorry if you feel offended by my comments, but look at some of the failed SEs that had long beta like Literature. They lacked clear direction and broke down to book recommendations and discussions. Wanting to put your unique community's footprint on the site is fine. Wanting it to follow completely different rules than other SEs will get the plug pulled. There's more that goes into the decision to launch a site than just Qs/As/visits. It has to generate *quality* content.
• 1. Alan Thomas II: I take no personal offense; I just happen to disagree with you sometimes. I also think that we're in danger of losing participation if the community gets the impression, however erroneous, that there's an arrogant, heavy hand coming down from above to change things from what the community needs to "Well, *we've* always done it *this* way, so *this* is better." You're probably right in many cases, and my record here shows that I accept consensus even when I don't like it (e.g., http://meta.libraries.stackexchange.com/q/81/345), but I am going to make the case for an alternate position first.
• 1. Alan Thomas II: Oh, and thanks for being the only person to explain *why* they disapprove of me; I've gotten at least 5 downvotes—I was up to +7 at one point—but I don't know what I'm doing wrong if no-one tells me.
• Joe: Here's the main reason for my downvote -- you're asking so many questions on the main site that I don't think you really care about the answers to. You're wording the question like you already know the answer, and are guiding people to your already percieved 'correct' answer. We had a problem in the early days of cooking.SE with one user (a Stack Exchange employee, even), doing a similar thing, and it was found they were actually plagerizing questions from other sites. In your case, one of the questions you "asked" was one I had posted to Area 51. From this, you come off as artificial.
• 1. Alan Thomas II: I thought the site needed a certain critical mass of popular questions to start attracting interest, and the Area 51 questions with sufficient up-votes that could be transformed into appropriate questions for a real SE site looked like a good starting point. We're currently at 3.4 Q/day now that the initial rush has died off, and I'm trying to help. Quite a few people once thought that those were good questions, even if they need adaptation for a real SE site.
• 1. Alan Thomas II: The one thing I can't be accused of is not trying, at least. I write questions, I vote on answers, I vote on comments, I flag things, I edit my own questions when people suggest improvements, I improve tags, I edit the tag wiki, I've suggested tag synonyms that have gotten adopted, . . . . Maybe I'm not the best moderator. I get into arguments with people, even if I accept the consensus against me. But, you know, the other 3 candidates have asked a total of 2 questions on Main between them; I've asked 22. (Meta: 5 total for them vs. 9 for me.)
• Joe: ... and I've asked a total of 10 "questions" on cooking.SE (one's not really a question) ... yet I was a moderator. It's not about asking questions. You seem to me to be trying a little *too* hard to be a moderator. I mean, I'm happy someone wants the job, but you seem a little over-eager, and that makes me think of a HHTGTG quote.

Answer by MDMarra

Since there seems to be a lack of desire for moderators, I would volunteer to be a temportary moderator while the site is getting off of the ground. While I have very litte personal experience with librarianship or library science, my fiancee (@KatieR), has been very active here. I am 25k+ on ServerFault and 13k+ on SuperUser as well as having 1.6k on mSO.

On ServerFault, I have lots of badges. Some of the ones that point to good community involvement include: Electorate, Constituent, Reviewer, Strunk & White, and Announcer. I was the first on the site to get Reviewer, which is given for using the 10k tools to review and act on a certain number of posts deemed in need of review by the system.

Even though I'm not a library professional, I have a firm understanding of how the Stack Exchange networks work. I do not think that I would want to be a long-term moderator, but I would love to be a pro-tem mod during the formation of this community. I think that it could be very useful, but will also need a lot of pruning, because of the subjective nature of librarianship. This site will need good leadership during beta to keep it on-topic and relevant and I think that I can help with that!

Comments

• Manishearth: Just because you're not a professional doesn't mean you won't make a good mod. Most of mod work requires familiarity but not expertise with the subject matter. Without any expertise in chem, I still got appointed mod there--I was also told by Aarthi that expertise is not necessary. So you're good, though I can relate to the apprehensiveness of your mod nomination :)

Answer by Joe

As we have a need for pro-tem moderators, I'll volunteer, but with a restriction that I can only do this short term -- I won't be able to devote much time to it once we hit mid-november or so, due to my busy winter/spring conference schedule.

So, qualifications :

• I have experience in moderating Stack Exchange sites as I was a pro-tem moderator on Seasoned Advice (aka. Cooking.SE)
• I'm an active member of a library Friends group, overseeing our branch's book sale.
• I'm an active member of ASIS&T, having helped to organize the last two RDAP summits.
• I'm a member of ALA (LITA / ACRL / ALTAFF), but not active (never been to any of their meetings)
• I pseudo-lurk (failed lurking?) on the code4lib, ngc4lib and PAMNET mailing lists

As for library cred ... I was the one who added categorization to Fark.com. (and then left after a falling out when Drew insisted on adding one then misusing it (weird == related to the paranormal; we already had strange) and then went and added a synonym (except for 'weird', all of the categories had a strong 'S' sound, but someone didn't like 'spiffy', so 'cool' was added, screwing up my color scheme).

I also had proposed to try to get the Cooking.SE group to work on a multilingual (multi-dialect?) thesaurus for cooking terms, but started a community wiki before the SE staff started blindly closing stuff that didn't fit into the StackExchange Q/A norm.

Comments