2020 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

Question

The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

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Spanish Language is scheduled for an election next week, October 5, 2020. In connection with that, 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.

Here's how it'll work:

• Until the nomination phase, (so, until October 5, 2020 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.

• If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.

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

• At the start of the nomination 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.

• Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, typically 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.

Answer 1

A classic (I don't even know who to quote as the original source):

In your opinion, what is the biggest problem/challenge Spanish Language Stack Exchange is currently facing? How would you propose to solve it?

Answer 2

Quite often Spanish.SE gets answers from unregistered users that are extremely short, just in the limit of "not an answer". These answers have their value, normally because they talk about the usage of some expression in the user's location. As a moderator you are quite likely to get some flags on these posts (some automatic from the Community user and some from normal users). How do you think such answers need to be handled?

Answer 3

This one also comes from our 2019 Pro Tem Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire (Question #2)

For a long time, the site's graduation was a goal (or the main goal) for our community. Now that we are no longer beta, what do you think that should be the next milestone for our community (a shared goal across our community, that is kind of a big audacious hairy goal). This could be rephrased as "What are this site's challenges and how do you plan to help empowering the community to work on them"?

Answer 4

Another one from the previous question collection which I find important:

How do you feel about low Meta participation? If you think it is a problem, how would you get more people to join Meta discussions? If you think it is not a problem, what other mechanisms do you intend to use to get input from the community on proposed policy changes, events, etc.?

Answer 5

From autumn 2019, the Stack Exchange community has faced several problems. Many mods have resigned (including two from Spanish.SE), many people disengaged and/or stopped participating in sites, etc. As a consequence, mod activities have slowed down and, in general, the network atmosphere is not as enthusiastic as it used to be.

Taking all of this into account, why are you running for a mod position? What it is your motivation to serve the community in good faith, considering that you may face situations where you will be in a position where both Stack Exchange and the community will be pressing in different directions?

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Desde el otoño de 2019, la comunidad de Stack Exchange ha tenido bastantes problemas. Muchos moderadores de la red han dimitido (también en Spanish.SE), hay bastante gente que ha dejado los sitios o reducido su actividad de forma significativa, etc. Como consecuencia de ello, la actividad de moderación se ha reducido y, en general, el clima no es tan expansivo como en épocas anteriores.

Conociendo todo esto, ¿por qué te presentas a moderador y con qué finalidad? ¿Qué te motiva a servir a la comunidad con buena fe, habida cuenta que puedes encontrarte en más de una ocasión en fuego cruzado (Stack Exchange por un lado, la comunidad por el otro)?

Answer 6

What contribution(s) to Meta (no more than three examples) would you say best exemplify your prospective moderation style?

I asked this last time as well.

Answer 7

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 8

Another classic (for this site)

What are your ideas to engage users in the different activities of the stack (Meta participation, upvoting, participating in the review queues, chat, etc.)