wimi's questionnaire
- In your opinion, what do moderators do?
As has often been said during the last 11 years, moderators are exception handlers. They are there to fix the problems that the community cannot solve, or that require faster action than the community can provide. The most important "exceptions" are disputes between users, but abusive content (especially in comments) that needs to be deleted quickly also qualifies.
I agree with Stack Exchange's view that a moderator should ideally do as little as possible. Wherever possible, I would let the community reach decisions using the available tools (close votes, delete votes, etc.) before intervening.
It has also been mentioned before that part of a moderator's job is being a janitor. This is also partly true, especially regarding tag housekeeping. If I become a moderator, I will start dealing with at least this.
- 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?
The first line of action would be to deal with the content itself, to make sure that the site is clean. If the generation of controversial content became a pattern, I would first try to talk to the user privately, and try to make them see how their posts are generating disputes and try to convince them to avoid that kind of posts, while also listening to their version of the story. I would expect most engaged users to be willing to fix the problem. However, if the user persists and generates problems in the community (especially, if they start to make the site uncomfortable for other users), I would have to start using the stronger tools (i.e., suspensions, following the general advice to start with a warning, then suspend for a short time if the behavior is repeated, then go on to longer suspensions). Luckily, it seems that we are unlikely to have to reach that point on Spanish.SE.
- How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
Communication is key. Moderators are a team, so if moderators disagree on their decisions, I would try to talk to the other moderator and reach an agreement. As long as privacy concerns allow this, my suggested way to reach an agreement would be to ask the community on Meta.
- 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.?
Low Meta participation means that there are few users that are involved enough in the site that they are interested in policies, events, and other meta discussions. Too low participation is a problem because it makes it difficult to know what the community wants and make decisions based on that. Users that do not participate on Meta are more likely to stay while they like the site, and leave when a change happens that they do not like. Without their input, we cannot prevent that.
I think users need to like the main site before they decide to participate on Meta. So the first step to increase participation is to have an attractive main site. Then, whenever the comments on a post lead to a discussion that would be better to have on Meta, we should actively encourage that. It can be as simple as a discussion on which question is a duplicate of which. That is how I started to participate on our Meta anyway...
- 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?
The community has tools to moderate answers, so in case of doubt I would let the community decide what to do from the review queues (VLQ/NAA). I would leave a comment suggesting ways in which the author could improve the answer. In general, I agree with the general sentiment on Meta Stack Exchange that "bad/wrong answers should be downvoted, not deleted" and "non-answers should be deleted". So if it answers the question, I would be more inclined to leave it there, comment and possibly downvote if the comment is not addressed. But the community can, and will, sometimes override me on this.
- In your opinion, what is the biggest problem/challenge Spanish Language Stack Exchange is currently facing? How would you propose to solve it?
The biggest problem is probably low participation, especially low involvement in Meta discussions (and low engagement leading to the lack of moderator candidates). As I wrote on my answer to question 4, making the main site interesting is the first step to fix that, and encouraging the use of Meta to solve discussions/disputes is the next step. The lack of moderator candidates is much harder to fix, as moderating is a voluntary job, and the motivation do it should come from the candidate personally. The relatively recent problems between the community and SE have damaged this motivation quite strongly on our site. I hope that the relation with SE will slowly improve, and next year maybe more people are motivated to moderate.
- What are your ideas to engage users in the different activities of the stack (Meta participation, upvoting, participating in the review queues, chat, etc.)
As I said before: have an interesting Main site. Be nice to new users, acknowledge it when they write good posts, make them feel motivated to keep contributing. Luckily, we do not seem to have a problem with the review queues or with voting, and those things probably come more naturally to users than Meta participation.
- 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"?
The main goal is still to increase participation. We are no longer beta, but our participation levels are not better than in the beta stage. As a big audacious hairy goal, I would suggest getting to add new entries to our list of "achievements related to presence in the media". Some nice stuff was achieved there, it would be nice to keep it up!
- 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? / Spanish version: 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)?
My motivation to run for moderator is that I like the site, and I want to keep it running. As mentioned in my nomination, there are users that have much longer experience than me on the site, and would be great moderators. But I understand that those users are not motivated to moderate, some due to the dispute with SE, some due to other personal reasons. Being a relatively newer user, the problems with SE have not hurt my motivation so strongly, and I think I can moderate well (enough) in this situation. I will, to the extent possible, put the interests of the Spanish.SE community first when dealing with SE. My experience in the last year is that the changes to the Code of Conduct did not cause big problems in our site. We had a user who found it important to keep their gender hidden, and we had some discussion about it. You can see my contribution to that discussion, which I think was well received by the community and by the user themselves.
- What contribution(s) to Meta (no more than three examples) would you say best exemplify your prospective moderation style?
In these times, the first one is definitely the answer I just mentioned. You can expect this kind of moderation from me in this issue (and in other issues): apply common sense, and respect individual users' wishes as long as that is possible (i.e., as long as that does not hurt other users).
The second one would be this one, which shows that I will get input from the community before making decisions. As mentioned before, unilateral decisions should be reserved for exceptional cases.
The third one is this one, which I wrote at the beginning of my time here. With this I show that I want to trust new users, and not make them feel like "new contributors going through an initiation test" for a too long time. Suggest ways to improve not-so-good answers, praise the first good answer, but let them feel like a full member of the community as soon as it is clear that they do not need more guidance.
