Conversation started Jan 16, 2015 at 15:46.
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
Jan 16, 2015 15:46
A few days ago I asked whether the policy that binding votes by mods should be reserved for clear-cut cases is formulates somewhere on meta.
Now I found this post. Admittedly it is very old (it is from the time of first moderator election) and the site has evolved since then.
On the other hand, there are cases where binding votes seem to be useful. For example, here we would have keep the incorrect duplicate-close votes age until, which would take time. Posting the fifth vote and immediately reopening seems to be better. (Thanks to Arthur Fischer for cleaning up the site in this way.)
 
7 hours later…
quid
quid
Jan 16, 2015 23:02
@MartinSleziak I am of the opinion that everybody should only vote to close things that are (in their perception) obviously off-topic (or fulfill some of the other closing criteria).
Other than that the text is way too imprecise. "Anything that could conceivably be of interest to some nontrivial segment of the community should be decided by the community as a whole." What is this supposed to mean? I assume a nontrivial segment of the community is interested in good food. Does this mean we cannot simply close questions regarding food?
What should "be decided by the community as a whole" mean in actual practice? This might have been somewhat more reasonable four years ago, though really even then it was not. But now?
quid
quid
Jan 16, 2015 23:24
Either way, I consider it as a false dichotomy to have "community votes" and "moderator votes," especially since votes to close/reopen (in contrast to up/down votes) are not expressions of a personal opinion but enforcing policies, for everybody. The name "vote" is really confusing in this context, unfortunately.
 
2 hours later…
Daniel Fischer
Daniel Fischer
Jan 17, 2015 01:20
@anorton Done.
I'm just dropping in here before I go to sleep to say thanks to you all for your work.
 
4 hours later…
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
Jan 17, 2015 05:51
@quid Personally I am glad that I do not have dupehammer nor moderator powers. Occasionally I voted to close and made mistakes, I would have to be more careful if my votes were binding.
I was under the impression that there is some kind of unwritten rule that moderators should avoid casting binding votes. (See the previous discussion - you can see there some examples of mods posting comments instead of voting and also quote from Carl Mummert which seems to be under the same impression.)
But I thought that this is something which is not explicitly stated somewhere. So it was interesting for me to see that at least in the early days of MSE there was also post on meta stating this policy.
My discussion with Arthur Fischer basically ended with this:
Jan 12 at 13:33, by Martin Sleziak
If the main thing I take from our conversation is the following, and if I at least try to act according to that, then this time was not completely wasted: At the same time there is tendency among most active regular users to abdicate their own responsibility to keep the site clean.
So it seems that at the moment it is not feasible to keep the site clean without binding votes by moderators.
If some users prefer them not to use binding votes at all, they should step up and be more active in keeping the site clean, closing, reopening, etc.
 
Conversation ended Jan 17, 2015 at 5:57.