EL&U 2014 Election

@phenry ELU and ELL both need a standalone "INSUFFICIENT CONTEXT" closereason, applied swiftly and not subject to reopening until the needed context is supplied. But I'm afraid that ain't gonna happen.

PSA: election result announcements may be delayed if the tooling chokes on @Matt's name. Again.

I find it concerning that there are so many deleted messages in this chat room. If messages can't stand on the public record, perhaps they ought not be posted.

I'm so confused!

Are you seriously asking people to own up to anonymous vote when the system is designed that way? There's no reason to assume it's anyone here: yesterday's edit would have bumped the question on the front page. But since you do ask, I haven't voted on his answers at all, although I do think that particular one is not particularly useful in actually answering the question.

If you don't win the election, how will your contribution to the site change? Would you run again in the next election?

@Marthaª I don't necessarily agree with this. I think that most proposed solutions are being lazy and not explicitly addressing the other side. I believe there is a balance that can be struck between good quality questions and new user friendliness. My goal for the next era of ELU is to continue researching and pursuing such a solution.

@phenry Yeah, the succinct and the to-the-point transcript.

@Marthaª - Exactly. Straight dictionary lookups are one thing, but how can grammar questions be "general reference"--especially if you don't know the name of the thing you're looking up?

My talents are soooo wasted on this audience.

@medica Ok, but you see my point don't you? As a moderator far more than just one user is going to have it in for you. You're going to get chewed out and picked on on a regular basis. If you can't consistently be the one to put a dead end to it and you let yourself fire back like that...

@tchrist Minor correction: SE is a reputation-ocracy. You can gain reputation simply by doing lots and lots of mediocre work.

Don't ping me, I'm not the user; please just answer the question. He didn't want to be pinged. I certainly don't.

I am a little concerned that this room is not going to be helpful in helping members of the community at large decide who to vote for. Moderation is largely about drudge work and keeping a weather eye and a level head. Moderators lead by example. The signal-to-noise ratio in this room seems rather low after last night, and the transcript is enormous.

In the chat FAQ, in the section "What can we chat about?", it states "...each room has a defined topic. When talking in a room, it's polite to stay roughly on topic for the room, as defined by the room owners." At first, this seems like a good basis for judging what a room conversation should be about. However, the EL&U chatroom has this for its "topic": "I am in a party. The wine is depleted. Then some Son of God manufacture even more win. Yay." Shouldn't the topic actually state a topic?

The names of moderator candidates will appear in italics in this room.

Oh, well in that case: "I hate politics. Vote for me and I'll get shit done."

In case candidates are unaware: you can vote for yourself. I know I will be.

@MrHen Agree. Y'all should be closing a lot more stuff for GR or lack of context... But not everything currently being closed as such merits it. More firepower + more accuracy is needed.

If we have a schism...

Our previous actions are what have earned us our current reputation, remember.

I want to personally thank all of our candidates for running in this election.

I just don't think we should be telling a 50-year-old who's spoken English all his life to "go ask your question at English Language Learners." That's just insulting.

@Alraxite - I'll answer your question by asking another one. If a person asks a basic question about grammar, and it gets a good answer, what harm has been done?

If I'm elected, I would like to spearhead a joint effort with ELL to define where the boundary between the two sites lies. I feel like both sites have sort of been talking past each other and it's led to ill feelings in both places.

@MrHen - Free speech is not consequence-free speech.

either way, everyone wins by getting mods that were elected by a large number of members.

My job as moderator is not to police the site, but to handle flags.

Perhaps the statistics show me to be one of them! I don't believe I am. I do believe that questions need to show a bit of research and be within the scope of the site as presented in the Help pages. In my experience, yours always qualify. If only that were the case for all.

You have to determine whether a willingness to participate in this phase of the process is a factor which is relevant to the site as a whole. Personally, I would also factor in previous track record of involvement in the site and its management (principally, flags and meta, but edits and review queues are relevant) and also general demeanour in comments and answers. In my view this room, particularly this year, is less useful. That's a pity.

I do not mean to be inflammatory, @phenry, I just want a bit of further explanation of this, if you'd please:

I never knew elections were this much fun.

@Cerberus - Is it necessary that people become "part of the group," or even want to, in order to use the chat function of this site? When I began my friendliness jihad six months ago I got accused of wanting to turn ELU into a social network. Well, our chat room is pretty much all social network and very little English discussion.

@phenry My issue is that new users come to the chatroom with the expectation that experienced users will be welcoming towards curious users with similar interests. However, they are often thrust into the midst of an exclusionary clique and desperately try to figure out how to conform to the arbitrary, unintuitive norms of the chat room. While @cerberus may greet new people, not every experienced user is that receptive to newcomers.

I like a constructive approach, not talking down our favourite moderator of all time.

If a moderator has done something that I think is bad for the site, I am going to mention it. I would hope that anyone would do the same about me, if I'm elected.

@phenry That’s a very aggressive statement, even a potentially offensive one. As one of “his cronies”, I not only represent that remark, I resent it.

I am rather unhappy to see this election turn into some sort of “vote of confidence” for the current set of active moderators, and to try to zing Reg on his room titles is not merely petty but also distracts from the real issues at hand.

...you can ping multiple people in one message; you don't need to re-post it

@medica And we're trying to moderate chat better. But we can't do everything. So give us a shout when something does go wrong!

and if you guys need a chat mod for whatever reason, feel free to pop into the Assembly. There is usually at least one in there. Mod flags also work, use "Flag for moderator" in the message context menu.

@medica I think that it is certainly acceptable to bring a question to chat to encourage further discussion, but bringing it to chat with the intent to have it closed might be a tad presumptuous. I tend to ask people what they think about questions rather than asking them to close them.

@phenry Yeah that's word. Were so many of them unfit for the rest of us? Very cagey.

@medica WTF with all the deletions. Are you doing that yourself or is some mod doing it? Do you know why those things were deletable?

@tchrist I might be jumping in mid-discussion here, but saying that the so-called "summer of love" people are demanding "friendly at any cost" is a bit of a straw-man argument.

@KitFox Nobody ever gave a contrasting set of examples of questions that would be acceptable only on ELU, only on ELL, acceptable on both, and acceptable on neither. Perhaps if we had at least a half-dozen such examples in each of those four categories, it might help.

@MrHen I do. And yes they have some explaining to do.

@medica The great thing about this election is, no matter who wins the majority of you will be losers.

@MrHen makes note to vote for MrHen for a third time