@Behaviour Tragically, I pulled that number from your chat profile. Who knew they were different!

Okay, here is a rough draft: Citizenship score based on certain badges and reputation. I tried to make it as simple as possible, both to save time and avoid the appearance of biasing the results in someone's favor.

Method: the number of badges among 17 selected, plus 1 point for every 1000 reputation up to 20000.

Interesting results.

Looks like Asaf has to be a mod after all.

The theoretical maximum is 37, but nobody reached it yet. I did not include reviews here, but most of these folks review regularly anyway.

I went all the way to 20000 with rep since this is where the privileges end.

Yikes, I'm at 14. I haven't been working hard enough.

What's the last badge that most people are missing? I guess you included Illuminator.

Different people miss different badges. For example, amWhy is missing only Investor.

I take it you required someone have a single badge to be counted?

All users with reputation at least 1000 are included.

I am at 35, missing Illuminator and Sportsmanship.

ah-huh-moment. doesn't seem to be showing up in your results.

Recently renamed, so SEDE has the old name. Don't remember what it was.

Mind running your query on his userid for me? I'm making a ranked list of candidates out of curiosity.

hello all

He's at 22, OC-Sansoo in SEDE.

Thanks.

Hi @mixedmath. What do you think of my "citizenship score" query?

@Behaviour I'm not quite sure. What does it do?

oh, I see the post just above

@Behaviour I nominated Jonas Meyer because he responded to my comment below nomination of Daniel fisher.

That's an odd reason to nominate someone. But a good choice nonetheless.

Here's a current ranked list of moderator candidate citizenship scores. I didn't include users below 1k reputation.

fascinating. I'm amused that none of the current mods have a 36. An ex-mod has 35, then comes me at 34, and then the other mods and ex-mods at 33 and 32

I wonder what badge I have/don't have

Mods are too busy to earn Illuminator. Maybe I should even drop it.

I think you should.

I had to reread it, but I think it's a very worthwhile badge

Is there any reason no current moderator has yet nominated himself?

edits are important

@MikeMiller Okay, dropped. Now the theoretical total is 36, and we have 6 users with it.

@Studentmath nominated himself for what?

for mod i assum

Indeed

But it is not necessary.

@Studentmath Moderators don't have to run for re-election, they stay as mods. Until they resign, or are removed for some reason, such as inactivity.

@Studentmath because we're staying on as mods

Ah, that makes sense. And is comforting to know, looking at the list

well, Willie and one other are not. But the rest of us are

@mixedmath Yes, this is why I put several edit-related badges in there.

I hope it works well. In the past, it seems like most users pay more attention to reputation and less attention to everything else

I like the current query. I would not mind any of the top 6 being mods, even though I disagree with some (e.g., Git Gud) on some things.

Of course, t.b. is no longer with us (on the site).

On MO the max is 32.

Interesting that you said that after the query modification, @Behaviour.

On the one hand, I'm pleased to see so few nominations today - looks like the community interest in shiny buttons has worn off. On the other hand, I'd like some different blood to come in and purge some of the old candidates.

Added the Last Access Column to the query.

What are the scores of the current mods?

robjohn 33

mixedmath 34, Arthur Fischer 33, Alexander Gruber 33, robjohn 33, Willie Wong 32, Alex Becker 32...

Michael Greinecker 28, Mariano Suárez-Alvarez 26, ... have I missed someone?

No, that's the whole list.

@MikeMiller Could you make a new pastbin after the query was revised?

I can do it too, but since you have the names already...

No, nothing changed.

Ah, of course.

There are four users with illuminator, and none of them are moderator candidates.

Okay, I'll write a meta post with these results under How much experience should a potential moderator have?.

Just looked at the stats in the "What's it like to be a moderator?" question. 50 comments deleted per day, yikes.

Interesting thought: we should elect moderators who are not familiar with the site policies!

It does happen to be true that the current group of moderators get along extremely well

this is not the same thing as "groupthink", of course

I've wondered about this: suppose a new moderator, or set of moderators, was elected that had wildly different opinions than you on the way the site should be run. How do you deal with this? This can't be tenable in the long term, as either you fight over some decision (I'm thinking, e.g., close-reopen wars) or another or each side cedes to the other whenever one makes a decision

@MikeMiller I suppose we'll see what happens. The last time we had a major flare up between mods, it eventually led to all the mods involved leaving the site

*correction, leaving mod-ship

Supposing that the cut-off for citizenship score is that of the current moderator with the lowest score, we currently have three eligible candidates.

Daniel Fischer, hardmath, and Jonas Meyer, none of whom have explicitly declined their unofficial nominations, are all above that minimum.

Anastasiya-Romanova suddenly began to review

Her first close vote was 12 hours ago. Not her first use of the close queue, but her first vote to close.

I see no pattern whatosever between what she decides to leave open and what she decides to close.

So, I think not including anything explicitly tied to review in the citizenship score was a good idea. Thanks, Arthur.

I'm going to have to agree. A shame it's not a useful metric...

The nonsequiturs people write during mod elections are fascinating.

Incnis Mrsi was like that before the election. And dustin (quoted above) too. Both lack self-control.

Shog9's version of the query: cleaner code, and includes Refiner & Steward (counted one each). Which does not make any substantial difference, as expected.

I hadn't until now read the suggested questions and the comments under those questions. In addition to what I said above: it's also interesting how many people who are not regular MSE participants (or MSE participants at all) take such a keen interest in the elections.

@Behaviour Are you going to update your post with Shog9's query, or is it not different enough to make it worth it?

I'm still pondering if I should add Custodian to his code.

I'd say no. Do you have Explainer?

Yes, it's there. I have to leave for a while; if you have time, go ahead and edit the post adding Refiner & Steward // changing the links, data. Otherwise I'll do it later.

Sure, I can do that.

Reviewer & Steward, note. Refiner was already in.

Hm. Now I want to put Yearling in, because it will count only once...

I encourage it!

Okay. But then I'll also add Custodian to make it neat 40!

And this gives me a chance to give an actual title to the query.

Agh, I can't have that.

Okay, so keep it at 39?

Or is there a 20th badge that would make sense?

Why not one of the tag wiki badges?

(A good answer might be 'who edits tag wikis?', I suppose.)

I have Tag Editor in there already. Taxonomist is super rare.

Maybe Curious? To have experience asking questions.

Note that I don't have this badge myself, so it's not in my own interest.

Duly noted; I still don't agree with its inclusion.

In the same vein as Yearling you could include Constituent. Much rarer, to be sure, but I think it might be a nice addition; shows participation in the community for some time.

I actually thought of it once. Alright, will do.

It's not silly; voting in elections correlates with caring about the site.

I changed my mind on silliness before you even said so.

So it's 2 points in the "experience" category.

Ah, Adhvaitha is back.

New version of the query; I edited the original one, so the title is normal now.

Will update the post shortly.

@Behaviour Most orderings (i.e., alphabetical or rep) would put ah-huh before Sanath. Nothing important, though.

Updated the post... Phew, this is tedious.

There is a way to run a query on a selected set of users, but...

How is it that all the users in the returned list have at least one badge? Coincidence, or design?

Here's the parametrized version of the query -- takes a list of user Ids. With current candidates pre-filled.

It's hard to get to 1K without getting at least one of those badges.

Hard enough that nobody has.

@Behaviour where does one get familiar with all this statistical tools SX offers that you are using?

@dustin There isn't a very user-friendly introduction, but Data Explorer Help would be the place to start. Along with SQL tutorials of your choice.

@Behaviour ah-huh-moment. has removed his nomination; you might remove his name from your meta post about the citizenship status query.

Seems like the right plan of action.

I don't want to generate more automatic flags for Arthur to handle (excessive edits).

Pessimist in me asks: Is it worth the effort? There is now fervent activity on meta, candidates will have to answer various questions and give us information which might help to judge their qualities as possible moderators.

And in the end it is still possible that the election will be decided mainly by the votes of users who never heard of meta, have not seen any of this information, and chose their candidates mainly based on rep and personal sympathies; not really knowing what moderating entails and which qualities are needed there.

(I do not claim that I am going to spend days contemplating on which candidate is better, reviewing their strengths and weaknesses; but I definitely want to give it some thought. And I have already spent some time by trying to learn a bit more about the candidates which I thought I might possibly vote for.)

Yes, the whole question collection debate is largely useless. The candidates will construct some answers to those, which will be useful mostly to gauge their command of written English (which is somewhat important). The specifics of the questions and answers may be also of some use as tiebreakers. So... Yes, some parts of the process are overdone. Prior actions on the site matter to me a lot more than the debates.

One consequence of the election is that if someone has a question for meta - not related to election - it will probably get much less visibility thatn it would get any other time.

I certainly agree with "Prior actions on the site matter to me a lot more than the debates." But from the users nominated so far I can say only about one of them that their presence on main and meta has caught my attention and I have some information already without having to check their profile, activity on meta, etc.

I have already said it in a comment, but I will repeat it here: Thanks for your work on the citizenship score query Behaviour; it is a useful thing.

@MartinSleziak The same 5-10 people who answer all questions on meta will still answer them. :) As for the score -- although an abstract number, it shows that the current moderators fall into a certain range, and some of the contenders clearly do not.

Yes. However, there are two or three nominees who are below 5k and I still might at least consider voting from them

@AhaanRungta I see that you have omitted the sentence about your age.

Now the sentence: "My maturity and understanding for others sometimes make people forget that." seems to be somewhat isolated. (They make people forget what?)

You have also added the information about AoPS, as I suggested in the comment. You wrote: The only reason I stopped myself from doing so was because it might seem like I am showing off and/or have too much on my plate already, even though that is clearly not the case.

Personally, for me it seems as a useful information if I have to consider whether to vote for someone. (I hope that going with my suggestion will not harm your chances in the election.)

I thought about removing deleting my comment, since now this information is in the post. But I think that my comment and your reply add a bit of context. (They at least explain that you added this information only later and why you did so.) So it is perhaps better if these comments are lfet there.

@MartinSleziak - Thank you so very much for your help! Indeed, I typoed and I have edited my application again. By the way, why not run for mod yourself?

@AhaanRungta I have tried to answer this in detail here.

Thank you for the effort in providing those details, perhaps the next election will be a better fit to your schedule @MartinSleziak :-)

I think having the election so close to Christmas was a bad idea anyway.

@MartinSleziak Thanks for the response. Oh well.

BTW a few very young people decided to nominate themselves. I recall that Alex Becker was quite young when he started moderating. (But not this young.) Is there some experience from other sites with young moderators? Is age (in particularly of a very young person) something we would think about when voting?

I found this on meta.SE: Evaluating the risks of allowing teen moderators on the SE network. This discussin is kind of a mix of general discussion and looking into one specific incident. But at least I have learned from there htat Manishearth started moderating at Physics.SE already as a teenager.

Now there is also post on our meta. However, I do not like the form of the poll question.

I wanted to write we should, not we would.

I am wary of overly young moderators; they seem to be wary of themselves, too. Quote from Anistasiya-Romanova's unofficial nomination:

"I am aware that sometime I am emotionally unstable (No, I am not having mental illness, just a common thing as a teenager) and behave so silly"...

@MartinSleziak minitech was elected on SO when he was 15. On other sides, there have also been young ($< 18$) moderators, e.g. jrg. Doorknob is a pro-tem mod on two sites and is now 15 or 16. Age is certainly something one should think about, but we have examples that young people can make decent or good moderators (and examples that old[er] people can make terrible moderators).

@DanielFischer Good to know. Young mods seems to be much more common than I expected.

Thanks for the information!

As they say: "Youth must be served."

Personally, I would need more experience with a 13 or 14-year old to have enough confidence in the stability of a reasonable personality than with a 25-year old, but that's the stability, not the reasonability that makes the difference.

@skullpatrol Well cooked, or bloody?

boneless :D

It looks Pedro's bound to be a moderator this time. Lots of people are prepared to vote for him.

Including me, of course.

@BalarkaSen With all due respect to other candidates, of those who nominated themselves so far [unless there's a recent development I've not yet noticed], he's indubitably the best-qualified.

@DanielFischer There is a new candidate as of about half an hour ago. I do not think this changes your statement.

Nobody nominated Professor Shifrin :(

@DanielFischer I do hope you self-nominate at some point, as there aren't three people that I really want to moderate that are nominated. But you've heard this enough.

@DanielFischer Indeed. But you should also nominate yourself.

@MikeMiller I just refreshed, the latest I see is four hours, Abstraction.

@DanielFischer I suppose I only noticed him half an hour ago. Whoops!

@MikeMiller I still hope for Jonas and Jyrki stepping up to preserve my freedom ;)

Has leo ever been to chat? His comments below Pedro's nominatory post infers unintentional rudeness from the reply he made to Mike.

I don't think Mike is offended at all. Is he?

I've seen him in chat.

Then he belongs to the anti-Pedro club, which is known to exist around the chat. 313's comment is just stupid.

In any case, the allegation against him being rude is untrue.

there is a fine line between "rude" and "crude"

@BalarkaSen I've been. Not as often as I used some years ago.

I remember like 3 times in which Pedro was rude against some people in chat. I don't know if the intention was to harm someone. I lack of context. But we can't ensure that it didn't matter. Anyway, despite all that, I agree with Daniel, from the current candidates, he will be among my options

@leo I should have said this earlier; as Pedro commented, he and I are friendly. He was not being serious and certainly not hurtful to me, and I can't think of a situation in which he has been. (I can say nothing of his relationships with others, of course.)

@MikeMiller Good to clarify that. I still think he's unnice with some people, this is my personal opinion of course. Anyway, being nice is not vital to be a good moderator. So, things as they are, I have nothing against him then

I think his apparent 'unniceness' is really unintentional. He is rarely ever serious while in chat.

Fair enough.

this is unfortunate, because a lot of people are serious while in chat

Why should it be unfortunate?

conflict?

Fair, @skullpatrol, but people shouldn't take everything personally. while a lot of people are serious, a lot aren't.

anyway, we're drifting off the topic of this chatroom :P

indeed

@DanielFischer Which Jonas?

Jonas Meyer, I trust, @leo.

@BalarkaSen ah, yes :-)

I miss t.b.

me too :(

@leo Everyone does.

At least everyone should.

indeed

Is there any time in the process where one is supposed to ask questions to the individual candidates (e.g., ask them to explain their review history)? The comments on nominations does not seem to be the right place.

@MikeMiller I think the comments under nomination speeches are the right place to discuss the nominee's credentials. This is what they were used for in the past, too.

@MikeMiller: about me, you can ask them just here. If something important shows up, I can update my "nomination speech" accordingly.

Fair 'nuff.

What is you stand on using " 'nuff " as an abbreviation for "enough" :P

Specifically is it flag-able, and if so, how long should the suspension be?

There are no edits (suggested or otherwise) on nominations.

@Behaviour You should clarify: unless you're the nominator.

Yes! The people want to know: Clarify? :P

@JyrkiLahtonen Pray tell, can I persuade you?

I'm somewhat doubtful. On one hand I spend a lot of time here anyway. OTOH I'm a bit uncertain about my, what's it called, emotional intelligence? Also my rep may have gotten a bit tarnished in the relatively recent discussion, where I apparently managed to insult both André and Bill :-/

You would be IMO less controversial. Or Jonas.

We are down to 19 nominees again; Robin Goodfellow withdrew.

@JyrkiLahtonen I have some trouble seeing how this decreases your rep.

@Mike How widespread is that way of looking at it? :-)

@JyrkiLahtonen Insulting Bill is automatic at the moment you disagree in any way with him. André is slightly less easily insulted in general, but at that time, I had the impression, wasn't willing to hear out any criticism however mild either. I wouldn't sweat it in your place. And I would only be less controversial - if at all - because I kept silent on meta.

All in all, beyond me keeping my freedom to sometimes abuse the comment system and idling around, I also think that you and Jonas would be better moderators than I would be because you two are less timid voicing your stance. I have a tendency to become impatient with some sorts, and so rather say nothing than stoke the flames.

@Jyrki I am going to assume it is universal.

@DanielFischer There are quiet moderators, and I don't just mean Alex. I don't think I've ever seen Mariano get particularly involved on meta in recent years and I have nothing but good to say about his tenure.

@MikeMiller I do. I think Mariano is not doing enough as a mod recently.

@Daniel I am thinking about it. I'm not sure I'm a good choice, but I'm not very enthusiastic about the alternatives either. Unless you choose to run that is.

I am a bit amused that the 20 person cap has, thusfar, not been meaningful.

It seems that most nontrivial moderator actions I notice on the site are Arthur's. (I mean deletions for the most part.) Sometimes it's mixedmath or robjohn. On meta issues, Willie Wong tends to weigh in. But Mariano... is mostly active as a regular user.

@JyrkiLahtonen Well, we need more applicants, since I think I have to vote for three, and I'm currently only willing to vote for 2.

@Behaviour I don't quite understand your first sentence there; can you rephrase?

@JyrkiLahtonen Good to hear. I am sure you would be a good choice as moderator.

Mariano is not very visible. I assume he carries his share of the load. He is somewhat restrained in his participation in some other ways as well. For example he has chosen not to vote a lot. His answers are, of course, on the money.

Ah.

Ok! Good to know! Can't say I'm surprised to learn that Arthur is the busy beaver.

If you're worried about the popular opinion of you going into the election, I suspect it's higher than most nominees...

Thanks, Guys. We'll see. I gotta go and prepare a dozen slides or so. Tomorrow's the last lecture of my course.

This inspires the question: what is the reputation required to vote?

For a mod? 150.

So, users with only association bonus will not be able to, which is good.

When I mentioned mixedmath and robjohn, I should not have left Alexander Gruber out; he handles a fair share of flags.

That's good to hear.

These stats are not hard for a 10K user to track. Look at the flag history, follow the links to posts, see who deleted them.

Of course, without 10K you can't.

I only try to answer interesting questions. Unfortunately...

@MikeMiller Life is full of compromises.

:O I saw that @Behaviour

No problem pal.

In a way @Behaviour you are right :-)

Btw thanks for all your election work.

@Behaviour How can you tell how many flags are handled by each mod?

Where's the flag history?

It's alright, @skullpatrol, you don't need to express my outrage; if I'm outraged, I'll do it myself.

@MJD Your personal flag history he means.

On your profile page, click on the number of "helpful flags".

If you flag not too little, that gives a somewhat reasonable sample of which moderator handles how many flags. A bit skewed due to time zones, probably.

Outrage? Hardly. I have been known to hang around the chat room a bit too my friend @MikeMiller

Whatever, he always ignores me anyway.

I made a bookmarklet for computing the "citizenship" score from a user's profile page.

Tested on Abstraction, the newest candidate. Score 5 (= 1+4).

I'm familiar with the "helpful flags" page linked from my profile page, but I don't see where it says which flags have been handled by which moderators.

Even when there has been a personal reply from a moderator, it doesn't say which moderator wrote it.

@MJD That's intentional. Such messages aren't supposed to be personal.

@MJD Correct, there is no such information on the flag history page. But the flags I cast often lead to the post getting deleted (it then shows with red background on the flag summary page) and by following the link I can see who deleted it.

Oh, I understand now. Thanks.

Incidentally, moderators do have statistics on what other moderators are doing, and can see how their own activity stacks up against the rest of the group.

Yes, mixedmath gave such stats, quoted by me above.

Robin's withdrawal may be temporary, not that it matters.

Interesting that the comment history in profile shows comments that are not visible anywhere on the site.

Since we can't flag on the main elections page, I'll post here: Could I ask one of the mods / admins take a look at the comments posted by user 3 1 3? They seem to be highly inappropriate.

I agree.

Today I found it helpful to run a SEDE query to find all the times I had commented on a post by X, and all the times X had commented on a post by me, for each moderator nominee. I learned some useful things. For example, Anastasia Romanova turned out to be someone I remembered favorably, but under a different name, and I remembered one of the candidates being an annoying blockhead, but when I reviewed the conversation we had had I saw that there was nothing really wrong with it.

Next up: times that X and I have commented on the same post by someone else.

@epimorphic I suppose that happened already?

I don't see much there by him now

Yes, they're gone.

@MJD Here is a query that appears to do that: Have we met?