@Sh

@Shog9 (oops, wrong interface - my bad the above!) "when we say that the community runs the site, we mean exactly that. Not "via elected representatives"" I fear you may be missing my point, or that I'm not expressing it well. If the community runs the site, then one thing it can do is choose to have certain tasks handled via its elected representatives.

Or to restate it, does SE's promise that the community runs the site end when the community tries to do something SE doesn't approve of, or to do it in a way that SE doesn't approve of?

@MadHatter absolutely. That is always an option, provided the community is asking something of the moderators that it is actually feasible for them to do.

That's not what happened here though.

Lemme show you something...

This is a discussion happening on the gaming site right now.

They're deciding on whether a certain class of questions should be officially disallowed.

They've had many discussions like this in the past. Each is followed by a fairly impressive cleanup effort, wherein massive numbers of questions are closed and deleted.

This all happens in public. Every part of the change is discussed in detail, from the exact location of the boundaries being drawn, to the process by which the existing questions will be removed.

If, later on, someone is confused or upset by it, if they try to claim a moderator is abusing his power, then they are calmly shown the discussions, the artifacts produced from them (meta posts and FAQ topics explaining the results). They can accept it, or leave; the community has spoken.

Gaming is incredibly thorough about this, because it's something they've needed to do multiple times over the years. Other sites do things a bit differently; most sites rarely have the need to declare a formerly-allowed topic forbidden and perform such large cleanups.

But regardless of the exact mechanics of the process, I think this reflects the proper spirit: if you're expecting moderators to do something like this, then give them a proper charter, tell them exactly what is expected, allow for dissent and discussion up front.

Meta is your city hall. If a group of people decide to annex some land, this has to be open to public discussion and debate, the plans posted publicly for review, a vote taken. You don't get to make the decision at the local BPOE and then claim it was the community's decision.