This partly could be reflected by the relatively youth of our community, and perhaps that our questions can be more open than TeX and photography ones.
So all candidates think that this is ok, this is the way that things should be, and the difference between us and tex/photo is just that we are comparing apples and oranges?
I think I would try to leave it to the other moderators -- they'd be less biased. In general I wouldn't treat myself any different than another user, to the best of my ability.
I think we should produce more unanswered questions, at least in the short term. We had a lot of big list questions in beta. More research questions from new areas means more things the regulars don't know.
I've closed posts unilaterally for two reasons: (1) when I felt it was so obviously off topic that I felt that it was merely clutttering up the front page and (2) when there were 3 close votes or more and it was only because we didn't have enough 3000+ voters to do the closing
Agree with Dave. Also a bad idea to disagree in comments to the original question. Discuss with mods in private, or take it to meta if disagreement cannot be resolved.
Note that as a moderator, there can be a private chat room that only the mods can see. This can be used for discussions such as this, also dealing with spam, etc. Most things we do want out in the open, but there are some situations that are for mods only.
So here's my current position (and people can tell me what they thing): I want to make sure that if (say) Christos Papadimitriou or Moshe Vardi comes to scan the site, they aren't turned off
But I have a somewhat politically-incorrect question: recently there has been a lot of unhappiness @ meta.cstheory regarding the stackoverflow.com maintainers/admins. What's your take on this? Are you loyal to SE?-)
there's a certain unwillingness to adjust to the needs of different communities. We are not the SO community: we are smaller, more well behaved :), and less likely to cause ruckus
Whether a question is off-topic or not seems to be always debatable, so if the community likes the question, it should stay. We are all not capable of judging questions in each others' areas.
Overall, it would be nice if they were more responsive. On the other hand, it's not so terrible under SE either. We can see how it goes, but I am not "loyal" in that I am open to change if our needs aren't met.
I found the voting/nomination problems a little unfortunate. I could see both sides, so decided to not say anything. The process seemed to model real world processes, so from that perspective they seemed reasonable.
Relating to quality, what can you do to keep the quality on the site up, which will help attracting professional users and users that will stick around?
@Sadeq: Mods can do something. We can always leave the SE platform and set up our own Q&A site. And then I would really like to know if our moderators would support the transition to a new platform or be against it. :)
e.g. a question which can be answered easily by Googling or checking Wiki or looking it up in an introduction book to the area (undergrad) should get closed
@Jukka: it is a cost benefit analysis. If it gets to the point that someone researches exactly what it would take to move, we could discuss it seriously. I hope Rebecca et al got the message. If a handful of active users got as pissed as I did over how Rebecca blew Lev off, then, yeah, I could see us moving. Hopefully unnecessary.
If a question doesn't belong, leaving it open with a comment linking to google seems like a bad. We want to be the destination (for questions that belong), there are enough sites out there that send you on goose chases across the internet, imho.
Say someone comes on the site and asks a question that is below your standards, and you're rude about it and close the question. What will happen in a few years when that person is a cs-reasearcher? Will he or she come back?
@Ross we can encourage a wider participation from all areas of theory, like theory B, etc. But in the end it's not the moderators who control who asks what on this site.
@LevReyzin, and I think that's good. But the problems you see over at SO for example, is that a lot of people treat neewbies quite poorly. I think that's an attitude that develops and grows from closing too quickly, or not being willing to redirect and aid people asking questions that might not belong...
@Banang I agree it's something to be aware of -- I guess power corrupts. I would hope we follow in @Suresh's example of helping new users and treating them well.
But that's why I would have liked there to be periodic elections to oversee moderators over time.
@Oleksandr It depends on whether the question can stand on its own. for example, some questions are suspected as HW until the questioner can present a motivation. In those cases, if the OP never gives more info, even when asked, then we can close.
@Oleksander: it depends one the question, but I think closure of such questions is good for quality. If the asker does not care about the question, then why should we?
I have been emailed by people in my field who've stumbled CSTheory across answers to questions they were interested in via Google. (If only they'd joined up to.)
Would it make any sense to have something like "mini-polymath questions"? Questions that would aim at solving an open research problem and which would lead to a published paper?
Gil tried that (I think) and his is the top voted open question, so we could try it. I don't think it's an abuse of platform to ask open questions. @Jukka you've solved some open ones if I remember correctly :)
It just occurred to me that if we could give a talk (e.g., @ FCRC) on a result that was co-authored by cstheory.se, it would be a nifty way to promote us...
@jukka, I agree with Suresh. I think it is OK if someone does that but personally think it is difficult to manage a polymath on SE sites, though I should mention I don't have any exprience regarding it
@Rebecca I could see it going both ways. As a mod, I'd spend more time on the site, so maybe answer more questions. On the other hand, I'd have more work as a mod. We'll have to wait and see what happens when the new mods arrive, I think.
