@MJD At the moment, this is the highest-voted suggested question on the mod-candidate-question-collection-thread, so it will probably be asked. For what it is worth, I have never been suspended nor have I even gotten a moderator notice.
@MJD Although this will probably be asked, I would like to mention that I've never been suspended on this site, MO, or any of the other online communities I've participated in over the years.
@DominicMichaelis Oh, didn't know it is. I think because I posted their first.
@DominicMichaelis Just looked it up, so the order of appearance of my account should be: 1) MO 2) TeX.SE 3) math.SE. But nowadays I'm far more active on math.SE
@MichaelGreinecker Although I agree a primary would be beneficial, the benefit would be as a result of putting off the election until positions of candidates were made clear. As far as the intended purpose of a primary goes, this one will be sort of silly, reducing the field from 11 to 10.
@MichaelGreinecker SE did say that they would force primaries if that is really desired, they didn't like the idea of fake nominations to force a primary though
@DominicMichaelis Don't try to understand the way SE does time, it is always the way you don't expect it
@MadScientist My problem is that SE never said it acknowledges that primaries are really desired, even though I think many users expressed that desire.
@MichaelGreinecker They encouraged a feature request to see if the community actually wanted them. I'm rather skeptical if a forced primary would be useful myself
@DominicMichaelis The point is to narrow down candidates. But after last elections debacle with a moderator who was suspended twice before, many wanted to make sure that all dark secrets come of candidates come out of the closet before the final vote. And primaries would have been helpful in that case.
With regards to Bill's suspension history though, there was a question asked to all moderators along the lines of "have you ever been suspended". However, all questions are optional and Bill just declined to answer. I'm not sure that having primaries would have made much of a difference in this regard.
Well, he didn't decline to answer so much as just didn't answer. From looking at the thread, only two of the candidates did answer. It's a bit hard to tell though since comments were deleted.
And anyway, this time, I think that the suspension question will be a huge issue anyway, and would be even if we didn't have primaries. I'm not convinced that they'll make that much difference.
@DominicMichaelis I think that's true for a lot of candidates, including me. I was surprised by the lack of high-rep candidates and thought I should toss my hat in the ring.
I think all new moderators will have a problem with experience. Half the moderation tem will be newbies, so one cannot simply sit back and slowly learn from the old guard.
@AlexanderJones But that's not how it's worked in the past. For example, I am the only candidate with as much rep as any of the current (or recently resigned) moderators.
Rep is a sign not just of mathematical talent, but being able to answer user's mathematical questions well. I think that is a useful thing for a mod of a mathematics Q&A site.
@Alexander True, but for example I also spend much time on MSE as you can see e.g. from the fact that I have 4 times as many reviews as every other candidate. I just don't use the time e.g. in trying to be faster or better as all the others answering linear algebra question.
Yes, I would say that Julian is one of the candidates most suited for moderation (if not the most suited), despite having even lower reputation than me.
@TomOld well reputation is a sign how many time you spend on MSE and that is a siginificant factor I think. For sure guys like @Julian have a special position
@TomOldfield Julian's usage pattern is very strange. He's practically already moderating the site, but hardly using it. Makes me wonder how he got into math.SE, as it seems like he's doing an awful lot of free work relative to math.
I definitely think these facts recommend him as a moderator. They just seem odd.
Yes, but I spend rather a lot of time on MSE, but being an undergraduate means that the number of questions available for me to answer is reduced. I also don't usually answer questions that I don't find particularly interesting or relevant to me in some way. If I don't think that my answer will be unique in some way I usually won't answer.
@AlexBecker Can't really say. It's quite some fun and hopefully useful for the site. But I'm not the top reviewer. This position is in my opinion owned by @Amzoti.
I'm going to have a very long flight from Austria to Australia. I have a longer stay tomorrow in Germany and will get to answer all questions there in detail. I'll try to answer some before that.
@MJD Such cut-off values (10 in this case) are always a little awkward when they're just surpassed. The result will not be known ahead of time because we can vote for more than three candidates, and cannot indicate a preference among our votes.
What I mean is whether the running total will be secret in the general election, or whether it will be exposed as it is in the primary. Common practice in non-stackexchange elections is not to announce partial totals where possible.
@MJD The primary uses the voting mechanics of the main site, the actual election uses STV. I don't think there is much reason for the primary to be public except that it just reuses the common vote mechanics
The whole thing is so crazy that it's hard to know how to criticize it. Normally, one would start by supposing some reasonable goals of an election process and then argue that the actual process will not achieve those goals. But the existing process is so strange and jumbled that one can't take the first step of supposing its design goals.
@MJD Thanks for sharing your SQL knowledge; I have much to learn on that frontier. As for the primaries, I was at least relieved to see that the order of candidates is randomized every time the page is reloaded.
Apparently, one can vote either up or down on every candidate. I don't like that very much. I decided to vote exactly the same way as I will vote in the elections, and upvoted my top 3 choices. FWIW.
@75064 just bear in mind that you're consciously choosing not to rank the rest of them. If you feel someone would do well and don't up-vote them - or inappropriate and don't down-vote them - then you're implicitly giving more weight to others' votes.
2
It's your choice. But that goes for everyone else too.
@MJD the only goal here is to narrow down the field to 10 candidates. That's it. Other things may happen as side-effects of this process, but if we enter the main election phase with 10 candidates then that is enough.
I noticed that negative totals are shown as zero... expanding the vote number (is it for 1K users only?) shows that some nominees got more downvotes than upvotes.
Which makes me wonder: do negatively-voted candidates advance to the final round too, if they are in top 10? (It's not hard to be in top 10 out of 11.)
Mathematics 2013 Moderator Election
Mathematics 2013 Moderator Election