Should moderators wait till community made its opinion fully known before closing?

Question

Moderator votes are "binding" - meaning that, while it takes 5 close votes to close a question, a single close vote from moderator will do it no matter how many other people voted before.

I would propose that moderators try (as much as possible) and refrain from performing actions that are binding - especially voting to close a question - unless it's one of 3 exceptional cases:

• There's a VERY clear community consensus that the question ought to be closed (3+ existing close votes, many flags, negative comments, negative consensus on meta or chat).

• The question is so 100% egregious that it must be closed immediately lest it cause severe immediate damage to the site (I'm having a hard time coming up with such emergency example, but let's say someone posts a clearly off-topic AND extremely offensive question - something you don't want to show up in Google search). Even in this case, I would posit that asking on META or chat first would be ideal, and waiting a reasonable (5 mins) time for people in community to pipe up.

• The item was extensively publically discussed by the community (I'd propose the threshold of at least 4-6 people, for at least 1-3 hours; not sure of best limits) on Meta or chat; and after that discussion there's a clear disagreement with nowhere near strong majority, never mind consensus. As far as I understand, this case is specifically where moderators were meant to interfere - ideally, when the community agrees to bring it to a moderator decision. However, I strongly feel that usually the moderator action happens too soon before there's a consensus.

Please note that the above does NOT cover 2 cases where I strongly believe a moderator vote is a bad idea:

• Moderator votes to close because as private community member, he feels the question is worth closing. I know one of our mods recently voiced this sentiment. It's a bit unfair to mods as people, but if you're the first/second guy to vote to close, please wait till community opinion is more clearly expressed and/or some discussion takes place. With great power comes great responsibility, and all :)

  Please note "well if the community wants it, they can vote to re-open" is an extremely annoying and very wrong cop-out. First, it's hard to find 5 people willing to bother to look into the issue, analyze, agree, AND vote to open, all in reasonable amount of time. Second, a lot of people would not vote to re-open seeing a moderator name on the closing even if they would have otherwise (I've seen that happen).

• The question MAY be bad, and is controversial, and there's an active discussion.

  What would be a good action to take would be to lock/protect the question to avoid the discussion taking place on main site (if one is happening, or undesirable answers appear), and forcefully suggest to people to "take it outside" - e.g. chat or Meta.

  Now, if whoever wants to keep the question refuses to do that, this is a proper ground to close the question.

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DISCLAIMER1: This post is NOT a reflection of any specific problem with current SciFi.SE moderators, though at times they have exhibited the actions that I will suggest above as "should be avoided". But the opinions expressed here have gelled back when I was a newbie on StackOverflow and had absolutely zero interaction of my own with moderator practices - merely reading moderation rules and observing mods in action, and are not a reflection on any specific moderator - rather, on overall rules.

DISCLAIMER2: The timing of this post was affected by 3 things (none of which was a specific action by a moderator):

• Gilles' post in chat yesterday indicating that moderators should not set policy and only get involved when the community can't come to a consensus (did I get that right?)

• the upcoming moderator elections. I want to have the policy discussed and set BEFORE we have new moderators (and can have input from current ones); AND allow voters who care about this issue to be able to gauge moderator candidate's views on the topic.

• Just came to the front of my "questions to ask on meta" buffer queue :)

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Answer 1

I disagree with your proposal. The role of moderators is not to set policy (except very occasionally, when the community can't decide when left to itself). The role of moderators is to enforce policy.

If the site rules clearly say that a question is unwelcome, it's perfectly normal for a moderator to close it. If the moderator happens to be the first user seeing the question, so be it. Moderator closures aren't reserved for egregious cases; they're normal for clear cases. It's only in borderline cases which could go either way, cases where there isn't a clear policy, that it's better for a moderator not to intervene straight away. (If I see a borderline case, I generally leave a tab open and come back after a few hours, often also leave a comment, perhaps ask in chat.)

Moderator actions can be appealed, especially question closures (answer deletions are admittedly harder to appeal since fewer people get to see the deleted answer, but then answer deletions are rarer and only for egregious cases). Moderator actions can be challenged through comments, chat (sometimes), and meta. Reopen votes aren't a cop-out, they do work as intended; it's rare for a question to get enough attention for 5 reopen votes, but moderators usually will reopen a question if a meta discussion shows a dominant community wish to reopen, or if the question has been improved through editing.

Stack Overflow tends to work differently simply because of scale. SO gets about 1000 new posts per moderator per day, SFF a little more than 10. So a vast majority of posts on SO are never even seen by any moderator.

Answer 2

Flags will bring a moderator to the scene and if they agree with the raise, will act on it as suggested. But if you're not a moderator, you won't see that and might think they're trigger happy.

That's the same as if they came across it on their own. If they spot something and are in tune with the community, they don't have to always sit on their hands waiting for someone else to vote to close. If it's there and they see it, why shouldn't they act on it?

Moderators should understand the site and community. That includes being able to know when to close or re-open questions they read.

If you feel like moderators should wait for everyone else to do the work, to vote or act and only turn up once the rest of the community has had their say, you don't trust that moderator to know what they're doing or what the site is about.

Answer 3

I think that this is a reasonable philosophy, and I agree in general with the sentiment (these are very similar to the personal guidelines I use on parenting.se, although the community is much less active there so I am a bit more aggressive in using my close vote there than I otherwise would be).

However, I do not think that this needs to be formalized as a policy.

The idea behind electing moderators is that they are individuals that the community trusts to do the best job possible. Setting up rules for when moderators can and cannot close questions implies that moderators should not be able to use personal discretion when acting in that role, which is contrary to the trust we, as a community, have expressed by electing them.

In actuality, there are checks and balances in place that protect against perceived "abuse" of moderator powers, or even simple disagreement between moderators and the community.

Having multiple moderators is one of the primary examples of this. Our moderators should be working together, and discussing controversial issues between themselves (as well as with the community at large). Ideally, they should come to an agreement (or at least a compromise) on any issue of moderation.

Also, as was mentioned, members of the community can vote to reopen. Based upon my recent experiences, I disagree with your assessment of the "vote to reopen" system. I do believe it works.

By way of example, I recently had a question that was closed as general reference by a moderator (although the moderator was not the only one who voted to close). However, I disagreed with the reasons for the closure, and we (yourself included) discussed why it should/should not be closed, citing various meta discussions on the subject. In the end, the community voted to reopen. I have absolutely no problem with the way the situation was handled, both by the moderator, and the members of the community who voted to close or open. I would also have been perfectly fine if the question had remained closed due to lack of community support for reopening it. However, I do not feel it was in any way a problem that a moderator closed the question even though it was clear (in hindsight, at least), that there was not a clear community consensus that the question should be closed.

In short, I don't see any reason to really have these rules (or guidelines) for moderator activity defined here. The moderators will do what they think best for the site, and we have to trust them to use appropriate discretion. However, if they make mistakes, the community has the power to fix them (within reasonable limits). Rather than trying to avoid this ever happening, I think that the situations where there is a disagreement between a moderator decision and community consensus is healthy and beneficial, as it helps to further define and clarify the boundaries.

Answer 4

Yes, moderators should be cautious with their binding votes. But that doesn't mean they should wait for a "community consensus" on each question before they act on it. Or at least, not an explicit one; the "community consensus" has already been reached, it's the topics and scopes that are on and off-topic. If a post is clearly out of bounds, meaning on a topic that the community has decided is off-topic, or of a scope the community has already decided is too narrow, the moderator should close the question, or migrate it if another site is willing to take it. If the community disagrees with that decision, we need to go to meta and discuss how we should alter the community consensus on acceptable topics. When it is ambiguous whether a question is off-topic, however, I think a mod should wait and see what the community makes of that edge case. For the record, I am strongly in favor of giving people the benefit of the doubt, so for any post not clearly off-topic (or otherwise in need of closure), I will wait to see what the community thinks.

Answer 5

My philosophy of moderation is pretty much as follows.

1. If I see a flagged message, and it is specific to a moderator-only thing, I'll make a judgement call. This could be move a question, convert an answer to a comment, etc.
2. If the question/answer is terrible, I'll close it.
3. If the question is bad, but not terrible, I'll wait a while to see if the community wants to do something with it.

I do get impatient with people who flag to close a question, and have reputation, but don't vote to close the question...