2013 Moderator Election

Hi everyone,

Slightly over two years ago, I was nominated as Pro Tempore moderator along with Sklivvz and Fabian. Together, with the aid of Oddthinking, we guided the site to maturity. Once the election date came, I saw that great candidates were running and I decided not to run, so I could use the time for other activities. Among them, I moderated the /r/CanadaPolitics where I applied the skills that I had developed on Skeptics Stack Exchange to foster civil and high level debate.

Now, it's time for me to come back to Skeptics.

I'm not running to offer change. I think the current moderators have done a great job over the past year and wouldn't seek radical change in policy. I'm running to offer my experience and to fix the problems I see on-sight, rather than by flagging.

I'd like to nominate the great Evan Carroll. His reputation stands for itself. Firstly, Evan is very skeptical; this is evidenced by his high level. He has leveled up his skepticism to 1,477. After careful consideration, 37 bronze medals and 8 silver medals were automatically awarded to him by the server farm that runs this site. All of these medals were awarded for outstanding service.

Evan has been a productive and prominent member of many SEs. His charm, wit, fairness, and sheer intellect may leave other ops feeling woefully inadequate to uphold the same duties that Evan will handle with stunning grace. If elected, you should expect out of Evan a fairness and transparency never before seen on StackExchange. Evan stands up for the many, and in doing so he stands up for knowledge -- which is pretty much just what skepticism is all about.

Let's improve SE.Skeptics together. Let's improve skepticism.

Viva la revolución.

Greetings Peasants.

I would like to nominate myself to be the next moderator of Skeptics.SE.

I believe my superior intellect, and superior emotional quotient will allow me to serve the community as a moderator more effectively than any other possible candidate. Going hand in hand with my superior intellect, I possess superior skills of deduction and wisdom.

I am an expert in identifying questions that are off and on-topic. In saying that, I believe stack exchange should be more liberal orientated, and I will promote a reduction in the number of questions to be closed as off-topic.

Thank you my dear peasants,

I look forward to being your future King!

Hello!

I am fairly new to the site, I have only answered a few questions, but I am active on the page. I am not the one which constantly cleans the page though.

My belief is though that there needs to be a counter-pole to the more conservative thinking mods. I am quite liberal, and want a less alienating and open community. The power of mods is great, and I think it would be bad if only the ones with a conservative unaccepting mindset held all that power. Liberal in the sense that I am more for a bit looser way, not as strict.

My goal would be to be the political counter part of the mods, to have diversity. I am young and new, with all which that brings.

My mindset to modding is to clean up complete trash, but try to salvage everything possible. Main target group of skeptics is experts within their specific areas, and skeptics is VERY wide, you can make pretty much anything under the sun fit with the right wording.

That said not all experts are well-versed in scientific methods, instead of chasing them away with pitchforks, I believe they should be welcomed, and helped out with that part. They have the expertise, someone else can provide the writing, editing and referencing.

A year ago, I stood down as one of the Pro Tem (beta) moderators, and did not run in the first election.

I thought:

• I wanted to focus on answering questions.
• I trusted the other mod candidates to do a good job.
• My interest in Skeptics.SE was likely to wane over the next 6 months.

What happened:

• More time on answers gave me the rep to rise from fourth to first position in the rankings.
• The existing mods have been doing an excellent job. I endorse them over me.
• My interest in Skeptics.SE hasn't waned. Although, I tend to spend more periods of short time on the site, which is slowing my ability to answer, but better suits editing.

Two right out of three ain't bad.

Now, I'd like to stand for election - not to bring change to the site, but just to bring back my ability to immediately deal with spam and non-answers. The ability to clean up the inevitable messes caused by naive users efficiently is motivation enough.

I'll continue to contribute to this site, which I think has grown to be a tremendous resource for the Internet and the Skeptical Community, but with a black diamond next to my name, I hope to contribute more effectively.

I'm nominating myself simply because I believe that the community needs more candidates to choose from, and I'm willing to put in the time and effort to be an active voice for the community.

I'll freely admit: I haven't been terribly active on skeptics, at least compared to the other stackexchange sites I'm active in (mostly the parenting beta and Science Fiction & Fantasy stackexchange). However, I take the position and responsibility of moderator very seriously, and, if elected, I would make sure that I made skeptics my top priority for the SE platform.

My qualifications are that I'm very familiar with both the stackexchange platform in general, the roles of a moderator (I've been a pro tem moderator on Parenting for almost 2 years), and the Skeptics community (while I haven't been that active, I've been here for over a year, and have watched the community grow and develop since beta).

My style of moderation is to push anything that isn't clearly defined to meta discussion, and for any borderline cases I tend to wait and see how the community reacts.

Greetings,

My name is Jamie, and I would very much like to help moderate and organise Skeptics.

Some very interesting* bullet points about me

• I am active every day on Skeptics. I don't answer all that many questions, but I enjoy reading and learning about all kinds subjects often seen on skeptics such as popular science, conspiracies, "old wives tale"-like beliefs to name but a few.
• I attempt to help new users in as polite way as possible regarding the usage and requirements specific to skeptics.
• I raise as many moderator flags as I can, all have been deemed helpful.
• I am a programmer and am very active on SO, and therefore used to many of the moderator tools available on SE sites.
• From the number of s's instead of z's in this post, you'll deduce I'm from the UK.

I am of the very strong opinion that Skeptics should remain very strict with its need for proper referencing of questions and answers, and a strong notable claim for questions. I think that this is what distinguishes Skeptics from other QA sites covering similar subjects.

I believe that I can make a positive contribution to this site.

_{* Bullet points not guaranteed to be interesting.}