Temporary Tag Moderators

Question

Some of the tags on the main site have "a bit" of a quality problem. android and php jump to mind.

They get hundreds of new questions a day, which can be broadly put into three categories:

1. Duplicates (about 45%)
2. Badly researched/off topic (about 45%)
3. Genuine questions (only 10%)

Now in the recent elections, one of the top PHP users (aka Gordon) won and the tag should have a little more mod activity on it.

However, the android is still in pretty bad shape.

I'm proposing temporary tag moderators, who have limited moderator powers extending only to a few tags, and are appointed only for the time the tag needs maintenance.

These users will not have full moderator powers, but instead be a hybrid between 20k users and moderators.

Their powers

• Binding close votes for questions on those tags
• Binding delete votes for questions on those tags
• Ability to migrate questions to appropriate other SE site, if available (for example, Android.SE from the Android tag)
• Unlimited reviews for questions on that tag, in addition to the review limits like 20 edits reviews.
• Ability to handle only Not an Answer and Very Low quality flags for questions on those tags.

Selection Process

Such "Tag Moderators" should be elected through an election, in which users with a gold (silver?) tag badge may nominate themselves. Only tags with a certain number of questions a day should require such moderators (100/day? 200?)

Users nominating should have a deep and specialized knowledge on that tag, and be familiar with the Stack Overflow Q&A model.

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Benefits

• Reduces workload for moderators
• Improves tag quality

Downsides

• Creates a bit of a temporary power inequality between users

Answer 1

No. One does not need to be an expert in a topic to be a moderator. I'm an first year undergrad physics student, with a little more than high school level chemistry knowledge. Yet I moderate the Physics and Chemistry sites (and not badly, if I say so myself). I'm not an expert in either, I'm a novice. I wouldn't be able to answer most of the questions on Physics. Still, moderating the site has nothing to do with how good you are with a topic. Familiarity is enough.

The SO mods could indeed spend more time in these tags. But, wait: there's a reason that they spend less time here. Most of an SO mod's moderation comes from the queue. While using the site as "normal" users (asking, answering), they get a very small window to the site, though they probably are killing bad things on sight.

If the android tag has a quality problem, adding mods won't help¹. You need to get your community to start participating more in community moderation by flagging and voting to close. Point them to this guide or this long guide on Physics to get started.

^{1. Especially if you do it by rep/badges. Rep has little to do with how suited a user is for moderatorship, besides the familiarity with tools. Rep in a tag has nothing to do with how well you will moderate the tag.}

Answer 2

In general, more moderators is better than not enough.

This feels like a lot of overheard either way, though. An election isn't a trivial thing to run, even if we aren't necessarily talking about the same style of elections as we have now for site-wide moderators.

Are those percentages based on data or are they just your perception of how things are? The community should be able to take care of things... and if it's not, more community members stepping up would be a better way to go than electing "super users" and managing their powers.

To quote from the Theory of Moderation:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.

Let's not lose sight of that. Appointing additional moderators, no matter how or with what restrictions, goes against the basic principle of the network - most moderation should be community-driven and not dictatorial.