Meta reputation as an indication on matching moderation rule

Question

During the last elections, many users were referring to the meta reputation of a candidate as an important indication on how much the user fits the rule of being moderator.

IMHO, meta reputation shouldn't reflect someone's matching to this rule, specially when he's very active in stackoverflow and knows the rules. Also keep in mind that many users can see updates/requests/questions/answers in meta without actually being part of it.

Take for example a user that has a good participation in stackoverflow, edits posts, votes to close etc.. Does it really matter if he or she's active on meta or not, if they knows what they're doing and they're really updated with all meta related things?

What do you think?

Answer 1

You really shouldn't judge a moderator nominee by any one arbitrary metric, because they don't tell the whole story. You need to look at how they've responded to people in the past, how willing they would be to act as a janitor and policeman, and whether they fully understand the site and its policies.

That said, take a look at the top Meta users from the last year. There are an awful lot of diamonds on that list. In fact, most of the remaining people on that first page are ones I could get behind as moderator candidates on Stack Overflow.

If you're spending a lot of time here leaving answers that help out new and existing users, or helping to steer site policy, you are showing both a significant interest in how the site operates and a willingness to guide others in the use of the site and network. This is an orthogonal set of skills to asking and answering on Stack Overflow proper, and I personally consider your participation here more important than your reputation on Stack Overflow.

A moderator's primary responsibility is to handle things the community cannot, and that includes interfacing with users having problems or stepping in when people get out of control. When someone responds on Meta to a question, are they polite, articulate, and knowledgable about the site? If so, that usually indicates someone I'd like for the position, and that tends to coincide with how people vote here.

Also, you better get familiar with Meta before you become a moderator, because if and when you screw up, you're going to have to come here to defend or apologize for your actions.

Again, it can't be the only thing you judge someone by, but I'd weigh Meta participation much higher than reputation on the main site. There's a reason why the Convention badge is required to nominate yourself for election on SO, alongside the flagging and editing badges.

Answer 2

Being an active participant has a lot of advantages when it comes to evaluating a moderator candidate as well as improving one's ability to moderate:

• Being active on meta exposes you to a much broader scope of posts than the vast majority of users see on SO proper. Most people are really only active in a handful of language tags, and often tend to focus on specific categories of questions within those tags based on their particular expertise. Because of this many users will be unaware of the conventions, problems, solutions, personalities, etc. found in these other tags. When someone becomes a mod they will suddenly be responsible for interacting with questions they may well never have touched before. In such cases it's not a matter of understanding the technical expertise, but realizing that certain tags have built their own conventions for addressing various issues, and moderators need to be able to understand that to effectively moderate.

• Being active on meta exposes you to a lot of edge cases, and interesting/unusual/rare moderation issues. While very active SO users likely come across some of these issues naturally, they'll come across quite a lot more of them by being active on MSO.

• Active meta users are much more likely to understand not just what the current policies are, but how they came about, what other considerations were made, the detailed reasonings for why a policy is implemented, etc. A user can moderate quite a bit more effectively when they really understand policies, rather than simply memorizing them. They will be able to apply them more effectively, be able to apply them to more unusual cases more effectively, and (more importantly) they will be able to explain policies, and their importance, to other users more effectively when they (inevitably) have their actions questioned.

• An active meta user has (generally) demonstrated an effectiveness for explaining site policy to other users, often users who were very...emotional...about the issue. And for those that have demonstrated, through their meta activity, that they aren't very good at this, then their meta activity is still being very useful at evaluating how good of a candidate they are.

Answer 3

As a candidate in the election one of my concerns was my apparent lack of Meta participation. However, that doesn't mean I'm not aware of what's going on, just that for a lot of things I'm not going to waste time trying to FGITW more active and experienced users when I know it'll be answered perfectly well and I could be spending that time editing posts into shape etc...

A comment on my nomination post which shows one way of looking at it:

"keep up to date with Meta (even if I don't say much that often)" It's nice that you have a processing type of personality. The community would greatly benefit from a guy who devotes more time thinking on what others has to say, where instead of words he puts his resolve on those discussions on proper actions. - Mark Garcia

But I'm sure others would look at it from the polar opposite.

Unless there's something that needs my input, or there's something I feel strongly about, then I just observe as if I can argue both sides equally well, then there's no point creating noise with my neutral 2p.

So while I agree with Brad that Meta participation is important, it's difficult to quantify to any reasonable metric. I'd be wary of someone that'd just scraped the Convention badge, but at the same time, I'd be wary of someone that was answering every single Meta question they possibly could (as they'll have to learn to step back to do some exception handling instead and let the community answer).

I personally found when voting that comments were useful - even just the way people ask for clarification, or point out faux pas that new users have committed is an indicator of their attitude which would probably carry over to Meta posts should they have to handle requests/justify their actions.

So yes, while it's important, and I was very wary that a lot of people would weigh it very heavily in their decision, a balanced approach is more reasonable - and for me that was trying to get a feeling for attitude and consistency rather than Meta rep.

Bottom line: People will choose on whatever basis they wish

(further eg: I did see some Twitter posts where one person was voting based on people that used their real names and another for the people with the "coolest" avatars...)