Recently there were mistakes in the "celebrating SE sites that are 10 years old" blog post. Area 51 Discussions should not be present and proper names weren't given to some websites. This has led me to think that we could give Stack Exchange mods the privilege to review the new blog posts. In the review they can edit the post and then approve. What do others think about this idea?
asked Aug 19, 2021 at 4:14
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2 Answers
This seems...unnecessary. It's the company's blog, for them to write about whatever they want. A lot of the content is only tangentially related to the network itself. And there are cases where it wouldn't be appropriate, like announcing the acquisition (generally, such deals are kept secret until announced to everyone).
The vast majority of the posts have not had such objections, and even moderators aren't uniquely qualified to review such posts (many alt text issues have been pointed out by someone who was not, at the time, a moderator). Even that seems like something to catch as part of the process with an accessibility scanner app that checks for alt text, not something for which the company should rely on moderators.
Perhaps on a case-by-case basis, the company might want to preview things with the moderator team before posting them publicly...but they're already doing that with things like Collectives.
Finally, the current system seems to work just fine: a post went up that had some issues, they were pointed out here on Meta, and now they're being fixed. Why do we need more process?
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2"they're already doing that with things like Collectives" - perhaps, but the latest drama proves beyond doubt they're not doing it with blog posts that are directly about the sites, while those are the posts that must be reviewed. Commented Aug 19, 2021 at 10:27
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6Okay, but why the moderators? Surely the Community team would have caught this latest issue had they reviewed it, for instance.– Ryan MCommented Aug 19, 2021 at 10:36
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2Yeah in this specific case asking each site mods would make less sense than ask single long time CM, but still, the idea is the same: have someone review the post. :) Commented Aug 19, 2021 at 11:30
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Pretty sure the blog writers aren't responsible to anyone. Remember when Ben Popper unilaterally decided that high school teaching was on-topic at Academia.SE? Commented Aug 22, 2021 at 6:41
I think the suggestion here is unnecessary for a number of reasons, but to touch on this particular episode:
There is a process by which blog posts that touch on community/site issues are, ideally, presented to my team for review. When the system works right, we churn out a lot of stuff without issues.
The problem is, the system is brittle - it relies on the presence of principals, and the principals were out of the office (Ben was on holiday and I was traveling on personal business).
We're building some redundancies into the system to prevent this from happening again - I can't promise a 0% error rate, of course, but we'll do better.
answered Aug 20, 2021 at 19:44
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1Can you get this dangerous and misleading post about "imposter syndrome" (written by someone who evidently doesn't understand what it means) taken down? stackoverflow.blog/2020/02/10/… Of yeah, and I forgot about the sexist comment: "Imposter syndrome for man is feeling like you don’t belong like you’re a fake." Commented Aug 22, 2021 at 6:45