Help us identify new roles for community members

Question

Update 2 (March 6, 23)

We made a shortlist of the most promising suggestions from the answers provided, and we then shared our findings with Philippe Beaudette, our VP of Community. After some discussion, we determined that we need to do further exploration and research into these proposed roles before we can consider a potential fit for the network. Afterward, we’ll share our findings with the community and discuss the next steps for any roles we might pursue.

Update

Thank you to everyone who has contributed their suggestions. At this point, we are going through all the feedback shared. Additional feedback past this point is welcome but won't be taken into account for our initial discovery work.

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TL;DR: The Community Team has been doing discovery work on the possible creation of new community roles across the Stack Exchange network and individual sites. We started by approaching site moderators, and now we want to hear from the broader community about the different roles you would like to see outside of the existing site moderator role. This could be anything that you would see as applying to the network as a whole (which individual communities can choose to fill, or not), or a role specific to a particular Stack Exchange site.

Background

For a long time, the only codified community role that we have had on Stack Exchange sites is that of the site moderators. The community contributes to and participates on each site in various ways, but we have rarely provided an official way to recognize the ways in which each user has helped maintain the knowledge base and/or support the rest of the community. As such, we wanted to find ways to give you all more ownership of your respective communities and empower you to shape them further.

What kinds of roles?

Throughout the network's history the only role designated to the community so far has been the role of site moderator. This is an exercise of exploring what could exist alongside that role to enrich the experience of using the different sites. These could be roles that would exist alongside new tools, opt-in responsibilities, or permissions related to specific badges. The sky's the limit here.

For example, we believe the following could be possible roles to consider:

• Plagiarism Handler – a role centered around reviewing and removing plagiarism from the network
• Deputy Moderators – a temporary role by appointment that would give lower-rep users some early access to reputation-based curation tools
• Event Planner – a role centered around creating and organizing events for their site, community, etc.

Don’t focus too much on these roles in particular; we’re just including them as examples of the different kinds of roles that could be considered. (But if you think one of the above examples would be a good role for us to add, feel free to suggest it as an answer and explain how you think it should work!)

How should I share my suggestions for new roles?

We don’t want the discussion to focus too much on analyzing our existing examples; rather, you should treat this as an open-ended opportunity to brainstorm and identify possible new roles that could help our communities run more efficiently and create a more enjoyable experience for all of you.

If you have an idea for a new community role please post it as an answer on this post (one suggested role per answer). To make it easier to discuss your ideas, please start each answer with a name for the role as the heading of your answer, followed by a brief description of how you think the role would work (e.g., what permissions it might need, new tools you think it might need, etc.).

December 19th, 2022 is our tentative deadline

You can always propose things on Meta – but as far as this post is concerned, we’ll be accepting suggestions of new community roles until December 19th, 2022. After that, we’ll present and discuss these ideas internally with the rest of the Community Team and other staff. We plan to make a post in early January to share which roles, if any, we will begin exploring in more depth with engineering and product teams.

We can’t promise that your suggestions will all be implemented; the examples we provided are just interesting things that we think might enrich the network experience. Regardless of the outcomes, we think this is an interesting exercise to carry out periodically, to continue innovating on the Stack Exchange user experience.

Answer 1

Comment mods

Currently 99.9% of comment moderation is done by mods (the other 0.1% is autodeletion by enough user flags). Other than flagging there is no way to moderate comments unless you are a mod. Every once in a while I catch arguments that get out of control in comments on SO and all we can do is flag and watch and hope a mod sees or it gains 3 flags (assuming it does not match the list of 1 flag deletion). If this is implemented it would make this situations end a lot faster due to the comments being deleted a lot faster.

Someone would become a comment mod by being appointed by staff and/or site mods.

Very heavy inspiration from this answer.

Answer 2

Audit moderators

Over on Meta Stack Overflow, we have a lot of positively scored questions about review queue audits that they failed and disagree with (search results). Although the system does an OK job at finding posts which work as audits, it also returns a few bad ones that get called out a lot. Posts about bad audits even make it to "Hot meta posts" sometimes (recently happened, not uncommon).

Here's my proposal: instead of trying to get the system to do all of the work - finding posts, determining quality, being accused of bad audit posts - have the system send the posts it finds to the audit moderators and have them verify which posts would work well as audits.

This would require a new aspect to the system, some sort of special-access triage queue for 'suggested audits' (as opposed to 'suggested edits'). To become an audit moderator, a site moderator/staff member would have to appoint you. Appointment would likely be on the basis that you don't fail many audits yourself and that you're active on the site you get appointed on (yeah, this is per-site only).

That's just my two cents, community opinions appreciated.

Answer 3

Curators

Much of the effort towards improving question quality goes towards sanctioning bad questions-- closure, review, etc. There is a lot of room for greater recognition of good questions.

On our site, we have experimented with ways to do this in the form of curators. Curators seek out exceptional questions and answers ("pearls"), recognize them in a chat room, and sometimes add bounties. Typically, these are high rep users who are domain experts in their tags, who notice underrated posts and like to help get them the attention they deserve.

These roles could benefit from official support.

• We could have a curated 'best of' section with enhanced visibility on the main site, similar to featured questions.
• We could have a periodic top list or newsletter recognizing notable posts, similar to how we had site blogs.
• Curators could get access to limited, not-to-be-abused free bounties to promote unanswered pearl questions.

Curator would be a volunteer role, appointed by site moderators, and supervised by the same to prevent abuse.

Answer 4

Chat moderators

I've long been in favor of this past request to have a set of users whose responsibility is to moderate the chat sites in addition to the site moderators, rather than completely having this responsibility fall on the site mods.

Now, all of these problems, I believe, stem from one main issue: We expect the [site] moderators to moderate chat.

Now, at a certain level, this makes sense. They are the people we elected / appointed to moderate the main sites, and chat is an extension of the main site. It makes sense to have the same people in charge of moderation.

However, this doesn't work. The site moderators have been elected / appointed for their skill in moderating a Q&A site. The skills required for effectively moderating a Q&A site are, if not totally different, largely different from the skills needed to moderate a chat room / server. It's a different skillset to moderate a live chat vs a Q&A site. Some of the moderators on the sites have those skills. Others... don't.

A lot of moderators don't use chat in the first place. They are not required to use chat and shouldn't be required to use it. We therefore cannot depend solely on these site moderators to moderate chat, because they have no responsibility to do so, may not have the skills needed to do so, and that is not what we ask of moderators when we elect / appoint them. There are also too many moderators, to the point where they occasionally need moderation themselves.

The main problems pointed out in that post are:

• The skills needed to moderate a chat site are different from those needed to moderate a Q&A site. Some moderators may be skilled at moderating a Q&A site, but not at moderating a chat site.

• Moderators are primarily elected (or appointed) for their ability to moderate a Q&A site, not a chat site. Moderating chat is not explicitly part of the responsibility given to moderators when they are given their diamonds.

• Not every site moderator is active on the chat sites. Some don't even use chat at all.

• Related to the above point, in some cases, there may not be a moderator around to curtail disruption that goes beyond what a room owner can handle (such as an issue spilling into different rooms).

To summarize, relying on site moderators to also moderate chat doesn't work because it's not part of their responsibility and many may not have the skill or will to moderate chat.

My proposal for a role would be the chat moderator role. These moderators would be placed into the role based on their experience moderating chat sites (either as a site moderator, a room owner, or moderator of an external chat site) and would have the explicit responsibility to moderate chat. Site moderators would continue receiving chat moderation privileges as they do now, but these chat moderators would also be appointed on top of those. They would also be a rank above normal site moderators, to address other issues pointed out in that post.

Answer 5

Tag curator

I intend this literally, as "one who curates (posts in) a certain tag"

This draws from:

• Close vote superpowers for other badges in low volume tags

• Empowering tag-badge holders part II - let's look at silver?

• Extending the gold badge rights to further close vote reasons

• Give high-rep users extra weight on close votes

What and why

This role identifies users with some degree of domain expertise, usually represented by tag badges; and some degree of platform expertise, in the form of significant commitment to a specific tag.

Curating (old) content is one of the main differentiators between a repository of high-quality Q&A and helpdesk, therefore the role is aligned with the overarching goal of Stack Exchange.

The main difference between tag badge holders and tag curators is that users with domain expertise who are also interested in tag curation will edit, vote-to-close, dupe-hammer and/or answer old questions.

Users with tag expertise who are not interested in curation, typically will only answer, and possibly cast votes only on newest questions. For them, older content is simply not interesting. Tag curators instead will also curate existing older content in their tag.

How to identify such users

Tag badges (possibly just gold, but also silver and bronze) + number of actions (edits, close/reopen votes, delete/undelete votes¹) on older content with the relevant tag where they didn't participate in tag editing. Some sort of "Archaeologist" badge on a specific tag could be used as a metric².

I don't have a threshold in mind for how old content need to be in order to qualify. Probably the same as "Archaeologist" or "Necromancer" badges, just to avoid introducing more foreign criteria.

The count of such actions should exclude questions that have been asked or answered by that same user. Maintaining your own content in good shape doesn't imply an interest in broader tag curation³.

Privileges of tag curators

Note: If the goal of this brainstorming is simply to define new user roles to give credit where it's due, it's not strictly necessary to attach privileges to it. In my view, additional privileges make sense and are a nice addition.

As it was already suggested elsewhere, extended vote powers.

• Gold badge holders with tag curator status may have binding close and reopen votes at least for "Needs details or clarity", "Needs more focus", "Opinion based", "Needs debugging details", "Not reproducible or caused by a typo" close reasons, along with "Duplicate".

• Silver badge holders with tag curator status may have their close and reopen votes weighted 2 instead of one.

• Bronze badge holders with tag curator status may be granted access to close/reopen vote privilege below 3.000 reputation — and possibly edit privileges below 2.000 reputation —, in that tag.

Deletion privileges shouldn't be affected. Personally, I do consider deletion as an important part of curation. However actions that remove/hide content are harder to properly oversee. Further reducing thresholds could become a vector for abuse.

Use case

This stems from a practical issue. Tag curators who scavenge for old content, especially when looking for dupe targets, may very easily come across off-topic posts that escaped moderation. If a several-years-old off-topic question has also received answers, casting a close vote more often than not results in... nothing. The close vote will just age away in the close queue.

This is even more true for low-traffic tags, where the chances that new content gets timely moderated are lower, and off-topic material just piles up forever. When such off-topic unclosed questions receive new activity, they may become eligible for concerted action in certain chat rooms, but this simply doesn't scale.

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footnotes:

1. Not sure if in-queue reviews should count for this. If close/reopen votes are counted, it doesn't matter where the votes were cast from.
2. I'm not suggesting to introduce a new kind of "Archeologist" badge. Just saying it could be useful to reuse the criteria.
3. This follows the award criteria for Editor, Strunk & White, Copy Editor badges

Answer 6

Mentor

(I think focusing on new users took us down a wrong path. This isn’t about onboarding new users. It’s about people volunteering to help people with the process of using the site.)

In the City of Heroes video game a player could flag themselves with either "Helper" or "Help me". This would change their character's nameplate so that other users would know who they could ask for help and who might need help. I don't know how well the "Help me" tag worked out, but the Helpers were a pretty nice group who would wait by the spawn point and offer new users help getting started. I experienced the same thing when we tried Fallout 76. There was a group of players that would hang out where the newbies showed up after the tutorial and give them a few things to help get them started playing. It was a really nice introduction to the game.

This would be a volunteer role (not elected) available after someone has met a certain set of requirements - reputation threshold, positive question/answer reception, no suspensions over some time period, mod team doesn't object, etc. When I volunteered for Musixmatch they had an "academy" that went over the various rules and best practices and gave me a certificate after I passed a short practical test. Being certified opened up a different level of participation, so this might be a way to ensure that the mentors have some basic training.

Volunteering as a mentor will

• add a special icon to their profile so users know they are open to questions
• give access to some mechanism to be available for users to ask them questions, like getting notifications whenever someone posts in a special chat room
• some sort of filter for newer user posts so they can focus on them
• some way for the people they've helped to give them an anonymous "thank you" thumbs up (maybe it counts for a badge?)

Mentors should be able to turn on/off the mentoring mode after they've passed the initial vetting, so that if they are getting burned out or they have other obligations they can take a step back. They maybe have to do it in some reasonably large chunks of time, so they can't flip it on or off every other day?

I also think mentors should be able to engage with each other as a group (much like elected moderators can) to get and share advice on mentoring. I don't know if there needs to be some sort of limit on how many people can be mentors, but there should be some sort of participation commitment. I don’t think it needs to be an exclusive role — anyone who is willing to make the time commitment and meets the other requirements should be able to identify as a mentor. I don’t see any reason why a site moderator couldn’t have both a diamond and a mentor flag.

A newly registered user could be asked if they wanted to "say hello" to the mentors as an introduction to the feature.

Answer 7

There's a couple of old suggestions that could be revisited:

• Empowering tag-badge holders part II - let's look at silver?
• What privilege should 30k users get?
• Help us identify micro-privileges for top users
• Is using reputation to scale the number of close votes the best way?

Answer 8

Migration helper

It is very hard to get questions from small SO tags migrated to suitable target sites. Take for example the LaTeX tag on SO. Every now and then a high quality question gets asked, which would surely get a good answer on TeX - LaTeX. However, voting to migrate very rarely works because there are not a lot of users who will review this tag and most votes will simply age away.

A migration helper could be a user with experience in both the tag and the target site (criteria for example gold badge in the tag and trusted user privilege on the target site) and their vote to migrate would either single-handedly migrate the question or at least reduce the number of necessary votes.

Answer 9

Privilege consolidation

At the moment, the low bar to cross-platform 'trust' returns also low privileges. Perhaps this should be tiered. (This could also be combined with some of the other answers here, or taken to a new question, as to precisely which privileges.)

As a user who has more than 30k on some Stack Exchange sites (and actually more than 300k network-wide), I find it somewhat restrictive if I join a new Stack Exchange site to be able to do very little in the way of 'routine' tasks I can do on the others.

Of course, having high rep or gold badge dupe-hammer on one Stack Exchange site should not automatically grant me the same or equivalent on another, but I feel it should grant some of the lower privileges - actual up/downvotes, close/reopen votes, ability to see deleted answers and questions rather than getting a 404, review queue abilities.
I'm aware that having more than 30k in gardening, for instance (I don't; it's just an example) does not automatically mean I'm any expert on Unix—but it does signify I'm likely to be reasonably adept at weeding out the truly bad questions, or separating the wheat from the chaff on new users/questions (see what I did there?;) and that I ought to be responsible enough to not spuriously or unthinkingly mark questions as 'needs detail' simply because I don't understand the topic.

One practical consideration would be how this is applied. Currently, it would require the user to be handed a far greater number of 'trust' points when joining a new group.
I don't see how this would work; it's not particularly 'fair'. It implies more tested knowledge and experience in the new topic than strictly necessary. It would be difficult to backdate.
An alternative might be to award it as a badge instead. 'Consolidated contributor' or something similar. I'm still not certain how simple this would be to backdate. It would allow tiering though, as there are already bronze, silver, and gold tiers within the badge system.

After comments basically asking "what's the point?" - this is one of my quietest groups. Most of the questions mean nothing to me because the subject matter is extremely broad, so my Q&A interaction is small. I am, however, perfectly capable of spotting the completely off-topic or truly bad questions whether I know the answers or not. At this rate I'll be able to contribute to that in about another decade or so.
Flags add to the moderation effort; they do not reduce it, which would be the primary purpose of such additional privileges.

Answer 10

Tag Manager

Naming things is hard; a better name is welcome

There is a related proposal on this Q&A: Synonymizer

The Current System

Background

Tags are an often overlooked/under-observed aspect of the site, but the system (regardless of its strengths and weaknesses) serves as a primary mechanism for organising our content. The few privileges that are not restricted to moderators are: create tags, propose tag synonyms approve tag wiki edits, and finally make unreviewed tag wiki edits.

The issue with the current privileges is that they don't actually provide mechanisms or tools for ongoing upkeep of the tags from non-moderators and with sites that have tens of thousands of tags it's not really feasible for moderators to manage them effectively either.

Creating Tags

There is very minimal oversight into the tag creation process. Yes, the 10k tools has a small section about recently created tags and provides a small window into recently created tags. But this reputation threshold is much higher than would actually be needed to handle any tag-related issues. Any user with the ability to edit questions and answers for all intents and purposes already has all the tools they would need to handle tag creation/removal from the system.

Synonyms

For this next section, we're going to ignore that moderators can and do move this process along. The point is to demonstrate how the process would function without a moderator stepping in. Moderators are exception handlers and managing the tags of the site should not be an "exception".

Synonyms require an initial proposal be made by a user with a score of 5 or more in the given tag. To vote for a proposal users similarly need to have a score of 5 or more. The primary issue with this system is, even when it is a tag which is obviously synonymous, you would have to wait for a minimum 5 users to all reach tag score of 5 to be able to get the synonym approved (that's 1 user to make the initial proposal and then a minimum of 4 upvotes for the synonym to be approved). If these users can even find the page where pending tag synonyms hide out, that is a significant number of users and effort needed. It can be extremely difficult on smaller/low activity tags for even a single user to get the requisite score needed to make the proposal.

Tag Wikis and Wiki Excerpts

Suggested Edits

Tag wiki excerpt and tag wiki edits are currently included in the suggested edits queue which primarily handles question and answer edits. The issue with the current system is that these edits require a totally different set of skills; they even have an entirely separate set of reject reasons. These edits can also sit for a very long time given the very high reputation threshold needed to even review these posts. I also know a lot of users who skip suggested edits on tag wikis and wiki excerpts because it breaks their flow to switch gears from Q&A suggested edits to tag wikis.

Immediate Edits

Even users with the ability to immediately make changes to tag wikis and wiki excerpts don't always understand what the requirements are for these fields. Beyond this, there's also almost no oversight in these edits since (unlike questions and answers) these edits are mostly invisible as they don't visibly "bump" anywhere to draw additional eyes to the change.

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New Privileges/Tooling

Extensions of Existing Privileges/Tools

Tag Managers would have the tools necessary to help to track and manage the tags of the site. This would include extensions of existing privileges/tools, e.g.:

• The power to manage tag synonyms by:
  • adding¹ synonyms without needing the required tag score
  • removing¹ existing tag synonyms
• The power to manage tags by:
  • adding and removing tags from questions (these users would have access to inline tag editing)
  • editing tag wikis and tag wiki excerpts (without review)
  • renaming¹ tags
  • merging¹ tags
• To provide oversight to tag wiki and tag wiki excerpt edits tag managers would gain access to:
  • A dedicated review queue (or tools page) to review only tag wiki and tag wiki excerpt suggested edits
  • A list of recently edited tag wikis and wiki excerpts (to spot check as needed)
  • The ability to override¹ previously approved/rejected suggested edits on tag wiki/tag wiki excerpt

¹ None of these need to be unilateral privileges – they could require some consensus, e.g., 3 tag managers to approve before the change takes effect.

Entirely New Tools

Tag Managers would also greatly benefit from tools that could indicate the "health" of the tag. This could come in many forms, but I'm thinking of tools that could detect issues with tags.

For example, the basic tag on Stack Overflow. This tag is added to significantly more posts than it remains on. Many users use this tag to indicate the question is a beginner level question instead of what the tag is supposed to be used for, i.e. BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). For this reason, it is removed from the majority of posts it is added to. SEDE indicates it's removed from 88.205% of posts (with the normal caveats with using SEDE for data like not including deleted posts).

Other pieces of information that may be useful is closure/deletion rate of tags. What percentage of questions with a given tag are closed/reopened/deleted. These rates could help draw attention to off-topic or otherwise unsuitable questions and/or tags.

If there were a place to review statistics about tag usage and usage trends, this could help to detect outliers and would be easier to intervene and make changes (like perhaps renaming the tag or updating the wiki excerpt).

These tools could probably be generally useful to lots of members of the community and do not necessarily need to be restricted to just this role.

Community Benefits

A lot of the work on tags ends up going undone. There are very few users who have the ability to make these changes, and there's almost no oversight due to very limited tools which are often tucked out of the way.

We end up catching improper tags way too late and then end up having to spend hours burninating tags with hundreds (or thousands) of questions. Improper, confusing, and/or plagiarised tag wikis and tag wiki excerpts are left undiscovered (sometimes for years). If there were a group of users who were able to intervene before the issue gets out of hand the overall workload on the community could be lessened.

Eligibility

There are lots of ways to choose candidates. On Stack Overflow participation in the burninations that are being fairly regularly facilitated would be a good indicator of eligibility, however, I recognise that this does not work for all sites.

Answer 11

Trusted Editor

The edit queue is often full, much to the frustration of some lower-rep users who would like to spend more time reviewing posts but who quickly run of out edits (we're limited to 5 pending edits at once). Users with this role would either have only some of their edits reviewed (one out of three as an initial suggestion) or would be able to make edits like 2k+ users. It would be granted to users who have at least 500 reputation (minimum to access the review queues), a recent editing history with a low reject to accept ratio, and the Strunk and White badge (80 edits).

Answer 12

Plagiarism Analyst

As I understand it, there is a backlog of possible plagiarism flags. A Plagiarism Analyst would volunteer to help reduce that backlog.

In that role, the Plagiarism Analyst (PA) would:

• Have access to the plagiarism reports.
• Do the background research necessary to identify whether the suggested (claimed) plagiarism is indeed plagiarism.
• Have access to a mechanism to pass the results to Regular Moderators (or Staff) for further action — if further action is necessary.
  • That is, the PA would not have the final decision on the flag.

If the PA concludes that the flag is accurate — the content is plagiarized — the results would provide a detailed analysis of why it is plagiarized, with URLs identifying the source, etc. This would make it easy for a Regular Moderator validating the assessment to see why it is indeed plagiarism. Conversely, if the PA concludes that the flag is inaccurate — the content is not plagiarized — the results would identify why that is considered to be the case, again including URLs or (Google) search terms used to try and identify the source.

Decisions would have to be made about whether a PA has a way to contact those who flagged the content as plagiarism with the intent to seek clarification from them about why it should be considered plagiarism. Another result could be 'not proven' — there is room to think that this might be plagiarized but the PA has not found the evidence to confirm that it is, or is not, plagiarism. This should be used as seldom as possible, and would probably leave the flag open for another PA to look at. If two PAs both come up with 'not proven', the flag should be treated as "not plagiarized". There would need to be a record of when the flagger was contacted for information to ensure they are not inundated with requests from PAs about a single flag. (OTOH, if a flagger reports many cases of plagiarism, they may get many requests for clarification — one per report.)

Only one PA should be able to work on any given plagiarism flag at a time. There would be a mechanism to grab a report to work on it (which would prevent others from working on it), and another to relinquish a plagiarism flag without coming to any conclusion (not even 'not proven'). There'd probably be a time limit — such as one week — during which the flag could be kept; after that, it would be relinquished automatically.

It would probably be a good idea to keep statistics on whether particular reporters of plagiarism are good at making valid reports or not, and whether their reports are accurate enough to make it easy to analyze them. If there's someone who routinely flags plagiarism without the PA team being able to substantiate the claims, then a warning can be given. If there's someone who routinely provides accurate and helpful flags, that could be noted too; such flags are likely to be easier to confirm.

Answer 13

Reviewer

This role allows for accessing specific review queues on certain authorized sites on which the user has too low a reputation to otherwise be allowed access.

A user, who through their network-wide status (e.g. ≥ 10.000 reputation across sites [not counting association bonuses], ≥ 3000 of which on a single site, and having been awarded a Steward badge for any queue network-wide^*, but this will need communal tweaking) displays a required level of understanding of the workings of the network (or "networkings"), can opt for this Reviewer role.

There are sites that consistently have a high number of review items, but too few users to go through them. This role will help ease the tasks of other moderators, and allow for a quicker response to users who are waiting for the results of their proposed changes.

This necessarily comes with certain restrictions. The biggest problem is that a low reputation generally equals a lack of understanding on site-specific rules and scope. One solution would be to slowly open up more queues as the Reviewer gets acquainted with a site's scope; e.g. the Low Quality and Suggested Edits queues are opened initially, followed by the Questions and Answers queues, and finally by the Close and Reopen Votes queues.

A moderator on the site that can use this kind of assistance could perhaps grant a user with the minimum requirements pointed out earlier this role. Maybe a user that meets these requirements can simply opt in through their profile to be eligible for this role. Moderators are usually quite active and will have a general idea I think going through an election would not be necessary, as this is mostly just an extra helping hand (a Reviewer's vote would not weigh heavier).

^{* Alternatively, having been granted 2 Steward badges for the same queue anywhere on the network allows a user to be eligible for the role of Reviewer for that particular queue.}

Answer 14

Translation Reviewer

On international sites, the strings displayed on the site are translated by community users, and user suggestions are approved by moderators (and staff). But moderators are not always familiar with translation. We need the help of trusted users.

Because the actual work is done on traducir.win , it may not necessarily be tied to roles on Stack Exchange.

Answer 15

Citation Needed™ Officer

Both Let gold tag badge holders add post notices? and Allow high-reputation users to add post notices (perhaps as a 30k privilege?) make a similar request.

Having some combination of the two would be useful.

At least on the stack I moderate, adding a post notice that something needs citation or references to back up claims is a useful teaching tool, resulting in either self-editing or self-deletion from new users.

Larger sites make this impossible, as it's currently only moderators who can do this. But plenty of community members would know how and when it's needed.

It would take pressure off either moderators or community members having to delete posts or other harsher actions.

That then means new users get a gentler introduction to the mores and etiquettes of the site.

Answer 16

Synonymizer

People with this role can vote on tag synonyms for any tag with less than N questions, even if they don't have the required score.

Currently, only users with a specific amount of reputation can vote to create synonyms. If synonyms for other tags should be created, moderators need to do that. I propose a role given to users who are experienced with synonyms and tags in general (e.g. similar to a tag badge on synonym-request on the meta site but also counting questions?). This role would allow them to vote for synonyms on tags.

This would not allow them to single-handly create tag synonyms, it would still be subject to voting.

Moderators should be able to remove this role from users and also be able to revert synonymisation from tags (if they cannot already).

The maximum number of questions (N) is to be determined. Alternatively, there could be a limitation on total views on questions with this tag or a specific number of users

Answer 17

Network Router

Privilege: Able to nominate, discuss, and approve/deny the migration of pages anywhere in the Stack Exchange Network where the user has demonstrated a sufficient expertise in the subject matter. (I will not delve into the actual/lengthy mechanisms and rules of my concept.)

Qualification: Users would need to possess silver/gold tag badges (or be moderators) on subject-relevant topics in BOTH communities in order to participate. (I can offer scenarios, but not on this page.)

Having a pool of SMEs making considered, transparent, and democratic decisions will be helpful in shifting topic-specific content to its most appropriate space. Better integrating associated communities will improve awareness of lesser known communities. The clean up will also help to contend with cross-posted content.

Answer 18

Blade runner

(Role name inspired by the movie of the same name)

Blade runners "hunt" accounts that use text generators i.e. chatGPT to make posts that don't give the proper attribution to the tool used and have not verified the accuracy of the post content.

These users might review posts from any community and flag posts to per-site moderators attention and / or community managers (CMs). They help per-site moderators and CMs to identify emerging disruptive behavior patterns powered by text generators / automation tools.

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This role might be supported by similar tools and workings used to handle spam (Charcoal-HQ chat room, smoke detector chat bot, etc.) as well by specialliced tools and workings, i.e. Blade Runners might be required to learn about chatGPT and other tools used by the offending accounts operators.

While anti-spam and anti-whatever be called this new disruptive activities have similitudes and could be grouped as a collaborative abuse fithing each of these tasks might be better handled by separate due to the specialization and time required. Anyway as there are users that are diamond moderators on multiple sites, users willing to collaborate to fight any type of abuse accross sites should be able to do that if they have the time, skills and ethics required.

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Related

• Could ChatGPT be a viable way to answer people's questions?
• Ban ChatGPT network-wide

Answer 19

Accessibility advisors

There was recently a kerfuffle about using the code block for code-like but not exactly code per se bits.

One concern there was that screen readers are said to choke on these compared to the New Feature: Table Support.

I was frustrated because I could not find anything more than anecdotal and 10+ year old lore about exactly what the accessibility issues were for code blocking for monospace vs for tables, and though about getting some software and trying it out myself.

Then I noticed there is a lot of different screen readers and other accessibility tools out there and I could not get all of them because:

• some are expensive and I'm poor
• each takes some time to learn (I have my own neuro-challenges)
• what matters is the experience of the folks who actually use these!

For the SE ecosystem in general (rather than a per-site basis) how about a recognized group of volunteers with various interests in accessibility get recognized as an important voice and have a central clearinghouse-type function for information and UI review for these issues?

Answer 20

Tag /typo reviewer

• a new edit role

• if an edit is made that has changed only tags or that requires only tags to be checked, this could be done by this person

• this person would not edit the question or answers, only the tags

• I would suggest a threshold of 250 points so than more people/users would be allegeable for this

• The edit queue is often full (at least on Stack Overflow), and I think that is better that users with higher reputation focus on tasks that require more attention, for example, wiki entries, edits to the questions/answers

• I don't have any data to back this up. This is all based on my observations

• if there is a review request that only requests to review some typos, this can be handled with someone who has a fewer number of reputation points than users who do triage/questions review

Answer 21

Subject Matter Expert

On the tags that I monitor most closely, such as xslt, there's an odd situation where we have half a dozen users who are the lead answerers - the vast majority of questions, if they're comprehensible at all, get answered by one of this small group, and we all know who we are. Yet I have no idea who the moderators are, all I know is that they occasionally get things really wrong (for example by closing a question that's perfectly answerable if you know enough about the topic).

I have absolutely no desire to be a moderator, life is too short for that, but as an expert in a particular area I would like to be able to engage with the moderators in such situations, to know who they are and to "advise" them when this is called for.

This also relates to the whole system of badges and brownie points (which I hate). As far as I can see the only point of these accolades is so that people reading your posts can see that you know what you are talking about. But that's defeated when you stray into an area where you are not an expert. It would be good to see answers from users who are acknowledged experts in the particular subject matter to be flagged as such.

Answer 22

Global coverage champion

This is a bit of a rubbish name, but let me explain what I mean, and perhaps someone can come up with a better one.

Stack Exchange is mostly conducted in English. For that reason, its coverage usually leans very heavily towards the preoccupations of people who, like myself, speak English.

To address this problem, we need more questions and answers about neglected (non-Anglophone) subjects. The Global Coverage Champions would be empowered to give a substantial rep bonus (hundreds or thousands of points) to users who ask and answer good questions on these topics.

SE is, of course, mainly technical sites. One imagines (though I could be wrong) that there is relatively little difference in the technical needs of people in Kenya, Peru, India, Canada or Italy. Python is Python, wherever you go.

It's a very different story on non-technical sites like History or Politics SE. The biggest tag is World War 2 - it has 1520 questions. For context, there are 126 questions about Africa. WW2 is an important subject, but it's not more important than the history of an entire continent since the beginning of time.

Another example: United States has 1478 questions. That's more than Russia, India, Japan and China combined. Again US history is an important topic, but is it more significant than the history of all those countries put together? Note that the precolonial Americas is not covered under this tag. Even if we include North America's entire history from European arrival to the present day, it's a far smaller expanse of time than the whole of Indian or Chinese history. And unlike African precolonial history, which was shamefully ignored by most academics until very recently, copious secondary sources (in languages other than English) exist which cover the history of the above four countries.

Politics SE is even more one-sided. It has 15,088 questions, and 6669 of these are tagged with United States! 1518 are tagged with United Kingdom.

Someone needs to reward users who can broaden the scope of these sites

This is not about penalising people who write on well-trodden topics. In no way am I suggesting that we need fewer questions about Anglophone countries and Anglophone preoccupations. I myself have written mostly about those topics.

What we need to do is generate more questions and answers about neglected topics. Someone needs to be empowered to give a substantial rep bonus (hundreds or thousands of points) to users who ask and answer good questions on these topics. If a post gets, say, a score of 5 or more and is not closed, the user should get points for writing it.

The Global Coverage Champion should solicit those questions and answers from, for example, non-English language stacks on SE. They should find out where speakers of Hindi, Japanese, Arabic or Swahili congregate across the internet and ask those people to submit questions here.

I've chosen nationality as the thing to focus on, but it's well known that SE, like much of the internet, has a diversity problem in more ways than one. If we try this and succeed, we can replicate the strategy for other diversity issues as well.

Answer 23

This seems like a solution looking for a problem. The problem isn't that people don't have armbands to do stuff they should be doing; the problem is that those actions aren't explicitly allowed, but instead implicitly allowed. Examples:

• curators: all those things are implicitly allowed by the editing, voting and bounty pages. There's no rule that says that you can't coordinate with others to make sure questions get the attention they deserve and the [tag]?tab=Frequent gives you an overall view of what is the most frequent questions on the tag (btw, please make that tab more prominent/default).
• tag curators: is just a rehashing of the gold badge privileges, which I personally think should be expanded to all close reasons. It's nothing new.
• audit moderators: we have the power of removing a bad audit via simple voting; the difference here is that we have to be aware of the bad audit first.
• mentorship: this is trying to funnel users towards a staging state, SE has more information about this than I do, but I don't think an armband would help here. This is structured guidance rather than unstructured, and should be done one on one, the public site isn't optimal for this.
• migration helper: is merely a lack of coordinated voting, since those small tags that have their own site members don't come often to SO. Chat rooms help here.
• Tag Manager and the others like it: this is mainly a request for better tools to manage tags and the creation of a guidance about "what should the tag corpus be" rather than a lack of roles. I already made proposals for the tooling aspects, which I will not rehash (mainly, bulk add/removal).
• Translation Reviewer: afaik, this already exists, it just doesn't get an armband. Also, any community member can report mistranslations.
• Global coverage champion: this can already be done by users, they simply aren't that interested.

As you can see, this is not a problem solved by RPG'ing our way to victory. It's merely a human problem and in some cases a lack of adequate tooling. If you fix the latter, the former will be easier. Also, I have a general distaste of armbands because if someone tells me that I can't edit a question because I'm not a curator, I will be very mad. Also, you have to consider the confusion aspects of it for external users (the 99% of the users that use the site). They already have problems correctly identifying the difference between a moderator and a user that can edit/close/vote/comment; adding more on top of it, will only cause more confusion.

I propose this: get devs cracking at better tooling for stuff that is needed, update the help center to have a non-exhaustive list of allowed actions (and explicitly tell that is not exhaustive too; this is very important), and try to give guidance so that humans can coordinate better. Multisite chatrooms could help?

Answer 24

A solution in search of a problem

And I mean that quite literally.

Instead of asking, "What roles?" you should be asking, "What problems?" Authority roles that grant additional powers should be created because there is a problem to be solved and it is a good fit for solving that problem, not because you've arbitrarily decided you wanted to create roles. You should be investigating what problems the communities are experiencing, and then new roles should be one possible solution among many on the table for solving it.

Answer 25

Mod Emeritus

This role is a different from most of the other suggestions. The focus is not on function but on honour.

When moderators retire after long and distinguished tenures, they revert to being standard users. There is no recognition of their contribution; it's almost like they were never mods in the first place.

I suggest that Community Managers be empowered to grant retiring moderators "Mod Emeritus" badges. Their username might be accompanied by a circle instead of a diamond, and they might retain some mod privileges such as access to mod-only chatrooms.

This would be a way to recognise the positive contributions of retiring mods who have shaped the tone and ethos of their community.

Answer 26

Help Officer

Many discussions on Meta are most interesting, and some provide details that the Help Center doesn't mention. A Help Officer would be a person that keeps up with the thousands of pages on Meta, looking for those things that really should be in the Help Center.

I could imagine this to require some priviledged interaction with management and access to some special extracting/editing tools. And why not make it rewarding, other than just the title...

The Help Officer could be put in charge of organizing polls on Meta where a vote can be cast based on a short one-line proposal.

Answer 27

Editor

Those that may not have many questions or many answers or comment a lot or vote a lot or review a lot or flag a lot but have sufficient rep (I think 2k is the bar), can still improve existing questions and answers by editing. I believe there are people like this or people who just like to improve existing content by editing it.

They would:

• choose specific, suitable question titles
• remove unnecessary parts (salutations, roundabout formulations)
• correct spelling or grammar mistakes
• improve formatting of text, tables, graphics
• streamline examples
• add-in feedback from comments
• check appropriate keyword usage

and thereby improve content, preferably of highly important (scored or visited) content. I would dare to say that the editing role is sufficiently different from the asker or answerer role with unique requirements. And the editing activity is surely having a very important impact on the success of the site, improving the quality of the content.

Answer 28

Support Partner

Many of the sites here have the capability of employees of the related products using SE as a support avenue and helping users here. An example might be Salesforce.

If a user can be validated as being an employee (via corporate email address for example), they can be highlighted as such in Stack Exchange and thus gain a level of trust from users needing support.

Answer 29

Site Feedback Aggregator

I admit that at first I thought this very Meta question was sort of absurd. And I do agree that it is a solution in search of a problem, as @jpmc26 suggested. However, as I thought about it more, I came to realize that this desperate search for "roles" might be part of a theme or trend that is broader in scope: Stack Exchange is trying to figure out how it can improve itself. So as bureaucratic as the whole role thing may seem, the initiative most likely has good intentions and this is good news.

I still don't think this means we necessarily need a bunch of new roles (although a few good ideas do turn up when combing through the answers here). But if we were to tackle these issues through the assignment of a "role", I would suggest the role of Site Feedback Aggregator. 🐊

This person would be in charge of scraping user feedback from real-world examples of where the SE format hasn't totally worked smoothly for users. It could come in the form of comment exchanges, the way answers are formatted, or just an observation of a site feature being misused with notable frequency. Ideally, this person would be familiar with a variety of SE sub-sites and aware of the nuanced needs that different communities have.

The aggregator's job would be (A) to observe opportunities for improvement based on the interactions taking place on the site (B) to consider possibilities for how improvements can be implemented - without developing any attachment to or insistence on how (as it is of course ultimately up to SE dev teams), but if asked for suggestions or opinions, the aggregator should be able to share some insight. (C) to be aware of what limitations and challenges the SE dev teams face, be aware of what problems they are already aware of, and have a sense for the scope of time and effort that is required to implement different types of changes.

The person in this role need not be identifiable as such, lest they become the target of the community's grievances. Rather, I envision this person as a neutral observer who is a member of the community like the rest of us.

In short, this space we have here is a community where site architecture shapes how conversations are had. Communication takes on certain formats. On the other hand, the community voices feedback about what is working and what isn't so much. Perhaps a Site Feedback Aggregator could help collect all the common issues/concerns in one place, and be the direct line between those who build Stack Exchange and its denizens.

^{Just an idea... since you asked.}

Answer 30

Mentor

Alt. Titles: Player-Coach, Coach, Big Sib, Stack Genius

Summary:

The "Mentor" or coach role facilitates platform on-boarding and programming knowledge transfer from advanced to beginner community members. The role will focus on chat-based support for users in need. The only official action of a Mentor outside of chat rooms would be to place (temporary) comments on poor questions or answers inviting the user into a mentorship chatroom. Mentors would focus on tags where they have established expertise.

Suggested Requirements:

• Minimum reputation (2k, perhaps? 5k?)
• Minimum badge awarded in the tag(s) serviced by the Mentor (Gold? or Silver?)
• 2 years as a user
• Average at least 1 hour per week in the chatroom each month

Permissions Awarded:

• "Mentor" label below avatar
• Personal Mentor chatroom access, mod. privileges
• Ability to post boilerplate comment inviting a user to their mentorship chatroom