Ben Reiniger
I've been around the site for just shy of 4 years now, and have been employed as a data scientist for about the same time. Prior to that, I was in academia as a mathematician; I take great joy in answering questions here and on related sites as a way to partially relive my teaching days, and I have used the Q&A here and at CV.SE as perhaps my main learning resource as I transitioned careers. I am nominating myself to aid the community additionally as a moderator, both as another face for the community and as a janitor for maintaining a high quality Q&A repository.
- How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
If the comments are unwelcoming, it needs to be addressed, possibly through direct contact with the user. If the comments are worse than just unwelcoming, they should be summarily deleted and the user contacted and disciplined as appropriate. If the arguments are just arguments about a subject, they should likely be moved to chat but otherwise are OK.
- How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?
Bring it up with that moderator, possibly with the third as well. Having consistent community guidelines is important, and that is most easily set out by the moderators.
- Visiting the reviews queues is the activity farthest removing from visiting the site simply to ask or answer questions. In the last year or two, how active have you been in the review queues?
Not very. I've struggled for quite some time with the on-topic boundaries and cross-site overlap, so the close queue's "off-topic" reasons have given me pause. The other queues and close reasons are more straightforward, and happily it seems the community keeps up well with those, so I haven't spent much time in them (though I vote and comment fairly extensively on posts from browsing the homepage). I've been starting to again go over the community's consensus of on-topic questions (both by monitoring the close queue and its history, and reading again some meta posts [thanks to @V2Blast for adding the scope tag to several]), and will expect to be more active in the queues whether elected or not.
- For a small site like ours, often it is difficult for 5 members to visit the close vote review queues in a reasonable period of time. As a moderator your close vote is binding. So, voting to close will close the question regardless of how the community at large has received the question. Discuss how you will use your moderator close vote powers and how you have recently used the powers you currently have. For additional context, see the longer version of this question.
On the "harshness" of closing described in the long-form question, I understand the hardliners' view of the SE model and the importance of maintaining a high standard to a quality Q&A repository; however, I can also see how close votes and downvotes are received especially by newcomers as unfriendly. I think giving guidance toward editing for reopening as a comment along with the close vote is helpful; the close messages are pretty clear, but sometimes something specific to the question at hand is better. Since the release of the "Follow" feature, I generally follow each question I vote to close, to be notified of edits that might warrant reopening.
It looks like I've cast 53 close votes in the past year, with 28 close queue reviews. (I suppose most of my close votes are cast on questions I spot from the homepage.) I expect to be more active in the latter, as discussed in my response to the previous question.
- One of the most important responsibilities of a moderator is being on the site regularly. Moderators are expected to visit the site regularly and go to the moderator queues and then maybe also the review queues. How often do you visit Data Science or other Stack Exchange sites during a day or week?
I visit a few times nearly every day, primarily here at Data Science, Cross Validated, and StackOverflow.
- What is your view on the overlap of this site with others in the stackexchange network? How do/will you determine whether a question in an overlapping area should be retained, migrated, or closed?
I posed this question before I had a good answer, and still can't say I have a clear-cut criterion for what's on topic here, but I will continue to make a concerted effort to align with the community. Maybe I should plug the cross-site linking and crossover questions feature request while I'm at it; go upvote if you like the idea.
My current view is that DS can differ from CV as being more focused on applications; DS:CV::engineering:science, if you will. That has clearly not been seen as the distinction, or at least not enforced as such; indeed most of my answers probably would fit well on CV. In the short term, I expect to be pretty lenient, keeping posts here as long as they are reasonably on-topic here.
DS differs from SO by requiring more than a minimal focus on the business problem or ML theory. The difficult overlaps then are package-specific questions that need a solid understanding of the theory underlying the implementation. Again for the short term I think erring on the side of keeping the question where asked is best.
AI started with a pretty clearly different focus than here, but a recent visit found a number of questions that I would be inclined to migrate to CV rather than keep here, nonetheless on AI.
Open Data and Operations Research seem pretty distinct from us.
- In your opinion, what do moderators do?
Help the community maintain the quality of the site and a welcoming environment.
- A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
It's almost strange that previous answers may be retroactively seen as more important because of the answerer's current diamond. That said, I stand behind my answers and comments, and I don't think this will have much effect.
- In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 4k or 5k rep?
I'm already well past the top non-diamond privileges. The binding close votes, moderator flag management, and even just the diamond badge itself will help me to help the community.
