2016 Moderator Election

My name is Jamie, and I've been a contributor to this site for the past couple years. My interest in philosophy comes initially from my faith as a Catholic, but in my posts on this site I've aspired to the StackExchange standards of responding with objective material about our shared corpus.

I took some philosophy classes as an undergrad, and have since graduation done a fair amount of self study reading Plato, Augustine, Aristotle, Aquinas, and others. I also follow the History of Philosophy podcast, which I highly recommend. Participating in this community has also taught me a lot about the field of Philosophy.

In handling my review queues, I've generally done the following:

1. Be patient and welcoming to new-comers, and explain how to improve the content they post
2. Bias for closing questions, not as a signal that the effort is unwelcomed, but rather to signal that the question needs work, and others shouldn't post answers.
3. Nudge people in the direction of objective questions and answers by making statements that are verifiable.

I'll throw in my lot, since we seem a little short on nominees.

My activity has been up and down over the past four years, but I'm always lurking - so I can easily take on moderating responsibilities at any time, and I've done that in streaks of editing over the years.

When I'm involved, I tend to be hands-off about sub-par posts, commenting just to encourage development and greater clarity. Only in the case of obvious trolls or unsalvageably poor posts do I intervene directly.

I have two big concerns about this SE, both of which have influenced my more passive participation: first, we need experts making high-quality contributions to various subjects; second, we need a smooth pipeline for getting new users up to good standards.

On the former, I feel well-placed to push things forward since I'm heading into a PhD program in philosophy. On the latter, I doubt there's much to be done viz. getting better first-time posts. Like Joseph, it seems to me we can just try and make people feel welcome.

I've watched this site bud and grow for so long under the care of our awesome pro-tem moderators (thank you all!) - looking ahead, it would be great to give back.

Hey there! My name is Joseph and I've been a moderator pro tempore since the site's inception.

My moderation style tends to be fairly "low touch", mainly watching review queues -- although you may also have seen me occasionally prompting questioners to "unpack" the philosophical interest or importance of questions. (Generally I am looking to make sure that philosophical motivation and context is fully spelled-out.)

I have also been involved in spring cleaning efforts -- trying to help wrangle tags or ensure questions have headlines formatted as titles. For quality control, I tend to focus largely on prominent questions (like the mainpage) and work hard to ensure that we are maintaining a standard of clarity and depth.

One of my main concerns is to help spark interest in our community from experts. I also spend a lot of time thinking about how to maintain an open and inclusive atmosphere that is welcoming to newcomers.

I've really enjoyed the time I've spent here, and I am excited about the changes in store for our community!

Thanks for taking the time to participate in these elections!

I have been more of a lurker and observer as of late, as I have found certain aspects of this groups policy to be less than satisfactory.

I have a broad breadth of training in all schools of philosophy but my depth of study and personal interests are in the following fields

Metaphysics

Eastern Philosophy - primarily Tibetan Buddhism, but also Zen, Taoism, and >Hinduism

Analytic Philosophy - History of 21st Century Philosophy

Existentialism

Philosophy of Mind

With only a mere BA in the field I do not have a huge curriculum vitae to back me in this self nomination.

I can only say the approach I will take as a moderator :

• Encouraging edits over closing

• Providing an alternate perspective from the current moderator group, often acting as an advocate for questions that might be deemed "Not fit for the site" prematurely.

• An open mind

• Stepping in when necessary only

Fields I will always defer to other moderators on

Ethics

Epistemology

Ancient (Read : Plato, Aristotle, etc)

As I have training in these fields, but little interest in them.