2017 Moderator Election

If you vote for me, I'll do the following:

• listen to you. I'm just like you: come here for answers and go about my own business immediately after getting an answer. I don't hang out here all day, because my family and my boss need me too.
• politely ask OP to compress their thoughts into fewer words and better a picture whenever I see a question that doesn't fit into my screen in its entirety
• maintain a balance between brief answers and deep answers
• all moderators seem to be male caucasians, so I'm going to bring the female minority perspective
• be open to new approaches and trends that come from practice. These days it's a lot of machine learning, so I'd be encouraging us to answer their questions so that they keep coming here

My goal in life is to kill Data Science SE (long overdue) by making it obsolete and everyone forget the words "data science" once and for all.

Final point: first three candidates in this election -- amoeba, gung and Tim -- are obvious choices, a la "isn't he already a moderator?!" I'm throwing myself into this as a "no way this guy is in the office" kind of an alternative for you.

War and Peace

Aksakal

Why me. I have been fairly active on Meta, in particular in the tag related-issues, and have coordinated several large tag reorganization projects. This kind of work would get a lot easier if I were a mod. The unmerged tag synonyms will be merged and the tags that need to be burninated will get burninated. Finally. (Apart from that, I like organizing existing threads through duplicates, merges, canonical Qs, etc., and with mod privileges this could be more effective.)

Why not me. During all these years, I have entirely neglected review queues. Monitoring review queues to quickly close & re-open stuff is one of the most important moderator tasks. However, I did not do it before and am unlikely to start now. My "candidate score" is 3 points short of maximum because I am missing some of the review badges. Among the existing nominees, @Tim and especially @gung are much more active in moderation as well as answering.

After some hesitation, I decided to nominate myself because there was not enough candidates and because I was encouraged by several kind users. But I don't know if such division of labour among mods makes sense.

Q&A

We're most of the way through the nomination period, and there's been little interest thus far. I guess I'll throw my hat into the ring. People who've been around Cross Validated have probably seen me, but I can briefly introduce myself using the why me / why not me style common in Stack Overflow's elections. My answers to the 2017 Moderator Election Q&A are here.

Why me: I've been on CV for a long time, and I'm pretty familiar with the site's conventions and culture. I already do a certain amount of moderating-esque tasks as a citizen of the site. Becoming a moderator may be less of a shift for me.

Why not me: I'm a grumpy old man, and I seem to be getting grumpier as I get older. Moreover, although I'm often around, I increasingly busier and busier in my personal and professional life, which will constrain the amount of time I will be able to dedicate to moderating tasks.

I am an active member of CrossValidated for more than three years. During this time I gained a decent reputation. I regularly use moderation tools (open/close votes, creating and editing tag wikis, proposing new tags, flagging offensive comments etc).

I agree with the StackExchange Theory of Moderation that basically says that the site is community-maintained and the moderators should do as little as possible. I don't believe a moderator would be able, or should be able, to make any major changes on the site. I believe that the major difference that moderator can make here, is to help to "clean up" CV by merging threads, cleaning-up tags, locking the old now-off-topic threads etc. (those are the things I'd focus).

I want to make it clear, that while I visit CV regularly, I won't be able to treat moderation duties as a "full time job". I am afraid that even if I tried to be a "full time" moderator, it'd inevitable lead to routine and making bad moderation decisions.

See also my answers for the community questions.