Health SE is advancing. We have our first community promotion ad running and we are getting close to implementing our disclaimer. We are finally beginning to work on some of the problems I talked about in http://meta.health.stackexchange.com/questions/316/advancing-health-se?cb=1. Still, there are some areas that we need to work on if we want this site to be successful. The biggest problem that I see right now is that we don't have enough community moderation.
In A Theory of Moderation, it talks about the moderators for each Stack Exchange community and why they are needed. Still, it does say one thing that really sticks out.
But what do community moderators do? The short answer is, as little as possible!
That's right. The moderators here on Stack Exchange should do as little as possible. That is actually one of the signs of a healthy Stack Exchange site; it means that community is able to take care of itself. Right now, Health SE is not doing that. We have 18 people (besides the moderators) who can vote to close questions. We need those 18 people to do exactly that. The moderators shouldn't be unilaterally closing every single off-topic questions. We shouldn't have to go through every question and answered posted here, making sure they are a good fit here on Health SE. Sadly, that has been the case a lot of times here on Health. That should be the community's job. We moderators will still try to act as regular community members should and we will also review questions and answers that have been flagged, but we don't want to have the only word in deciding whether questions should be closed and answers should be deleted.
How you can get involved in helping to moderating this site
Nearly everyone on this site can help by getting involved on Meta Health SE, voting up good content, flagging off-topic questions or low quality content, and suggesting edits or posting comments on posts that need to be improved
At 125 reputation, you can also begin to downvote bad content, along with the above mentioned moderating abilities
At 350 reputation, you can start to help guide new users posting for the first time, by reviewing questions and answers in the First Posts and Late Answers review queues
At 500 reputation, you can vote to close off-topic questions and reopen questions that should be reopened. You also have access to the Close Votes and Reopen Votes queues. This is one of the most important parts of community moderation, but even if you haven't reached this reputation threshold, you can still flag questions as off-topic
Once you reach 1000 reputation, your edits are automatically implemented and you can review other Suggested Edits, but more importantly, you can review in the Low Quality Posts review queue. Here, you can review posts that have been flagged and decide whether action needs to be taken
At 2000 reputation, you can access the moderator tools, where you can review some of the sites stats and also review the reviews others have made. You can also vote to delete questions
Once you reach 4000 reputation (which no one has yet), you can vote to delete and undelete answers. This is the closest you can get to being a moderator without actually being one, and is the place that everyone should hope to get to
We need you, the community, to help build Health SE. We mods love moderating here, but with your help, our job could be made much easier. And not only does community moderation help lessen the workload for everyone, it also will make the SE team look at us as a more complete community, something that every SE should strive for. Feel free to post any feedback you have about this post or ideas you have about encouraging community moderation here.
