It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation
While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together. To that end, here is how the moderation done here on Mathematica breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 1 12
Users destroyed 18 0
Users contacted 4 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 25 791
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 23 675
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 30 927
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 9 206
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 160 2,812
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 354 6,141
Tags merged 31 0
Tag synonyms proposed 19 0
Tag synonyms created 19 0
Questions unprotected 1 0
Questions reopened 59 35
Questions protected 3 8
Questions migrated 61 33
Questions merged 1 0
Questions flagged⁴ 0 226
Questions closed 1,006 1,784
Question flags handled⁴ 91 135
Posts unlocked 0 62
Posts undeleted 9 322
Posts locked 1 138
Posts deleted⁵ 338 3,275
Posts bumped 0 1,215
Comments undeleted 9 0
Comments flagged 0 134
Comments deleted⁶ 1,468 4,779
Comment flags handled 107 27
Answers flagged 3 720
Answer flags handled 519 204
All comments on a post moved to chat 35 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Mathematica without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 3 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 3, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁴ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Wishing you all a happy new year...
