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Is a reputation driven privilege system appropriate to implement community moderation on a higher-level physics site?

• In the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites, community moderation is implemented by means of a reputation based privilege system. This means, that the more reputation the users have, the more power they get to take part in governing and moderating the site, can impact the scope of the site, etc ... However, this approach only works well if a strong positive correlation between reputation and in depth knowledge and expertise about the topic of the site, can be assumed. Concerning implementing community moderation on Physics Overflow, I am not sure how strongly we should rely on such a reputation based privilege system too, as for example on Physics SE the necessary precondition of a strong correlation between reputation and deeper technical knowledge about advance topics, has broken down as described in some more details here: http://tpproposal.wordpress.com/2013/12/31/is-a-reputation-driven-privilege-system-appropriate-to-implement-community-moderation-on-physics-overflow/ An alternative to making use of a reputation based privilege system for higher order moderation privileges such as for example closing / reopening questions, would be to assign the permission for such moderator actions exclusively to  trusted and knowledgeable moderators, experts, etc; but let the community express its opinion by appropriate meta polling threads. An example of such a meta list is the request for reopen votes applied by Mathematics SE and MathOverflow for community reopening questions http://meta.mathoverflow.net/q/223/30967 The working principle of these meta threads (for closing, reopening, deleting, etc posts) is that the question itself introduces the purpose of the (for example reopen) review list, and the community can then nominate in answers posts that should be acted on (reopend for example). If there is an agreement that a question should be reopend for example, expressed by a positive enough net score of the corresponding answer, the moderators, experts, etc with the necessary privileges can just do it. What do you think is the better approach to implement good community moderation, are there other possibilities and issues to consider we did not yet think about?

• Answer:

  FWIW, I like the way quora does things....  I was a frequent poster at another physics site, and I stopped because I didn't get along with the moderators. 1) There is one issue in that there can be a remarkably large disjunction between someone's technical ability and their ability to explain something.  Just because someone has a Nobel prize for example doesn't mean that they can explain a problem in basic Physics 101. 2) The other problem is that if you rate by technical ability, you can drive away people that are good at explaining things.  For example, if you have a basic question on Newtonian mechanics, and you make it difficult for a smart undergraduate to answer that question, you are forcing someone with deep knowledge of string theory to do something that they don't have the time to do and may not be good at doing. 3) One thing that I noticed is that certain topics encourage cranks.  Quantum gravity will attract cranks.  Solid state physics and molecular physics won't.  Also, I've found that some cranks are "reasonable" in that they have weird views because they've never seen "real physics." 4) It's better to allow downvotes than to delete a post all together.