As you may have noticed, the big news of the day is that your moderator team has changed. I thought I would take this as an opportunity to issue your community a call to action.
The moderators on any Stack Exchange site have a very important and very difficult job. There are multiple reasons for this, some of which are more obvious than others. Most of our frequent users know that mods are the people who actually handle all the flags. The instant delete, migrate and close powers that come with the moderator diamond get a lot of attention, too.
Parts of the job that don't involve special privileges don't get talked about as much, but are no less important. Mods spend a lot of time—on meta and elsewhere in the community—gently guiding discussion and helping to keep things on track as the community grows. Behind the scenes, they serve as the primary liaisons between you fine people reading this and those of us who work at Stack Exchange.
In short, they're here to help.
It can't all be up to them, though. There's only so much that even the best moderator team can do when a community doesn't have established guidelines.
Over the past months and years, this meta site has seen its share of debates about deletions and content. In many cases, they've been about very specific cases and people. That is not necessarily invalid, but has also been less constructive than it could have been.
Long ago, early Stack Exchange users realized that it's basically never a good idea to "call out" specific users publicly. Admittedly, moderators are a little bit of a special case. Meta is a correct place to "appeal" if you feel a moderator has made a mistake, but even then, it's important to focus on actions, not people and to be civil. (For what it's worth, "focus on what was done rather than who did it" is also general advice that we give to moderators about how to do their jobs.)
What might be more helpful now is looking more broadly at what you do and do not want to see on the site. Do you believe that all answers should require supporting sources, and that there should be a site policy for deleting answers without citations? Start a new meta post proposing that. Or maybe you think language questions should be considered off-topic? Ask a meta question suggesting that.
Be specific. When possible, link to things you've actually seen on the site. For example, I myself got the idea to mention "language questions" just now because I thought this meta question did a good job at what I'm suggesting while keeping the focus on content and site policy, not people.
Please see this as a call to action to start discussions on what actions moderators should take when they see X or Y type of content on the site. Waiting until something happens and then saying "we should have had a policy about that, and if we did, the policy would have been the opposite of what happened"... well, that's too little, too late.
Again, the mods and CMs are here to help, but we cannot dictate. The mods are volunteering their time, and Stack Exchange is providing the servers, but the community guidelines must come from the community itself.
