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 Artificial Intelligence breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
Action Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended² 3 12
Users destroyed 8 0
Users contacted 7 0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue 477 816
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue 10 23
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue 103 85
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue 71 140
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue 504 953
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue 221 317
Tags merged 6 0
Tag synonyms proposed 5 0
Tag synonyms created 4 0
Questions reopened 16 0
Questions protected 1 4
Questions migrated 38 0
Questions flagged⁴ 3 448
Questions closed 161 18
Question flags handled⁴ 325 126
Posts unlocked 0 3
Posts undeleted 4 29
Posts locked 0 71
Posts deleted⁵ 157 493
Posts bumped 0 1,032
Escalations to the CM team 2 0
Comments undeleted 5 0
Comments flagged 0 336
Comments deleted⁶ 565 946
Comment flags handled 228 108
Answers flagged 9 369
Answer flags handled 309 69
All comments on a post moved to chat 8 0
Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Artificial Intelligence 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...