@toscho told me one day in a very brief discussion in chat that this community doesn't need moderators to moderate it, this is a community driven site (as is every site in the stackexchange network) and should be moderated by the community. And I totally agree with that.
Since @kaiser announced the summer cleanup program, it had gone quite well with closing off topic questions, but it came to my attention and also concerns me at how many of us really participate in doing close votes
I've realised this weekend that none of the moderators done close votes, and the ones they did came from front end close votes, not back end close votes. Don't get me wrong (specially the mods :-)), I don't say the moderators have to do close votes, and I also don't need to know why they did not, but it all comes down to the point that @toscho made to me, we don't need moderators to close off topic questions. My question is, every member that have earned at least 3K reputation can participate in voting to close a question, and looking at the members list, we are quite a lot of users with that privilege.
At this stage we are only a handfull of members that actively doing close votes, and that is not enough. I've went through every question I've voted on during the last two days, and most questions just need one more vote to be put on hold, just one. It takes only 5 non moderators' votes to close a question.
I know that we all can only vote 20 times a day (unlike a site like Stack Overflow where you get 40 votes a day) with a total close vote limit of 24 (which I would like to see been increase to at least 40). This makes it extremely difficult for a handful of members to cast close votes on the huge volume of flagging going on due to the summer clean up program. We can't do front end and back end close votes due to the limits set for us.
Members with 3K+ reputation, my plea is this, we all are active in some way on the site, even if you just check in once daily or just participating in some small talk in chat, it only takes 10 minutes of your time to quickly check into the review dashboard and to do a couple of close votes. You really don't have to do any other type of review, that is well taken care of. I'm just asking for your time on close votes
And please, don't stop doing reviews if you got all the badges.
Remember, all of us are moderators in some sense, we don't need the diamond next to our names to moderate the site. We have earned this privilage through reputation. WPSE is our site, the community's site, not the moderators' site. Let us all participate and do our part
