Is moderator monopolization healthy for the site?

Question

My sampling may be skewed, but when I look at recent questions, I see a significant number of them edited by one of the moderators. I don't see this phenomenon on other SO sites (or at least I haven't noticed it).

This same moderator unilaterally deleted a more informative answer of mine that competed with his 0-voted, but accepted, answer to his own question.

While helping to seed questions may be a valid strategy during the building phase of the site, it seems possible that having one or a few users, especially moderators, dominate the site could have the effect of discouraging participation (which is already quite low).

What do others think?

Answer 1

I definitely think that moderators should exercise restraint, especially in deleting answers. There's a reason for the voting system: good answers will rise, bad answers will fall, and even if two answers are very similar, the community can judge and guide with votes.

As for the frequency of question edits, have you looked at the edit log? Have you seen cases where the edits are heavy-handed or otherwise inappropriate? I haven't looked myself, but maybe I'll check a few out.

Answer 2

I completely agree -- I've actually been noticing the same thing happening over on cooking.SE, where there's one user who has rather detailed answers shortly after most questions are asked ... so there's no reason for other people to monitor questions to help out. (and they're pretty well blocked from getting reputation, as the initial answers are fairly detailed).

As for your specific case -- I think that your answer was useful, as it effectively said 'hey, they're now available'. There was one bit in there that I'm guessing Patrick too objection to (which I think is a completely legitimate comment, but I trimmed it ... still not 100% sure why I did; I'm not typically one for censorship ... I guess so I don't have to deal with bickering like I did when moderating cooking.SE when I'd undo things that other moderators had done)