What do Volunteer Supervisors do on WikiAnswers?

Answer 1

Answer 1

They deal with vandals, supervise certain categories of questions, filter answers, and stop people from changing other people's answers. There are more, as you will find out!

They make sure that short and long-term goals are being met in an appropriate manner.

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Answer 2

There are really six jobs which come under the header of a supervisor: Vandalism and Flagged Questions, Category Categorization, Dispute Resolution, Fact-Checking, Grammar, and Organization.

Vandalism and Flagged Question: These are the easiest to resolve. Usually the person who posted the vandalism or triggered the flags is not a major contributor and who may not be familiar with the rules. Additionally, it is likely that the contribution is objectively ridiculous or unintelligible, so your elimination or reversion of improper conduct will not cause waves. Often, especially in religious categories, questions are flagged because of edit wars, which makes the situation difficult to resolve, becomes it becomes a dispute resolution.

Category Categorization: Adding or removing questions from the category that do or do not belong there.

Dispute Resolution: This involves intervening between two contributors who are either engaged in an edit war, or unfriendly discussion wars. These disputes should be resolved by alerting the parties in question that the debating is not allowed and that you would like to resolve the issue. Then you go back into the question history to determine which answer came first, what the problems are, and determine a compound answer that balances both debaters' interests. It is a hard process. Not every contributor or supervisor, likes being told that they made a problematic step on the site. Settling issues will ruffle feathers, but if you can find an impartial resolution, all parties involved will respect it in the long run.

Fact-Checking: There are times when people use incorrect information. The standard should be used is that if something is asserted when it is clearly incorrect on a factual basis. For example, if somebody said that "the official religion of the Vatican is Islam", this would be clearly incorrect on a factual basis since the Vatican professes to be the center of Catholicism and not to have Islam as its official religion. The error should be corrected. By contrast, if someone asserts an unpopular theory, such as "all modern conflicts in Africa are a direct result of Western government agencies", this is an issue of interpretation and there is way that such a view is possible, although extremely unlikely. The supervisor may end up arguing against that perspective in a second answer, but an interpretation contrary to the mainstream is certainly acceptable, especially in history, literature, or religion categories.

Grammar: This is relatively straightforward. If your native language is English (or you have natural command of English), you can help polish the grammar of other contributors in order to make their points clearer. However, preserving the meaning of the content is more important than proper grammar, so be careful.

Organization within Answers: There are often times when different contributors repeat the same information or the information presented by multiple contributors is disjointed and would benefit from some organization. Perhaps in a debated question, it is better to separate the different sides of the argument out or in a question suggesting multiple causes of a historical event to title each type of cause and create a coherent narrative. However, this is very difficult to perfect. Often people will be less than excited to have their answer rearranged and if any content is missing, it will cause resentment. It is better to err on the side of caution with reorganization than the other four duties.

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Answer 3

• Lock (and unlock) questions
• Trash questions (moving them into special categories that explain why they're not good questions)
• See questions that have been trashed
• Revert answers to earlier versions
• Block users, either temporarily or permanently
• A few other things, but those are the big ones

Answer 2

The main role of a Supervisor on Answers (WikiAnswers) is to improve and maintain the quality of the website.

Supervisors are contributors who have been trusted to have some extra tools given to them. The majority of these tools are to improve the organisation and general quality of the contributions on the website. Some of them are also used for handling vandals (rule breakers).


The main things volunteer Supervisors do on Answers (WikiAnswers):

• Provide assistance and support to other contributors, regular or new
  
• Merge identical questions
• Ensure questions are in correct categories
• Ensure the spelling and grammar in answers and questions are correct
• Report bugs and issues with the site to the Supervisor community via the private Supervisor forum
• Remove questions and answers which should not be on the website because they are bad taste or illegal
  
• Ensuring answers are correct when in doubt by checking their accuracy on other sources
• Checking into flags (reported answers/questions) that have been generated by patrol bots or users and dealing with the reasons why the flag was generated
• Handling and dealing with difficult people in a professional and mature manner
• Defending the website from spam attacks and other forms of attack by specialising as an optional Vandal Patrol supervisor
  
• Other tasks as requested by the Community Assistants (Community Managers) or as per any extra optional programs you take part in
  

Bear in mind that Supervisors are regarded as trusted educators. Not the internet police. While they do have the ability to deal with unwelcome people, the majority of their tools are aimed at general organisation and improvements on the website.
Supervisors are not above the rules. They can still earn warnings and they can still be blocked (banned).
The supervisory role is voluntary. However you will earn some brilliant experience in managing a community and working on a website which will look great on Job Applications. Some people do it as a hobby. Others do it simply because they want to help out.


What types of Supervisor roles are there?

• Trainee Supervisors
• Regular Supervisors
• Senior Supervisors
  
• Vandal Patrol and Senior Vandal Patrol Supervisors
  
• Mentor and Senior Mentor Supervisors
  
• Advanced and Senior Advanced Supervisors
  
• Program Supervisor
  
• Community Assistant (employee of Answers.com)

Information on becoming a Supervisor
In order to become a Supervisor, you should show that you have a good standing on the website and are able to use the basic tools that you have access to.

There is a program on Answers called The Initiates Program (or TIP for short) which prepares people for the role of Supervisor in the community. Members of TIP are given tasks to perform and are mentored by the people who run the program. At the end of the short program, you may be invited to become a Supervisor here.
Not everyone goes through TIP to become a Supervisor, for example those who have been on the website for some years, in that case you will be referred directly to the management to consider inviting to the Supervisor team.

When a person becomes a Supervisor, they will be enrolled in a program called the Mentoring Program. There they will be taught by a Mentor about everything they need to know about being a Supervisor. At this time they are a trainee Supervisor. They will only be a fully-fledged Supervisor when they graduate from the Mentoring program.

When a Supervisor has gradated from the Mentoring Program, they have the optional choice of joining another program called Vandal Patrol.
Vandal Patrol is a program which focuses on dealing with vandals and rule-breakers on Answers.



The requirements for joining TIP and/or becoming a Supervisor are:

• You must be 15 or over.
  This is for legal reasons. As in - you must be 15 or over because the law says so. If you try to lie about your age then you could earn yourself a block (ban) from Answers because it is an act of fraud
  
  
• You must not have any serious violations against your account.
  Serious violations are considered but not limited to cyberbullying, illegal acts and so on)
  
  
• Have a fair amount of contributions and show that you can use the tools.
  
  
• You must not have a previous banned account.
  Yes, we can tell who is using multiple accounts. Warnings earned on previous accounts do carry over onto new accounts.
  
  
• Have a good knowledge of the Guidelines (the rules).

To join TIP, contact either:

• Skullcandy88 (Scott)
  
• Xnicola (Nicola)
  
• TIP@WikiAnswers.com

More information can be found in these places:

Supervisors:

• Related question: What are the requirements of becoming a Supervisor on Answers
• Help Centre: Supervisors
  

TIP:

• The official TIP Community Forum recruitment and information thread
• The TIP category on Answers containing FAQ on the program
  
• An information page on TIP