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I agree but both SE and Wikipedia suffer from moderators being picked based on karma. Karma is achievable easily despite any motives and personality traits which are bad. They should be picked by humans as they are a better and more objective judge of who is fit to moderating a site to the site's standards.

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AFAIK, SE mods are not picked based on karma, you can nominate yourself to be mod, and users will vote according to many indicators, not karma only.

Elections: http://stackoverflow.com/election

While this is correct, I think his complaint is about the privileges that high-reputation users get. Most moderation is done by ordinary users, not by elected moderators.

Your assumption is correct.

That's not strictly true.

Full moderators are elected... but high-rep users take on a ton of moderation tasks.

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