Generally no. But you should have listed your questions here because you're potentially being too non-specific for us to give productive answers. I second Stefan Kohl's comment.

Well, one of the problems is the about page is only available when one first logs in. That's easy to miss. It should also be made fairly prominently available when one goes to ask a question. Moreover, we should try to ensure it looks more about the site than just about the generic SE format.

The "Tell me more" link goes to the "About" page. A user that reads the entire "About" page receives an "Informed" badge. At the moment a little under 700 users have recieved the "Informed" badge, yet we have tens of thousands of users. I think the "About" page does more to explain the Stack Exchange format than the specifics of what this site is about. Given that so few people read it, it seems not so useful.

I worry this encourages people to manipulate questions for the purpose of giving self-aggrandizing answers. By and large I think we need to try to respect the will of the question-asker. Modifications to questions not done by the author should only be to correct basic features to ensure the question is understood: spelling, tags and such.

This is more of a math-sociology rant now but I also suspect that the evolution towards "moralistic language" in mathematics, when you see questions like "what is the right formalism for..." are symptoms of more or less the same thing. Some people explain what they mean by "right" but far too often people won't, or can't.

I think a reason for this misconception is that there's a significant percentage of mathematicians (this is a seat-of-the-pants computation) that are afraid of discussions that lean towards motivation and intent. Asking people what exactly they're interested in and why -- what is the greater purpose -- these questions can be frightening, especially to a grad student that takes it as an axiom that certain things are important. Enough mathematicians have a hard time explaining why their own research important on their grant applications.

I think the current moderators do not share country of origin as much as they share a common university for their Ph.D, Berkeley.

I'll give it some thought. I suppose this year is better than any for me. Thanks for the nomination.

I agree with Mark on this, if you are posting homework questions and hiding the fact that it's homeowork, it's reasonable to assume the person is cheating. On an MO question there's a strong onus on the poster to make it clear what one's motivation is.