User blog:Mrob27/OPEN DISCUSSION: ADMINISTRATOR ACCESS

This wiki was founded by Jmarsh97, who did a great job creating lots of pages and getting things started.

However, Jmarsh97 has (for good reasons I'm sure) been unable to spend the time to keep in touch with this wiki and take care of the tedious work of killing spam and so on.

Scooter8pie has on a couple occasions contacted the Wikia staff to deal with some of the really extreme cases of spam and profanity, and they were able to help. However, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't rise to the same level of urgency but still ought to be done. For example, it would be nice to be able to un-categorize something, or delete a page whose title was mis-spelled by mistake, etc.

Yesterday I contacted the Wikia staff myself, asking them "what can we do?". They replied:

From Grunny, Nov-29 01:11 pm (UTC):

Hi Robert,

Thanks for contacting Wikia. We have a page on the Community Central wiki where you can request admin status on any wiki that doesn't have an active admin team. Please see http://adopt.wikia.com for more information. On this page you can review the adoption criteria, as well as put in your request (remember to always provide a link to the wiki).

If there's an active user community, please start a discussion on the wiki about who would make the best admins, and why you would like to become one. Please provide a link to this discussion at the Adoption page, which will make it easy for staff to give the rights to the user(s) the community agrees on.

Good luck, and thanks for using Wikia!

Cheers, Grunny

Here is the discussion area for other wikis that have had this issue in the past. You can see lots of different examples of problems that came up and how they were dealt with.

They will appoint administrators if we take the right steps and make a request. One important step is to have an open discussion. here is an example of a discussion like this (in another video game wiki).

Another requirement is we have to wait until it's been 60 days after the old administrator went inactive. Jmarsh97 hasn't been around since Oct 27th, so that gives us a while to discuss this.

Being an administrator is kind of a pain because you're usually the only one who can do things and others will ask you to help. Often you'll get caught in the middle of an argument that (to you) seems pretty stupid but (to those other people) is the biggest problem in the world.

My Proposal
We need at least two people at the bare minimum, and preferably a few more. The important thing is not to break the chain (make sure there's always at least one active person who can appoint someone else to take their place).

You can see a list of all the users here: Special:ListUsers. "Wikia" and "Default" are automatic edits done by the system, so they don't count as users.

Measuring by number of edits, it looks like me and Scooter8pie are the ones who are really doing a lot here, and we seem to have a lot of time to spend on it. I also notice Albert.rutkowski has done a lot but maybe can't visit as often.

So I would suggest at the start, we should ask for Scooter8pie and Albert.rutkowski to be made administrators, and I suppose maybe someone else can nominate me (because it's a conflict of interest to recommend myself :-)

There are several other active users, who have been here recently, and are writing good stuff. I don't want to single people out by choosing where to draw the line, but if you are interested, you should speak up here. Also, if we get new administrators, then you'll be able to ask later. An administrator can appoint others to be administrators.

Request for Comments
Please put a comment here on this Blog, and tell us what you think about this proposal.

There should be nothing that needs to be said privately. I invite you to be honest about me. For example, you could say "Mrob27, I don't like what you did to the Materials article". It might be hard to say, but it's better than not saying it and then getting angry later if I start doing even worse stuff as an admin.

In any case, just try to stick to the facts and don't call names. Hopefully if there was any real problem with what anyone's been doing so far, then you've already made comments anyway.

Mrob27 15:07, November 29, 2011 (UTC)