Last Epoch Wiki:Village Pump/User Roles and the Wiki Community

I've been considering different ways for us to select who we would like to see become Administrators on the wiki.

The most common one - in my experience, at least - is some take on Requests for Adminship, as seen on Wowpedia, The Vault, Guild Wars Wiki, GuildWiki, and doubtlessly others. I feel like it would be a good idea to adopt the general concept ourselves and decide on some of the particulars for our own community. Preferably as much of this discussion as possible will occur on-wiki so it is accessible for contributors who haven't joined us yet. This is partially because I want the community to feel empowered to later suggest changes to our chosen solution, and I think being able to see how the decision was made would be encouraging. Not knowing how or where a decision was reached may lead to them feeling excluded, or that their ideas aren't welcome.

If there's a consensus that RfAs are a good approach, then some details we could discuss are;


 * The possible creation of broadly similar Requests for B'cratship.
 * Do we accept users nominating others, self-nominations, or both? (Or neither? If so - what?)
 * Whether there are any formal requirements for eligibility - if so, please include proposals.
 * Should the general approach to be to have as many trusted Administrators as possible, or to only add new Administrators as-and-when needed?
 * If we are talking about an out-right vote, or editors putting forth reasons for or against a nomination which is ultimately decided by the Bureaucrats.

Your opinion is valuable. Please let us know what you think. — sarno | TALK | 15:15, 13 June 2018 (UTC)


 * What is the need for Administrator's? I mean what can they do that other contributors can't? Is it necessary to have multiple yet?
 * I would probably say to offer "Request's for adminship" and decided on a case by case basis,
 * i.e. looking at the user's contributions and then deciding based on the quality/quantity of edit's.


 * My thought on this Caseyy89 (talk) 15:31, 13 June 2018 (UTC)


 * In a nutshell, Administrators have the Ban button, the Delete button, and can edit pages such as the main page which are attractive targets for trolls / vandals and thus not open to editing by most people.
 * They can also make changes to the appearance of the wiki (such as when I added the Village Pump link to the sidebar), make changes to the Abuse Filter (can prevent certain edits by certain people), and unban themselves As you might imagine, an Administrator unbanning themselves suggests a conflict of interests and raises questions about whether they're abusing the tools they have access to - it can rapidly lead to a community turning against the Administrator in question and it's not uncommon for a Bureaucrat to remove them from the position as a result. — sarno | TALK | 12:04, 16 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Personally I'd be in favor of having more roles whose privileges/responsibilities are more consolidated (e.g. Cargo Maintenance, Featured Image Committee, Edit Patroler, etc.) I feel that these smaller roles could be given out on a more liberal basis to those that demonstrate the capacity/willingness in those specific areas, as opposed to the Administrator role which has more privileges and thus consideration for that role requires more depth. In talking with Gamepedia staff however, this may be more effort than it's worth (Game_widow seems to be the only that knows how to do it).


 * I thinks RfAs would probably be a good approach for the administrator role, the other option being administrators being decided at the sole discretion of the Bureaucrat.


 * It's my understanding that on Gamepedia the Bureaucrat role is intended for game developers (with only a few legacy bureaucrats on certain older wikis).
 * Both would probably be the easiest methodology.
 * In general I think most wikis require a certain number of contributions and/or length of time on the wiki. I'm not sure that it would make sense at this juncture for the wiki, as it is so new.
 * IMHO any one that is capable and willing should be able to take on the role, agnostic of the current number of administrators. (In such a fashion, no one should be considered for the role more because there are not many administrators, and no one should be considered less if there are many administrators). This should help to maintain a certain level of quality and expectations from administrators.
 * I believe that the ultimate decision should reside with the Bureaucrat, or potentially a committee of administrators.

--GeoGalvanic (talk | testspace) 15:58, 13 June 2018 (UTC)


 * To add my own thoughts to this;
 * I am in favour of the general concept of RfAs.
 * RfBs could be based on RfAs, albeit with a higher standard needing to be met for approval.
 * I am most comfortable with self-nominations. I think nominating other people should be allowed however the next edit should be that person accepting or declining the nomination.
 * I am opposed to formal requirements; this is something that each community member can bear in mind when offering their thoughts on individual RfAs.
 * While I don't believe the current number of Admins should be held against ongoing RfAs, I don't want it to be seen as a prize. Being highly active is not sufficient in-and-of itself.
 * I dislike votes and would prefer to see the end result being based primarily on the points raised by the community. Bureaucrats should be able to go against consensus, however this should be rare. — sarno | TALK | 16:24, 13 June 2018 (UTC)


 * I would like to elaborate on my final point. I believe the role of both the community and the Bureaucrats is relevant. If the community is asked for input, that input should be valued highly. That said - the role of Bureaucrats should not be limited to counting votes and implementing whatever they dictate; there is little point to carefully vetting the judgement of prospective Bureaucrats if that judgement will be disregarded.
 * Going against community consensus will never be a popular thing to do, and Bureaucrats should be trusted to only do so if they truly believe it to be necessary.
 * Finally, I would like for all opinions to be valued for RfAs and RfBs. If the first ever edit of an IP address is to contribute to one and they offer good arguments to substantiate their opinion, those arguments should be welcomed. The merit of an argument is more important than its source. If RfAs come down to a vote, then I fear it is inevitable for a spotlight to be put on who is voting, and whether Account A is a sock puppet of Account B. Aside from discouraging valuable input from relatively unknown users, this makes anonymity impossible. On other wikis I have seen users be uncomfortable publicly speaking against the RfA of a popular member of the community.
 * tl;dr? Value everyone. Consider the merits of an argument; anything less is an ad hominem. I don't believe "+1" to be of particular value. — sarno | TALK | 16:45, 13 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Most of the RfAs I've looked at from other sites take votes from users, whether or not it's the determining factor, in order to measure what the community consensus is. "Consider the merits of an argument; anything less is an ad hominem. I don't believe "+1" to be of particular value." - If this is the approach we take perhaps it might be better to to look at RfAs in terms of a structured debate: e.g. Reasons for and Reasons against, and omit the vote entirely. If one can't come up with at least a few decent reasons for someones adminship, they probably aren't deserving of the role, and conversely someone who is opposed ought to have good reasons against them. The only issue I forsee is that it may be harder to determine when people have been given enough time to respond/enough people have voiced their opinions (which is already difficult in general)--GeoGalvanic (talk | testspace) 01:36, 15 June 2018 (UTC)


 * I think this general template could work well: Example 1, Example 2.
 * Not sure what the Request for Confirmation is all about, but I'm generally fond of the layout. — sarno | TALK | 19:21, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

(reset indent) Aye, those templates are what I was looking at as well. You'll notice that users "vote" while providing sometimes limited or no reasoning at all. Going back to the idea that "+1 is of no particular value" the burden could be on the bureaucrat to sift through those responses/assign value to them, or the format could be designed to make it more indicative that reasoning is more important than voting. Somthing like this maybe: ==Reasons For==

I think they're really cool
I heard they have the KS exclusive LE T-shirt... --User 1
 * some form of rebuttal, or agreement with above statement --User 2

Reason 2
Reasoning --User1
 * Conversation --User2

Reason 3
Reasoning --User 1
 * Conversation --User2

I don't like them
They were once really mean to me --User 1
 * some form of rebuttal, or agreement with above statement --User 2

Reason 2
Reasoning --User1
 * Conversation --User2

Reason 3
Reasoning --User 1
 * Conversation --User2

In such a manner a user that has a neutral (as opposed to no) opinion would be able to weigh in on both discussions in reasons for and reasons against, giving their opinions more weight and consideration than would be given a neutral vote.--GeoGalvanic (talk | testspace) 20:39, 15 June 2018 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure about turning it into a discussion where people agree / disagree with what are fundamentally opinions - that's how arguments start.
 * If you look at my Example 2 link, Manifold's opposition is literally " ~ " while, two comments later, PheNaxKian weighs in with a handful of sentences. From this I can see that Mainfold is opposed, but I don't know why. I don't know whether it's due to a misconception, I don't know whether it's because he and Scythe happen to dislike each other, I don't know if it's because he thinks there's too many sysops and his opposition isn't specific to Scythe but to any currently active RfAs. Thus it is incredibly difficult to weigh his opposition to the RfA - and while I wouldn't discount it entirely, I find it very difficult to be overly swayed by it either. Then we get PheNaxKian who comments on what they would desire to see in an admin, touches on Scythe's temperament, and how likely Scythe is to use the various capabilities of a wiki administrator. It is much easier to understand where the latter's opposition stems from and thus I find their input more compelling than I did Manifold's.
 * I would care if the community were 30-0 in favour, 0-30 opposed, or split down the middle at 15-15. But if there were two RfAs and one was 14-16 and the other was 16-14, then in my eyes they both got a split vote and the community sentiment aspect isn't more favourable for one than the other. One "vote" wouldn't decide the outcome, but a perspective well-articulated and which references verifiable incidents could well do. — sarno | TALK | 22:01, 15 June 2018 (UTC)


 * I think Administrators (Content creators?) should be chosen the same way you chose your community guides (us!).
 * Initially there's a meet-n-greet with the person applying for the position.
 * There should be a bit of questioning about experience writing/moderating/creating content, if you are so keen perhaps asking for an example of written essay or something.
 * Asking for a reason to "Why do you want to be a moderator/content creator?" is important in my opinion.
 * I think asking for some personal information like age and first name are options to allow a more friendly, buddy-like and pleasant discussions and to get a bigger overview on the candidate.
 * As to how people will be suggested: I tend to want both option.
 * A not so related thing I wanna bring up is, taking care of staff is important, having check ups on them to see they handle everything (asking them, not checking them really) and if they need more manpower or whatever. Maybe even organizing staff events/talk sessions/hangouts to keep morale up and discuss future wiki stuff.

That's my suggestions in a nutshell. Hesanka (talk) 05:07, 14 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Do you envisage this being primarily a public discussion or 'behind closed doors', so to speak? — sarno | TALK | 12:04, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Page Created
Based on the input here I've created Project:Requests for Adminship. If you've any concerns about that page feel free to edit it or let me know here. --GeoGalvanic (talk | testspace) 01:20, 12 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Seems good! — sarno | TALK | 03:50, 12 July 2018 (UTC)