- This blog in a nut shell: We are all working together towards the same goal in this big wiki project and the whole community is the boss of this wiki.
I've talked to Zai about my concerns which lead to him posted this thread and I think i'll just be honest and transparent and tell everyone about it. Let me start with a little story of me. I used to be an admin of another wiki for about 6 months a year ago. It was my first wiki. During my time as an admin I was running it like a boss. So a lot of the decisions will require my approval. It felt great to be able to have a lot of control in the wiki and a lot of people thanked me for my work. The admins I promoted were sort of working under me as i get the final say in everything. But after a few months I realised that I was in too much control and everyone just sort of follow my instructions. When I took a vacation, the wiki was in a mess, a lot of the activity that we were running came to a standstill when I was away. I realised that because I was overpowering, the community relied on me too much. So from there I learned that getting community involvement and not overpowering is very important to ensure that a wiki is successful.
So when I created this wiki, I ensured that I am enthusiastic but not overpowering. I make sure i follow the Wikia creation policy which stated that:
And from the growth we get during that time I would say it worked very well. You can see from this old forum thread that almost everyone participated in a major decision making. During that time Zai and Phoenix were not even an admin yet. And I was very happy that everyone - admin & non-admin alike managed to work together as a team. Even after I promoted a few admins, I make sure I seek their opinions from time to time.
After a couple of months I lost interest in the game and due to life commitments i became less and less active in the wiki. And because this wiki is run by community, the wiki is not affected by my absence at all.
When I revisit this wiki about two months ago, i was very happy that the wiki is still running great. However, I soon realised that something was different. I began to see things that happened in my previous wiki here. That's partly the reason why I extended my visit on this wiki.
I know this will be a touchy subject because we all dealing with rights and what not. But I can't just bring myself to ignore the problem. Therefore I decided to set things right in a slow pace. The introduction of the official wiki policy was actually part of the plan in ensuring that the community know that they have the rights in making positive changes to the wiki.
The way a wiki works is very unique. It's an on going project and everyone is working towards the same goal. The idea of community consensus is based on the assumption that majority of the users here are acting in good faith. The level of consensus is stated quite clearly here. So what the page is saying is something like this:
- DinoKev said Yes; admin consensus said No = No
- Admin consensus said No; community consensus said Yes = Yes
So community consensus is the sort of the mother of all decisions making.
Please don't get me wrong. The current admins are doing a great job in running the wiki. It's just that not everyone is experienced with how wiki works so sometimes overpowering may be confused with enthusiasm and leadership. The reason I wrote this blog post is not to offend anyone but in the hope that we will be able to set things right. I am not blaming anyone but myself for not guiding the community in creating the wiki policies and define the roles of the different admin usergroups before i left in Dec last year. That's why the wiki idea was lost in the process.
The role of admins(including bureaucrats and founder) are actually stated in every wiki: "Administrator powers should be used to help keep the wiki clear of vandalism, spam, and users who make malicious edits, but not for simple disagreements between users acting in good faith. Ideally an admin shouldn't be considered "in charge". The ideal admin is just someone who is trusted to have a few extra buttons and to use them for the benefit of the Wikia community." So other than doing the admin only stuff as stated in the admin policy, all the other stuffs that we admins are doing - organising featured card nomination, projects, etc can also be done by any users. We just need to get together to create guidelines so that everything can be run smoothly. And also all admins including the bureaucrats and founder should be regarded as equal.
I hope by clearing things up and getting more community involvement we will be able to get the wiki to newer heights. The policies will need to be revised further and I hope we will be able to do that with even more community involvement. This will be essential if we want to allow trading in the forum or somewhere on the wiki and introduce the new Wiki/Forum moderator position in future.
— DinoKev talk 16:56, June 7, 2013 (UTC)