Hello Halo Wikians!
Currently becoming an administrator involves the lengthy process of the administration team trying to seek out individuals who show understanding of the rules and policies on the wiki, commitment to improving our content, good relations with the community and knowledge of the many tools used to aid editing and revert vandalism.
This process of selection is made difficult by the fact that individuals who express all these traits tend to be rare, and by the time they're been noticed they've lost the interest to help the wiki further. While those who are enthusiastic to become administrators do not have the experience or skills to be an effective administrator.
Below is a proposed plan to build a clear hierarchy of user rights which allows for the admins to divide our tasks and editing rights among several user groups. This allows users can enter at the bottom and progress up each "tier" gaining more rights as trust and experience is procured. This way users who are enthusiastic for administrator roles can be introduced to the rights and responsibilities in a slow and controllable manner allowing development of experience while preventing the likelihood of abuse.
Hierarchy
The hierarchy is constructed in a ladder like structure, where the lower tiers are given specific tasks to perform using tools which are difficult to abuse. Each successive tier grants the user more tools and more complex tasks. Instead of having to recruit from a large number of users where admins look for specific and sometimes rare traits, admins can simply recruit from the tier below where the experience and characteristics we are looking for already exist and have been developed. Each tier will inherit the rights/tools of the tier below building the users repertoire of skills until they reach the full list of tools possessed by the administrator user group.
Below is the current design of the hierarchy envisaged by the admin group; with the user groups with the least number of responsibilities and tools to the left. Users would enter the hierarchy at the left hand side of the hierarchy either at the grey tier (social feature user groups) or the first blue tier (anti-vandalism/spam user groups). Each user groups function is explained in further detail below.
Chat moderator Forum moderator | Rollback Image control | Patroller | Administrator | Bureaucrat |
Chat Moderators
As the name suggests, chat moderators are users who volunteer to act as custodians for the chat feature of the wiki. Their selection is made through community voting on volunteers who put their name forwards. As the selection criteria is based on experience on the chat and knowledge of the chat policy, being a chat moderator alone does not allow users to qualify for promotion to higher tiers. However, users who qualify for a specific position through meeting the set requirements and have also served as a chat moderator may be a more preferable choice to other applicants due to their community experience and trustfulness.
Forum Moderators
With the development of the new forums and message walls, Wikia recently introduced the moderators user group to help moderate these heavily used social features. While Halo Nation does not use the message wall feature, the new forums have been in use for several months now and can be considered a mess of misplaced threads and spam. The moderators user group has already been renamed to “Forum moderators” and will act in a similar fashion to the current Chat moderators user group by acting as custodians of the forums. The primary function of the forum moderators group is to keep the forums clear of spam and ensure threads are kept under their relevant boards. As with chat moderators, being a forum moderator alone does not qualify users for promotion to a higher tier.
Rollbackers
Rollbackers are currently normal users with the rollback tool, which is essentially a glorified undo button. Despite this rollbackers require 500 mainspace edits, knowledge of our vandalism and spam policies, and no “questionable” history. For a user group with such a mundane tool it seems excessive to have such high selection requirements. Rollbackers will instead be reinvented to an anti-spam and vandalism role; adding new tools to help combat spam and vandalism on pages and in namespaces which are frequently overlooked by the administration group – such as blogs and top 10 lists. These are the user rights proposed for the current rollbackers user group:
- Auto-patrol – All edits by the user are automatically marked as patrolled on the recent changes page.
- Rollback – A tool for reverting all edits by a user to the previous author on the page.
- Move blogs – Allows rollbackers to rename blogs to more appropriate and descriptive titles.
- Edit blogs – Allows rollbackers to remove spam content and tag blogs for deletion.
- Edit top 10 – Allows rollbackers to edit and tag elements of a top 10 list.
- Comment edit – Allows rollbackers to edit the contents of a spam or abusive comment.
- Comment delete – Allows rollbackers to delete spam or abusive comments.
Image Controller
Image controllers have been suggested before and have been re-suggested as of late. The user group has been implemented on wikis such as MLP and RuneScape with high success. The user group’s primary function would be to patrol the new files special page renaming, sourcing or deleting newly uploaded images to ensure they comply with the wiki’s image policy. Image controllers would also be responsible for ensuring images are properly categorised so users can more easily find and access them for other pages, rather than uploading duplicates – of which is currently a major issue on the wiki. These are the user rights proposed for the image controller user group:
- Auto-patrol – All edits by the user are automatically marked as patrolled on recent changes page.
- Move file – Allows image controllers to rename images to more appropriate file names.
- Protect pages – Allows image controllers to protect heavily used images from vandalism. With the abuse filter active image controllers would only be able to protect files.
- Delete pages – Allows image controllers to delete images which do not comply with our regulations. With the abuse filter image controllers would only be able to delete files.
- Suppress redirects - Stops redirects being created from source pages when moving files.
- Reupload – Allows image controllers to upload new versions of an image to protected files.
- Upload by URL – Allows image controllers to upload images directly from a URL. Currently not available for users due to easy of abuse.
Patrollers
Patrollers are currently implemented on the wiki, but are not really used. The original idea was for patrollers to help admins by going through the recent changes page and helping to check recent edits and marking them as patrolled if they were within the wiki’s rules and policies. Patrollers would need to have knowledge of our regulations, be trustworthy as not to patrol bad edits, and be an experienced editor. As both image controllers and rollbackers would be experienced editors who are trusted and have knowledge of our rules and policy, they would offer the best selection of candidates for patrollers. As Image controllers and rollbackers become more experienced they could be short listed for promotion to patrollers.
Patrollers would act as trusted users who patrol the recent changes for new edits reverting any bad edits, reporting vandalism and spam to administrators, warning editors of their edits, and help protect or delete spam or vandalism from the wiki. Trustworthy candidates are key due to the delete tool. Hence why experience and practice at rollback and image control stages would encourage good use. These are the user rights proposed for the current patrollers user group:
- Rollback and Image Controller rights – Patrollers would inherit all the tools from the rollback and image controller user groups to continue patrolling files, blogs and top 10 lists.
- Auto-patrol – All edits by the user are automatically marked as patrolled.
- Patrol – Allows patrollers to mark checked edits as patrolled on the recent changes page.
- Protect – Allows patrollers to protect pages subject to high vandalism and spam.
- Delete – Allows patrollers to delete spam and vandalism pages. All visible on the deletion log.
- Browse archive – Allows patrollers to see previously deleted pages and their history.
Administrators
Administrators would continue as they currently are. The user rights would stay the same, as essentially they are the combination of all the above user group rights with additional move, edit and delete rights to user space pages. The biggest change in the step up to administrator is the ability to impose restrictions on users, and have a more proactive response to spammers and vandals. Administrators gain block tools and the ability to protect the site for periods of time. Administrators, as custodians of the wiki, also take a more active approach in their ability to change the wiki, with access to wiki customisation, entry to the admin discussion group, and an ability to head wiki projects.
Bureaucrats
Bureaucrats in reality are just administrators with the ability to promote and demote users to and from administrator. As the rights and responsibility of bureaucrats and administrators the two can be seen as the same step on the hierarchy.
Requirements
The following is a list of selection requirements currently proposed for each user group:
- Chat moderators
- 2 months experience on the chat; through sustained activity
- 50 main-space edits
- Read and understood the chat rules
- Forum moderators
- 2 months experience on the forums; through sustained activity
- 50 main-space edits
- Read and understood the forum rules
- Rollbackers
- 350 main-space edits
- Read “Recent Changes Guide”
- Read “Vandalism and Spam Guide”
- No questionable history within 6 months
- Image controllers
- 350 edits with at least 100 file edits and the rest main-space
- Recently uploaded images must comply with image policy
- Read “Image Policy”
- No questionable history within 6 months
- Patrollers
- 700 main-space edits
- Read “Recent Changes Guide”
- Read “Patrolling Guide”
- Read “Vandalism and Spam Guide”
- Read “Protect Pages Guide”
- Read “Deleting Pages Guide”
- No questionable history within 10 months
- Administrators
- 1200 main-space edits
- Been a member of the wiki for at least 6 months and been active for 6 months prior to application
- No history of vandalism or abuse
- No history of harassment or personal attacks
- Demonstrated leadership and enthusiasm for responsibility and improving the wiki
- Good relations and professional/approachable communication with the community
- Read and understood all rules and policies
- Bureaucrats
- Offered substantial contribution to the improvement of the wiki.
- Demonstrated good leadership within the administration group
- Been a long standing and active member of the community
Conclusion
The current selection of user groups function well individually but are difficult to manage at an administrator level and lack a proper structure to encourage users to help improve the wiki. An introduction of a hierarchy structure will allow users to develop their understanding of editing tools while giving administrators a group of users of which to recruit further administrators from.
While the hierarchy will improve the wiki through increasing the number of volunteers with improved editing tools, the decision to go ahead with this change is ultimately the community's decision. Please show your support or opposition to these changes by responding with {{Support}} or {{Oppose}} in the comments section. Feedback and suggestions to our current plan are always appreciated, so long as they are constructive.
TL;DR
Tl;dr We propose a change of our current user groups to better prepare potential administrators for their role and offer regular users a change to progress up a clear hierarchy of responsibility and anti-vandalism tools. Would you support this change?