Forum:New Community Roles

Hello folks, today Wikia has introduced two new community roles: Discussions Moderator and Content Moderator. I won't go in details, both the blog post and the help page explain the roles very well. I just wanted to bring this new change to the wiki attention because I think it's quite relevant for our wiki, especially for these reasons:


 * IIRC, we are using some custom scripts that "use" the rollback role in some ways and for that purpose we requested staff to change their privileges to add some new rights. I believe that change is now unnecessary and the "user right" should be reverted back to its original role, while the group should be "converted" in content moderators. Off course we can promote new rollbackers but once agains they will have less impactful power on the wiki.
 * Give the extensive use of the blog feature we have here, the role of "discussions moderator" can be useful IMO. Probably we should pick the candidates from the current chat moderators.
 * These two roles were created specifically to aid admins to manage the community and will address the problem that this wiki has sometimes of not having admins online. Basically, think of these groups as "junior admins".
 * With the creation of these new roles, a more definite user hierarchy/area of supervision will be established like shown in this picture.

Your thoughts.

Discussion
I'm not sure discussion moderators are that important, but content mods are vital. If there's no admin online, locking a page could be really helpful. I do think we need a crat to promote either of these rights, but Yata is active, so no problem.

17:32, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

We are in no need for discussion moderators. However, content moderators would most definitely be useful Roranoa Drake II (talk) 17:36, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

As I said we should contact staff and restore the original rollback rights and convert the current "rollbackers" to content moderators, since basically it's what they are now. We can then discuss if we need further "standard" rollbackers (since it's a quite minor role, but can come in handy) or other content moderators. Discussions moderators are somewhat less impactful here because we don't have either message wall or the new forum, therefore they are limited only to chat and blogs. Maybe we can promote some/all chat moderators to discussions moderators.

Blogs don't really need moderating. They're either fine or locked.

17:44, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

I agree that we don't really need discussion moderators. Content moderators are imo a great idea, though. And yes, changing our rollback rights back to normal would be a sound idea. 18:00, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

Ok, this is a pretty big change. Definitely needs a lot of community discussion first, due to the nature of it. User rights issues have a history of not going over smoothly. I'll divide my thoughts into sections:

Discussion Mods I think maybe one or two would be useful. I haven't been keeping nearly as close of an eye on blogs as I've wanted since... forever? With all the admin stuff I do and life, there's no time for reading and deleting blog comments, and I'm probably not the only admin who thinks that. We don't have the forum thread installed here, or article comments, and we likely never will, so the scope of this position is more limited than on other wikis. Overall, I say yes let's get one or two. Maybe look at trusted users with a lot of blog and chat experience.

Content Mods This is an interesting one. They can basically do everything an admin can expect change user rights and block people. It's a lot of responsibility that we don't normally like to give out. It could be useful for a lot of editing as a temporary right though, instead of giving people full admin rights. With Kage out of the picture for 6 months, I could see one or two of these people being very helpful to us. Ultimately though, I'm not 100% on this. People for this position would mainly include users that have been strong candidates for admin in the past, I believe.

Activity Requirement Both of these positions involve the wiki in a more serious way than chat mod or rollback, and things could be negatively effected by their absence. So much like how admins must remain active, I think these rights should have a similar activity requirement. Discussion mods would only have to worry about blog activity, I think, but may need more frequent editing that the one we have for admins now.

How do we assign the right? The importance of the right is somewhere in between Chat Mod, an appointed position, and admin, an elected position. So do we have admins appoint these editors, or elect them? Or some kind of mixture of nominations with appointments? I don't know, really. I'm leaning towards admin appointment right now.

So those are my most important thoughts right now. What does everyone else think? 21:01, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

The amount of spoilers and bad edits on this wiki when the chapters come has reached an all-time high, we really need content moderators imo. No real need for discussion moderators. 21:04, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

The straight-forward solution if you want avoid any kind of election and tedious community discussions is to convert all existing rollbackers to content moderators and all existing chat moderators to discussions moderators. The reasons I propose this are: If we do this we should be kinda set on the moderators front, so from that point we can evaluate if we need other lower-right users (chat mods and rollbackers).
 * 1) Our rollback user rights was edited and is basically Wikia's new content moderators. Therefore our rollbackers are already content moderators.
 * 2) Discussions moderators on this wiki are basically chat mods that have also some tools to manage blog comments since we don't have Wikia's new forum or message wall enabled. They should be trustworthy users and should already know and be know by the community and I think the wiki blog-sphere and chat-sphere kinda overlap. Needed or not, I'd say why not.

I don't like the idea of promoting everybody. As I said earlier, I think a certain activity requirement should be attached to these rights, and not every current mod or rollbacker would agree to those terms.

Also, I don't like the idea of having 8 more users with the ability to lock and delete pages, as well as 10 more doing the same in blogs. While that would lessen the load of stuff admins have to take care of, it's a lot more work in making sure that all of those people are being consistent with the rules and each other. At the end of the day, a lot can be done by regular users and rollbacks to just mark things for deletion or settle edit wars with words rather than locking.

And not to offend anyone, but there are some people I wouldn't easily trust with these rights. With rollbacking, regular users can still change back anything the rollbackers do, these rights make the jump where regular users can't change them back. That's power over others, and makes bias and a lack of knowledge of the rules a concern for those with rights. There are some users with rollback rights that I wouldn't trust with these. Conversely, there are some users with no rights at all that I would trust with something like the Discussion Mod rights. 04:12, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

If we could have at least two trusted content moderators. Things would be easier during chapter releases and times when admins aren't online. 05:00, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

I've got to admit, this sounds like a great idea. Often times, I find that issues that can only be resolved by admins (spam images/pages, misnamed images/pages, etc.) would be fixed much faster with content moderators. Content moderators could also clean up the messy blogs from new (and occassionally veteran) users (not to mention the infrequent flame wars in the comment sections). I disagree with Levi on the rollback/chat mod conversion because, like JSD said, it would be too many cooks in the kitchen. 05:29, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

The only two associated access rights possessed by Discussion Mods, which are relevant to this wiki, are the standard chat mod rights and the ability to delete blog comments. We already have chat mods and I don't recall blog comments requiring much management either. So it seems to me that Discussion Moderators aren't really necessary, but I guess there is no harm in having them. Content Mods, on the other hand, are definitely important. Most of you guys already gave reasons for why they will be beneficial so I won't repeat them. As for how we choose Content Mods, I think the admins should appoint them. I doubt there will really be a major difference between which users the community nominates and which users the admins appoint anyways. Lelouch Di  Britannia  07:40, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

So basically the admins need to have a chat and talk it out. If they decide they need more people to handle the workload, then they should consider promoting someone responsible. But I don't think we need more than one or two content mods.

13:33, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

At maximum, I think three should be adequate. Lelouch Di  Britannia  14:01, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

Btw, what our "custom" rollbackers can do at the moment? I suggested to promote all of them to content moderators because we should restore the original rollback right which is far less powerful. I had the impression that our custom rollbackers already had most of the rights of a content moderator.

Rollbackers can just rename images, I think. And run the renaming script. They can't delete anything or protect anything. So it's not really that close to content mods. I don't think we should change how our rollbackers work either, as those editors are still useful with the often large amount of image renaming that happens here. 14:35, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

More people able to lock pages couldn't hurt since we get so many anon edits/mistakes after each chapter, especially with Kage inactive. Discussion mods don't seem that useful, though since we don't get much trouble in blog comments, so we should probably only appoint one or two, if that. 17:44, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

I'm strongly against discussion mods, and totally in for content mods. Discussion mods seem like no fun. Content mods will be useful, all the time. 18:12, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

Discussion Mods can be more or less okay, I don't do much chats, and less for blogs, so... meh. As for Content Mods, that's a whole new yes on my books. We have plenty of editors who could really do good with that role, helps us admins with more than simply rollback rights. I go for that. 19:09, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

In my mind, discussion mods would only help enforce the rules we already have for blogs, and wouldn't do anything else. Most of their work would probably be just deleting blogs by newbies for having too little content. Maybe keep an eye out for a ToU violation in the comments, but that's not something that's ever been a problem here in the past.

Seems like there's a lot of people in for Content Mods at this point. How do people want to go about choosing who these users are? Right now, I think a good option would be an open discussion among all editors, with admins making the final call. Probably in a separate forum. 21:00, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

The danger with a public discussion is that the popular people are more likely to get voted in. I suggest the admins talk it out, and if they're unable to reach a decision, then it's opened up more.

22:20, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

I also think it should be an admin-only discussion first. This is definitely a big change in the wiki's heirarchy, so it probably best that the admins select the new mods. The regular users pick the admins, and, like most main governing bodies, they should select the next tier of authority. 22:57, January 15, 2016 (UTC)

Well, since we have 5 admins (Kage's inactive for the time being though), we'd probably go for like double the amountof Content and Discussion Mods, like having deputies, eh? Admins handle banning and some deleting, Mods handle more deleting and stuff. 08:38, January 16, 2016 (UTC)

Content mods should be restricted to a small group of trustworthy users. Discussion mods aren't needed. Regarding the selection, admin appointment is probably the way to go. 14:13, January 16, 2016 (UTC)

^pretty much agree 17:47, January 16, 2016 (UTC)

Alright, so development here: We can't assign the right of Discussion Mod here. We just don't have it as an option on this wiki, I would assume because we don't have the new forums and/or article comments. BUT I just checked, and content mods can delete blogs (not blog comments). So really, most of what need discussion mods for can be handled by content mods.

Maybe we could ask staff to fix this bug for us and let us get discussion mods, but I'd say it's unnecessary, given how many people don't want it, and what it would actually get us.

So I'm going to go ahead and assume we want mods, and admins will discuss who in a locked forum? One thing I think should be public is a discussion of how many content mods we want, which I'm starting as a subsection now. 18:33, January 16, 2016 (UTC)

How Many Content Mods?
So I think for now, we should have 2-3 content mods. The fact of the matter is there's not THAT much work to go around for admins and stuff in terms of deleting, locking, etc. So I think that having a few more that can be more active at times we are not is the best option. And to go off of what Yata said earlier about us having maybe twice as many content mods as admins, I think that might be a good balance, if we didn't already have 5 admins. I think the best solution would be to just wait for the next couple admins to retire and replace them with content mods instead of admins. I don't think we should agree to a preset number of CMs or admins here, but at least decide on a starting point and wait to see the balance. 18:33, January 16, 2016 (UTC)

The usage of this new found power will most likley be limited at times. So yeah, I say we should have two mods. 18:37, January 16, 2016 (UTC)

2 to 3 should be enough, as more often than not there are usually 2 to 3 admins on at a time, so they can combine to complete the 5. Whomever is appointed should be active during the first few hours of a chapter coming out, as that is when they'll probably be needed most. 20:56, January 16, 2016 (UTC)

I'd say 2 or 3 is fine, maybe 4 if there's a lot going on or if an admin can't be active. Most of what they would do is just monitoring changes after a new chapter comes out and occasionally deleting blogs. 22:17, January 16, 2016 (UTC)

Sticking to how many I said before, that is 2-3 mods. And it looks like we have a consensus. 07:38, January 17, 2016 (UTC)

We have 5 admins, so maybe the same number (give or take 1) in content mods is good. Right now, we're having one inactive admin for 6 months, so 4 mods seems like a good number. Especially if they agree to help out with the more troubling issues of clearing out unused/improperly uploaded images. We do have a lot of unsourced stuff here. 01:06, January 19, 2016 (UTC)
 * I mean, how is File:DXGLM10-I.png a way to name an image? If we have 4 mods, and they agree to help hunt and change these stuff, the more the merrier, right? 01:09, January 19, 2016 (UTC)

We don't really need mods for that since rollbackers can already rename images. The only thing that mods can do that rollbacks can't is delete images. 02:13, January 19, 2016 (UTC)

However that's why rollbackers shouldn't be able to do that... the added rights are now overlapping with content mods and rollbackers should return to their original, very-limited, role. If you need more people assign more mods, you can also think mods as the next "promotion" from rollbacker.

I think Levi has a point here. If we nerf rollbacks, that'd work.

21:04, January 19, 2016 (UTC)

I don't see any problem with rollbacks having the right to rename images currently. Our problem with images is that we have strict naming standards to help with our massive amount of images. They have and got the right to help with the images that we already have with poor names, and not necessarily to keep up with the new ones. It's more about just having quality editors able to do a lot of work than it is about having power. 23:08, January 19, 2016 (UTC)

I think that the main purpose of content mods should be deleting and protecting pages when admins aren't around to do so, especially when a chapter comes out. As a rollbacker, I find image renaming to be one of, if not the, most important of the tools granted. 00:12, January 20, 2016 (UTC)

Although image renaming may not be important as it once was. I still think rollbackers should keep the image renaming ability. The last thing we want to is increase work load of the admins. We do really want to go back to a time when there was hundreds of images that needed renaming? 00:46, January 20, 2016 (UTC)

My point was that "image renaming" was added to rollbackers back when content mods didn't exist. Now that they do, rollbackers are partially doing what the mods were created for. In fact I bet all the current rollbackers were introduced only because the added "image renaming" right and not for the rollback right which the group is intended for. If that's the case, we have a currently a pseudo-mod group which blurries the line between the rollbackers and content mods. We should separate better these groups, imo. If someone wants to manage files, in other words manage contents, make him a mod; if someone want to help against vandalism, make him a rollbacker. I rather have more content mods then these pseudo-mod group, which is why I proposed at the beginning to promoting all of them to mods by default since, I bet, managing content was the reason they got the rights in the first place.

I still don't have a problem with rollbackers keeping the right. There's definitely still a lot of images that need renaming here even if the category is empty currently. It's not really "moderating", as the right to rename really doesn't hold power over other users. I'd be far more nervous giving more editors full content mod rights than I would be keeping the renaming right with rollbackers.

It sounds like we're starting to beat a dead horse on that issue. Is there anyone else that agrees with Levi that the rollbackers should lose the rights.

Seems like we're pretty much nearing the end here. I'll start up an admin discussion in the next couple days. 00:52, January 21, 2016 (UTC)

Okay, so we think that rollbackers don't truly use the image renaming power (if so, they do it rarely, since we admins usually have to be the ones to rename/delete these images). May seem a little redundant to let them keep this power if they won't truly use it. But if they do want to help out with mods and admins to rename crappy images, then keep it
 * Maybe we should decide who will be mods first. Then we see the remaining rollbackers and check their history if they actually moved any images for the sake of good. If it averages out that they do very little moving, we nerf their image renaming ability. 06:41, January 21, 2016 (UTC)

The only rollback power I've ever used IS image renaming... 08:05, January 21, 2016 (UTC)

Which proves my point: you should be a content mod rather then a rollbacker. @JSD: I don't really think content mods have any power over users or authority like an admin for example, the term "moderating" is probably misleading because they don't moderate users but content. I see their role purely as a technical one. It can certainly be misused, but at that point they would fail their role and be demoted.

I agree with Levi. Unlike admins, content mods don't have the ability to block users or grant and revoke user rights. The user right shouldn't be regarded as giving the user who holds it authority. It only provides the user with additional tools that aid them in managing the site, mainly deleting and protecting pages. 12:40, January 21, 2016 (UTC)