| Forums: War Room → Rollbacks and moderation | 
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| This discussion is closed. The result of this discussion was: |
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The rollback and moderator positions will not be combined. |
| Please do not edit this discussion. |
So… I wouldn’t propose this if something this disconcerting hadn’t happened. But it did.
On September 4th, a user came onto the message boards posting white supremacist hate. And it stayed there.
And it continued staying there.
For more than 24 hours.
Avatar Wiki hosted White Supremacist Propaganda for over a day. And nobody could do anything.
Usually, things get taken care of quickly because Lostris is always there (thank you!). But, with her being on vacation, the wiki had no active users who had moderation tools. If FireFerret did not realize that she had Fruipit’s tumblr and contacted her, those hate messages could have been up for way longer.
However, this forum is not meant to be a critique of the admins. The administrators do their job effectively and discharge their duties as expected. This is meant to help move forward moderation in a positive manner.
Where we are
The idea behind rollbacks, at least in the older days, was to create a team of people who could handle the more menial tasks (i.e. vandalism fighting and later on comment moderation), without needing to rely on the administrators so much. That way, they were freed up to do the tasks they really needed to do, like blocking, maintenance, etc.
Yet, when we disabled article comments, rollbacks lost the ability to help. Suddenly, the only useful power they wielded was the rollback tool, which is rarely used in favor of the undo tool.
We tried creating new positions, mainly moderator, but I personally believe those were a failure. Currently, nobody holds those tools, and though there are those who have applied, many have been rejected. Which means the responsibility of moderation has fallen solely on the admins–a responsibility that ought to be shared.
Where we can go from here
Simply put, I propose strengthening the rollback user and removing the moderator position.
Rollback has always been viewed as a position of trust: do the bureaucrats, and by extension, the community, trust you enough to wield power? Trust.
I believe, if we can trust a user enough to wield the tools of a rollback, which in the past essentially included the tools of the moderators, we can trust them to be moderators and chat moderators as well. We do not split up the tools of admins such that only KMP can edit MediaWiki and only Thailog can upload images; we should not split up the moderation tools. This would make the application process more holistic, and I’m not asking that a user be evaluated solely on anti-vandalism and then suddenly have moderation tools. Under this proposal, users would be evaluated on all their wiki activity, just like adminship.
We're on the precipice of more activity on this wiki as things gear up with the Netflix series. The forums will only get more active and people will visit us more often as we regain relevance.
The rollback user was effective when given the tools to moderate comments; the rollback user will be effective when given tools to moderate forums.
To be clear, I propose the following:
- Rollbacks get the following tools added:
wallarchive, commentdelete, commentedit, walledit, chatmoderator, commentmove, wallmessageremove, notifyeveryone, wallremove, blog-comments-delete, forumadmin - Remove the moderator position as it is now redundant
- Keep chatmoderator as some users are only active in chat
- Provide more support to the administrator team
Thoughts? – Srijay K • TechFilmer 05:40, September 19, 2018 (UTC)
- I would definitely feel more comfortable with this discussion if Lostris were here to weigh in, as, as you noted, she is the most active admin on the wiki. And, she has been for the last several years.
- That being said, I see no reason to oppose this. Given the smaller number of editing users (compared to when I was here last) and a potential influx, as is what happened when Korra was first released, enabling trusted users to have a few more tools to help is not a negative thing. Frui (🌹 • 🐝 • 🐝🐝) 21:55, September 19, 2018 (UTC)
- To that first point, absolutely, I would love for her input as well. Please don't construe the timing of this forum to be trying to take advantage of her vacation; the timing of this forum was based upon the new Netflix announcement and my thoughts on the future of this wiki. – Srijay K • TechFilmer 00:40, September 20, 2018 (UTC)
- I would just kind of assume no final decision would be made until at least Lostris gets back. Anyway, I am totally for expanding the pool of people who can enforce standards.Neo Bahamut (wall • contribs) 17:40, September 20, 2018 (UTC)
- Same. I think it would be good to delegate editing power on this wiki. "There goes Tokyo, yet again." —SCB (The chatty-chat section.) 18:03, September 20, 2018 (UTC)
Oh yeah totally, I mean I can't remember the last time a forum was closed according to time anyways so I'm more than fine with waiting for her to weigh in. And yeah, Shonen, Frui summed it up nicely. It's more of shifting responsibility of tools to improve effectiveness. – Srijay K • TechFilmer 21:04, September 20, 2018 (UTC)
- This is the original forum where the introduction of the moderator position was discussed and agreed upon, and I think it is worth including here since many of the arguments made there will apply here.
- I am opposed to this proposal for the same reasons that I was against the two positions being combined before, and because I believe that doing so would actually work against what you are trying to achieve. The principle on the wiki has always been that tools such as rollback and moderation are given to users that have shown a consistent history of good contributions and actions that warrant being given these additional tools. To quote myself:
- "Getting rollback is based on anti-vandalism and corrective work, whereas moderator rights are more to do with removing inappropriate posts and threads. [...] a number of users spend most of their time on the discussion boards and do not have any great history of correcting vandalism. Therefore, if the two positions were combined, those that might wish to become moderators could be restricted from that because they do not fall under the requirements for rollback, and vice versa. I think having them separate is a better option."
- And to quote the (in)famous 888:
- " I think we should be cautious about one process giving out too many rights at once when many users might not use all the rights. It also means that the bar set to give users one set of the rights would be lower because no-one would have to worry about someone inexperienced with one side of the wiki inadvertently doing things wrong to another side of it. This arrangement is more flexible, in my view."
- Keeping them separate makes it easier for a user to get just one position (if their focus is just in one area) or both if they desire. If the positions are combined, it adds additional requirements to both for someone to get those tools and so makes it harder to get either. This seems to me to make it harder to solve the problem you are discussing of "bad" threads staying up too long.
- To address the problem in the proposal, I have a few comments:
- a single bad comment/thread which stayed up longer than it should is hardly a massive problem. Yes, it isn't good, but I would advise against blowing it up into more of an issue than it is.
- since the moderator position was created, only three people have applied for it. I'm not sure the position can be considered a failure (but I accept my position may be biased somewhat on this), but I think the issue of not enough people having the position could be solved by just more people applying for it. If the requirements for the position are too restrictive, perhaps they need loosening but in my view they are not.
- Regarding your suggestion to Provide more support to the administrator team, I'm not really sure what this means, but if the problem is admin activity I feel like the new series should help solve that. HAMMEROFTHØR (wall) • 22:16, September 20, 2018 (UTC)
- As a rollback myself, I don't wanna sound biased in any way, though I understand it may be possible. That is why I postponed my response on this forum. I think there are good reasons on both ends of the discussion, but I do support it. Why? Yes, admin activity has been lower recently - I get admins are busy, as I've been busy myself. I do visit the wiki daily, however, even if I don't edit. There have been cases in which I've seen spam or problems reported on the admin noticeboard which aren't attended for quite some time; in one case, a problem was reported and it wasn't handled for a week.
- I get it if there are insecurities over giving rollbacks these rights, but of the three people who have requested moderator rights (all of these dating back to 2015), all of them were or are rollback users. I haven't seen anyone else requesting moderator rights. Now, I myself requested moderator rights and I was denied them because of my low activity on forums, and that was understandable. I don't think it hurts to give users tools they might not use, as opposed to not giving them to the users and having something go unnoticed. Even rollback tools are scarcely used, yet we have them in case they become necessary to use. I would use this same logic if the two positions were to be merged.
- I think Provide more support to the administrator team was to have this merged group help out when administrators can't, which makes complete sense to me. I don't think we can say a new show will help admin activity, since life goes on - new show or not. So per Frui, I see no reason to oppose this, but I also want to see what LL thinks about this. Tono555
17:19, September 21, 2018 (UTC)
- I think Provide more support to the administrator team was to have this merged group help out when administrators can't, which makes complete sense to me. I don't think we can say a new show will help admin activity, since life goes on - new show or not. So per Frui, I see no reason to oppose this, but I also want to see what LL thinks about this. Tono555
- As I said above, I don't see how combining the two makes things better in the way that is being suggested. If any rollback wants the rights, they can request them. If any user that isn't a rollback wants the rights, they can request them. In both cases, their request would be judged only against the moderator criteria. By this proposal, any user that solely wants the moderation rights would have to also qualify for rollback rights, and vice versa. Unless there is something major I am missing, how is this not making things harder (that is, effectively adding more restrictions/requirements to the one position) and not easier? HAMMEROFTHØR (wall) • 18:10, September 21, 2018 (UTC)
- Hmmm HoT you bring up good points. At this point, I do agree with HoT. I definitely shoulder some of the blame for the unfortunate event that prompted this discussion, in the scheme of things, it was just one event, and the wiki didn't crash and burn lol Frui (🌹 • 🐝 • 🐝🐝) 17:55, September 23, 2018 (UTC)
Sorry it took me a bit to respond with my thoughts regarding this–I've been incredibly swamped with work. I understand that it was only one event and in the grand scheme of things it isn't a major deal. However, I do believe that we should always be examining our policies, be it just because of time or be it because of a specific incident. We have had other instances of spam staying up for a solid amount of time (e.g. the recent piracy attack). This is not blowing it up out of proportion, this is just using the scenario to overcome the impetus wrt discussing this topic.
Every user right we have on this website is based around trust. Especially the administrator position. One could argue that we should divide adminiship further based on this same paradigm. If an admin never edits the MediaWiki JS then why bother allowing them to have the ability to do so. Or, more topical, our admins are not the most active on the message boards yet they are implicity tasked with moderating them.
To me, the message sent by separating moderator and rollback is that we trust you-ish. We trust you enough to undo vandalism, but when it comes to the message boards, we don't trust you enough. We did trust you to moderate comments, but we don't trust you to moderate the message boards.
Regarding the "bar" being set, I don't know if it is now higher or lower as it really is different. Under this new paradigm, applications for rollback would be viewed holistically and be based on whether or not the bureaucrats believe
- a) you will not abuse the tools granted to you
- b) you can make use of some, if not all, of the tools effectively
- c) the user has demonstrated firm understanding of the wiki and is trustworthy
The third is the absolute most important. If a user has the wiki's best intentions at heart, and this has been established by their history of work, I do not see why we cannot expect them to exercise some degree of responsibility. It holds rollbacks to a different standard of experience and levelheadedness and is about their character–not just about how many valid undos they have.
Quickly, I would like to acknowledge my bias as a rollback rejected from the moderator position. Given this, if this forum passes, I personally am willing to step down as rollback and be re-evaluated under the new critera and I hope the other current rollbacks would be open to this and not be grandfathered in. – Srijay K • TechFilmer 17:06, September 29, 2018 (UTC)
- I do not dispute that the administrator position has some rights that not all admins make use of. But, I would also note that the process for gaining administrator rights is inherently different to gaining rollback/moderator, and so I do not think the two can be so easily compared as you are doing.
- I think you are placing too much emphasis on the, for want of a better word, prestige of being given rights on the wiki. The rights themselves are not some kind of measure of how trustworthy a user is compared to another. Yes, users that are given the rights should be trustworthy, but not getting the rights doesn’t mean that user is untrustworthy, or less trusted than another user. Someone with both rights is not more trustworthy than someone with just one. I hope you would also agree with me that there are users that do not have such rights that are still trustworthy. I think the more important requirement is that the user has shown a need for the rights, through their previous history on the wiki (e.g. undoing bad edits or reporting comments that require deletion) and that in getting the rights they will be already to do what they are already doing easier.
- As I understand your proposal, you want to combine the two positions and remove the requirement that the user has showed a history of related activity in either position. I do not agree with this, for the basis that I just laid out; there is a level of trust in giving the rights for sure, but the demonstrated need for the rights is far more important and would be entirely diminished by your proposal. If I have misunderstood and your suggestion is that the two positions be combined with the requirements for both added to the single position, I detailed above why I think this is also a bad idea, so I will simply refer to that. HAMMEROFTHØR (wall) • 20:21, September 29, 2018 (UTC)
- HoT has already brought up a number of good points, and I feel no need to go over them all again. I do, however, want to reiterate that having a moderating position on this wiki is not about being more or less trustworthy than other users, as said. It is about delegating and enabling users who have shown themselves to be both active and a positive force in certain (or all) areas of the wiki by granting them access to tools to help the wiki function seamlessly. They are not – or rather, they should not – be considered as being "better" for having the ability to do such things.
- Everything else that needs to be said has already been written here, and much better than I could. After reading the argument, it seems to be summed up thusly: rollbacks are "trusted" to do one job, and therefore they can be "trusted" to do another job, regardless of whether they actually have the skill or desire to do so. Please correct me if I am mistaken. Frui (🌹 • 🐝 • 🐝🐝) 20:37, September 29, 2018 (UTC)
- I want to make something very clear: it was due to a decision from FANDOM that the moderation position came to be. While I wasn't necessarily for the split, I don't see why we should start jumping through hoops now to combine both positions again. If you want moderator abilities, just apply, it's as simple as that. If you have a history of being active on the forums and displayed a mature attitude when it came to moderation, you will get the rights. It has always worked for applying for rollback rights, moderator rights are no different. So all those that feel like they'd be a good fit, just head over to the request form and apply. I don't see why anything should change.
- As for "unwanted posts were up for a day": contact the VSTF. The global team handles spam and vandalism. White-supremacist posts are a breach of FANDOM's ToU. Sometimes those can fall under the scope of the VSTF, sometimes they don't and you'll be referred to FANDOM Staff. Sometimes you can even ask for the VSTF to contact Staff off the wiki for you, as we have a more direct way of communicating with FANDOM staff than the special:contact form. Lady Lostris /
SOAP 12:06, October 5, 2018 (UTC)