Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-9062114-20140907030841

Hi everyone, this Consensus discusses pretty much what the title said. That Forum Moderators should be given the right like a Patroller to be promoted to an Administrator of the Wiki.

Now, let's look at the facts, on multiple Wikis, the Forums are growing and becoming large parts of communities for people, especially on this website, so why do we let only Mainspace editors have the chance for power on this site. That's leaving a huge part of the Wiki without the ability to lead one day, which I personally don't think is doing good for the Wiki. In addition, it will only give powers to those who may not have interests in the other areas of the site. For example, since only Patroller can become Admins, the current staff of Admins will only be picked from people who know how to deal with Mainspace, not the whole site. Admins are supposed to be Rolemodels and mentors for the community, so I think, we should pick people from all areas of the Wiki who each have there own specialties. That way the site can be lead fairly, and with every user getting fair chances, regardless of what they are really interested in. Now, the system may have made sense when the Mainspace was really big, and the Forums were mostly used for CTs and Site Improvement threads, but now that is no longer the case, and is only serving to keep good users, unable to get Admin rights.

Now I get some of think the Mainspace is still the most important part of the site, regardless of this, the philosophy of this has not served the Wiki great in recent times, look at our Admin numbers? We have maybe, one active Admin now, and are unable to nominate people because we can only choose from Patrollers. However, if we add Forum Moderators to that, it brings out a whole new group of users who can possibly get the position and do good here, so not only would we be able to represent the community better with Forum Mod Admins being added, but it might help our lack of eligable user problems.

Something that could be thought, is that Sysop tools actually are good for moderating Forums, only Admins can close bad Forums, block disruptive users, etc. Couldn't the Forum frequent users benefit from having these tools? With Sysops that only focus on the Mainspace, these issues can go unfixed for a while, while if a Forum user was Sysop, it could get taken care of pretty nicely. Also, a lot of Forum type users also go on Blogs, which means possibly having Admins from Mods could lead to more order in the Blogs, such as removing harmful comments, deleting disruptive blogs and all that.

I honestly can't see anything wrong with giving Forum Mods the right to become Sysops here, like the Patrollers, when you think about all the good it could do. I personally think it's time for the Wiki to evolve, no more treating the Mainspace as all that matters, clearly people don't follow this anymore, and it will only end up hurting the Wiki. Time to modernize the Admin choosing System for the Wiki, what do you think about it!?

 