User:Atvelonis/Admin

This is a collection of my thoughts on how an administrator (sysop) should ideally act and what duties they should perform.

Deleting/undeleting pages
One of the primary jobs of administrators is deleting pages that break the rules or are otherwise inappropriate for the wiki. This includes spam articles, irrelevant material, or anything overly risqué (there are obviously exceptions to this last point). A page can be deleted by clicking the arrow next to the "Edit" button, pressing "Delete," and then hitting "Delete page." A reason from the drop-down tab, or a more descriptive one written out manually, should always be included.

Likewise, if a page was deleted mistakenly or unfairly, it is the duty of an administrator to restore the page to how it was previously. This can be done by visiting a deleted article, clicking "view/restore," and then "Restore." It is a good idea to include reasoning for why the page in question is being undeleted, especially if it is a contentious topic.

Protecting pages
An argument among editors will occasionally become heated enough over a page that an administrator is forced to intervene and protect (lock) the article. A good time to protect a page would be during an edit wars, if it is undergoing excessive vandalism, or if it happens to be about something extremely noteworthy, controversial, or necessary, and therefore must be protected from any possible harm.

By default, pages are open to all contributors, even those without an account. However, administrators can "semi-protect" the page so that only logged-in users whose accounts are over a certain age can edit it. The option for this is "Block new and unregistered users." The most stringent option, "Administrators and Content Moderators only," should be used sparingly, as it prevents anyone who is not an administrator, content moderator, or a member of Wikia Staff from editing the article.

Generally, a page is only protected temporarily. The option for indefinite protection should not be used too frequently, as it is very easy to forget to unlock a page in the future. For the most part, only things like rule pages and important templates are protected indefinitely. A list of all protected pages on the wiki can be found on Special:ProtectedPages. Some of these cannot even by edited by administrators.

Blocking users
Administrators are required to block troublesome users for differing amounts of time, depending on the offense they have committed. A table with block length guidelines can be found here. These guidelines can be ignored if the situation permits it, but they are good to follow in most scenarios.

When to block a user
Of course, administrators may take in context when deciding how to enforce a rule. It is better to judge by the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. For example, you should not block a user based purely on a technicality. Alternatively, if a user breaks a rule in order to fix a critical issue or otherwise prevent further harm from befalling the wiki, it is not a good idea to block them for it.

Rather, blocks should only be handed out if a user or group of users has repeatedly proven themselves to be detrimental to the further development of the wiki and/or community. This does not mean that administrators have the right to block whomever they disagree with. There is a fine line between blocking someone for sharing a dissenting opinion (even a harshly-worded one), and blocking someone for actively causing damage to the wiki or its users.

That said, no one on the wiki is entitled to freedom of speech. At least, their freedom to express opinions is not protected by the Constitution of the United States of America, even though Wikia is headquartered in the United States. This is because the oft-quoted First Amendment only applies to the government; as Wikia is a private company, its employees (and, by extension, its volunteer staff members) are not required to abide by legal restrictions regarding censorship that do apply to the government.

Note that this argument should not be flouted in order to justify blocking a large number of people without a good reason. It is a defense against those who claim that they have the right to spout whatever nonsense they please on the wiki, not a justification for censorship.

Community input on blocks
When dealing with troublesome users, it is important to remember that just because a user may have a large amount of community support, their statements or actions do not necessarily represent the best path forward for the wiki.

Although several democratic elements exist within the wiki, The Elder Scrolls Wiki is not a democracy. A major flaw with democratic systems of government is the tyranny of the majority; under-informed or ill-intentioned individuals may vote in ways that actually harm the underlying goal of the wiki. This is why a consensus is never ultimately decided by a vote, rather by discussion.

Rather than a pure democracy, the wiki is commonly described as a meritocracy, in which only the most deserving members hold staff roles. It is also sometimes thought of as more of a bureaucracy, in which decisions are made with little community intervention, and the process for policy-making is primarily in the hands of the staff. In truth, the wiki is a mix of these three systems of government.

Thus, community support for a block (or a page deletion, protection, etc.) is not required. It is easy to misinterpret this line of thought as, "Administrators have the final say in all matters," but that is not really the case. While an "executive decision" (so to speak) is necessary in many situations for efficient policy-making, an administrator should generally abide by whatever the community thinks is the right thing to do.

For example, if an administrator thinks that the wiki background should be a picture of the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the vast majority of the community believes that it should be a picture of the ESO Ouroboros, the latter image should be adopted. However, if a user has caused a significant amount of damage to the community, policies, or wiki itself, they should be blocked, even if they have a high degree of community support.

The difficulty here is deciding what is considered "damage." Obviously, someone who is outright vandalizing articles should be blocked. However, it can get a lot more nuanced than that. If someone makes a huge amount of bad policy proposals that distract from the addition of content on articles, should they be blocked? Are they genuinely trying their best to help out, or is it actually a convoluted way to make the wiki an overly difficult, hostile, or otherwise unappealing place to contribute to? These are the questions that have to be considered when blocking someone for anything more heinous than blatant vandalism.

Most of the time, the wider community is not informed enough to make a decision on whether or not someone should be blocked, as they do not track user contributions to as great a degree as administrators tend to. Thus, the opinion of an informed administrator is weighted more heavily than that of a passionate, yet uninformed member of the community. That said, their opinions should not be outright ignored. It is important to balance executive decisions with community input. Failing to do this may be grounds for the demotion of the administrator at fault.

In fact, on more than one occasion, administrators have been demoted by community consensus. Whether these demotions were entirely called for is a matter of debate, but the point is that no one, even an administrator, is above the rules. A demotion usually only happens if an administrator is unquestionably abusing their power to a significant degree. However, if they are simply making a controversial (but much-needed) decision, but not actually overstepping their boundaries, then they have no reason to be demoted.

MediaWiki
It is the job of the administration to keep MediaWiki pages (the back-end structure of the wiki) updated and with as little clutter as possible. A list of what are in my opinion the most useful MediaWiki pages can be found here, while a full list can be found by sorting Special:AllPages. Note that you have to again click on the links provided on this page to see the exact MediaWiki pages.

MediaWiki is one of those things that should not be changed significantly without consensus from the rest of the staff and/or community (if necessary). Note that even if something appears to be useless at a glance, it is probably still there for a reason. As such, I would advise that you not edit any part of any MediaWiki page without understanding what you are doing, at least in a basic sense.

Generally, it is also a bad idea to add innumerable quirky scripts to the wiki unless they are genuinely useful. Things like pretty (but useless) animations, popups, or a million widgets are probably not necessary to the wiki, and only serve to increase loading times by a small degree. Over time, these scripts can really add up, eventually reaching the point where simply reviewing them becomes a project in and of itself. Administrators should strive to find a balance between useful scripts and unneeded ones whenever possible.

If you ever need assistance with a MediaWiki page, Flightmare is probably the best person to get help from on this wiki. If he is inaccessible for whatever reason, consider asking on Community Central or sending a ticket to Wikia (though it is not their job to help clean up messy MediaWiki pages).

Project pages
It is also the job of administrators to create and maintain the wiki's official project pages (anything in the Project: namespace). This includes policies, archives, poweruser groups such as the Circle, events such as the Member of the Month award, and more. Many of these pages are semi-protected or fully protected to avoid vandalism or misinformation being placed on them.

Administrators technically have direct control over the contents of policy pages, but they are not permitted to create or remove whichever rules they please without community consensus. While a full consensus is not always necessary, administrators should seek to at least present their ideas at the moot ever month in order to gauge community support or opposition.

Policy creation should never be a secretive matter. Some things are left to the administration, but if the community presents legitimate objections to a policy (even one that they may not be knowledgeable in), the administration should amend the policy to address these issues to the best of their ability.

Other staff duties
In addition to the aforementioned duties, administrators are encouraged to keep an eye on all parts of the wiki, including Recent Changes, the Chat, and the Forums. Generally, each administrator will have slightly different areas of expertise, but they should all make an effort not to completely ignore one or more sections of the wiki.

Patrolling
In essence, patrolling comes down to just continually opening everything on Special:RecentChanges and checking if each of the edits are good or not. If they are vandalism, inaccurate, unnecessary, or otherwise undesirable, they should be reverted, and the user who made the edit should be informed of how they can improve their future edits. They also have to patrol new articles to make sure that they are up to snuff, and block users who commit vandalism or repeatedly cause disruption on articles.

Forum moderation
Similar to patrolling, forum moderation requires every post to be reviewed by a moderator or administrator, who will determine if it breaks any rules. The Forum guidelines should be used on the Forums, and the Discussions guidelines should be used on Discussions.

It is perfectly fine to make exceptions to the rules here and there, depending on the situation. Posts that blatantly violate the rules should be deleted, whereas legitimate threads that have gotten derailed in some way should usually be locked. If the users are still capable of continuing the conversation in a mature fashion, then only the specific comments that have been derailing the thread should be removed.

Blocks should only be handed out if a user has broken the rules multiple times after being warned (see above); in other words, a first offense is usually not something to block over, unless it is plain spam or vandalism.

Chat moderation
Moderating the Chat requires a great deal of attention, so it is not always possible to keep a close eye on it while simultaneously editing or moderating a different part of the wiki. If one or more Chat moderators are online, it is perfectly acceptable to AFK in the Chat. If not, I would recommend keeping a closer eye on the Chat.

It is best to enable chathacks (Options -> Enable chathacks) and set your pings to various corruptions of your name, as well as the terms, "Admin," "Moderator," and if you want to be especially vigilant, "Help," "Question," and related terms.

News
Alongside the news team, administrators are responsible for keeping the news on the front page up-to-date. Add the category "News" to blogs add have them display on the front page's first news tab. Likewise, add "Community News" to blogs to the second news tab on the front page.

Administrators must also either delegate the writing of the Weekly Updates to a member of the staff, or write the updates themselves. They must also continually update all related materials, such as social media accounts and other aspects of the front page.

Good traits to have
While editing skills are extremely important to being administrator, admins also have to be active with the community, and as such require a good number of social and leadership skills. I've listed a few that I believe are important for the position:


 * Accessibility – Users should be able to contact admins in at least one way (talk pages), and ideally in several, such as through the Chat or from off-site. Additionally, admins should make themselves as approachable as possible and avoid coming off as cold or unfriendly.
 * Assertiveness – Although an admin should obviously take into account multiple different opinions before making a big decision, they should not meekly step aside every time someone challenges their ideas. They should be firm in their beliefs, but not overly stubborn.
 * Calmness – An administrator shouldn't be freaking out over calamitous events. Additionally, they should know how to deal with criticism and policy, editing, moderation, etc. issues in a level-headed manner.
 * Caution – Although it can be beneficial to try out new features and explore new avenues, admins should be careful not to go too far. Totally changing the content of all of the wiki's rules to something different, for example, is risky and could potentially have devastating effects.
 * Dedication – An admin should constantly be dedicated to protecting and improving the wiki. They shouldn't abandon or neglect the wiki for another wiki or website, although of course real life does take priority over administrative duties at times.
 * Friendliness – Tying into being approachable, an admin should have friendly or at least professional interactions with all users. They should not be hostile or otherwise unpleasant to users, and should instead strive to create functional relations with as many users as possible.
 * Helpfulness – Admins should always strive to be as helpful as possible to new and old users alike. Explaining things to others and fixing issues in a friendly but still informative fashion is a very good way for an administrator improve the wiki.
 * Humility – Being responsible for so many essential aspects of the wiki can have a negative effect on the perception of one's own importance. An admin should be aware that they are just a glorified internet janitor, and that they are not irremovable from their position should they stop acting properly. They should accept the fact that they are not above the rules, and should not consider themselves any more important than they actually are.
 * Integrity – In addition to being honest to other members of the community, an administrator should not be tempted to break the rules just because they think they can; they should always remain devoted to improving and maintaining the wiki.
 * Intuition – Administrators should be able to process a situation easily and figure out a course of action fairly quickly. No one is perfect in this regard, but the position often requires quick thinking. Although many scenarios require a much deeper level of thought, some must be handled almost instantaneously.
 * Judgment – Similar to the previous point, admins should be able to reach sensible conclusions more often than not. They should be able to suggest compromises and solutions, and should also be able to make sense of drawn-out debates.
 * Knowledge – Obviously, an admin should know what they're doing most of the time. This means being familiar with policy and style guidelines, as well as having knowledge of the game series itself and of course how to perform their administrative duties.
 * Leadership – While they are not dictators, admins are the faces of the wiki and as such should demonstrate good leadership skills. Admins do not necessarily give orders, but they should make an effort to be forthright with their ideas.
 * Patience – An administrator should be patient with everyone they speak to. Most people aren't knowledgeable about many things on the wiki, so teaching them about such things should not result in an admin getting frustrated and leaving.
 * Positivity – Although they certainly don't have to be bounding with energy, an administrator should be at least somewhat inspirational among members of the community. It's difficult to follow a leader who constantly brings everyone down emotionally.
 * Restraint – Admins should be capable of exercising restraint when it comes to blocks, protections, consensuses, and other matters. This means that they should only make use of their tools if there is a proper reason to do so, such as dealing with vandalism.
 * Trustworthiness – Users should be able to come to admins for help and expect a decent reply, and admins should always be there to handle blocking users and de-escalating heated arguments. An unreliable admin probably shouldn't have the position.

Things to avoid

 * Wikilawyering

Miscellaneous essays

 * Don't be high maintenance
 * Encourage the newcomers
 * Free speech
 * Imagine others complexly
 * You don't own Wikipedia

How to run the back-end of the wiki if all the admins disappear
In the very unlikely event that the entire active administration resigns, leaving only a couple of confused and inexperienced patrollers to run the site in their permanent absence (cough cough January 2015), this is how to complete all of the various administrative duties that you probably take for granted. I'm not foreshadowing anything; this is just a backup plan so that in a worst-case scenario, future admins actually have a clue what they're doing. It's also just a good resource for new admins.

Weekly updates
They don't write themselves. They're posted on Saturdays after the moot, and discuss everything from new rules to new games. I personally date them for Saturday even if I write it on Tuesday, just so I don't confuse myself (and everyone else). Proper record-keeping is important; be sure to talk about everything that's happening on the wiki itself, and also be very sure to remain updated on the progression of the series in general. Here are some links which you will certainly want to make use of if you happen to be writing these updates:


 * Wikia
 * Wikia Staff Blog
 * Wikia Technical Updates


 * TES
 * Bethesda News
 * Legends News
 * ESO News


 * Other
 * PC Gamer – My go-to for general TES or PC news that isn't on any of the official sites.
 * Gamers Nexus – If you're gathering technical data on a game, such as performance benchmarks and/or analysis, these guys have their testing methodology down.

I also just tend to search "The Elder Scrolls" in Google under "News" and see what pops up, in case it happens to be an unofficial (but still noteworthy) piece of information. Usually this stuff is just click-baity garbage, but if it happens to be any good then it's often worth mentioning. Don't forget to update the project page when you're done.

Promoting/demoting staff
This is pretty easy. Go to Special:UserRights (only accessible if you are an admin or Staff), type in the username of the person you want to promote (or demote) and click "Edit user groups," then select/deselect the necessary checkboxes. Write a brief note if you want, and then hit "Save user groups." That's it.

Staff MediaWiki/templates
This is what can sometimes take a little longer if you don't know what you're doing: the MediaWiki. And templates. You can probably figure out what to do for these yourself, just copy+paste the previous entry for some other admin and replace their name with the name of the person you're promoting. Might have to mess around with a couple other stats, but it's not difficult. Don't forget commas. Here's where you've gotta go:
 * MediaWiki:Common.css/highlights.css – Where you go to apply username highlights.
 * MediaWiki:ProfileTags (formerly MediaWiki:Common.js/masthead.js, but the JS approval process was a pain.) – To update the little note at the top of the user's profile that says their position. Also used for MOTM.
 * Template:StaffList – Transcluded on staff pages. Edit the position-specific ones.
 * Template:StaffList/admin
 * Template:StaffList/patrol
 * Template:StaffList/mod
 * Template:StaffList/chatmod
 * Template:StaffList/news
 * Template:StaffList/bot
 * Template:StaffNav – A navbox representation of all staff.
 * Template:StaffTimeline (2011) – A visual representation of all staff. You have to update both this one and the individual ones to do it fully; it's not automatic as they're different templates.
 * Template:AdminTimeline
 * Template:PatrollerTimeline
 * Template:ForumModTimeline
 * Template:ChatModTimeline

Don't forget to add one of the following templates to their profile if you're promoting someone, depending on the position:
 * Administrator
 * Patroller
 * ForumMod
 * ChatMod
 * News Team
 * Bot

Bots
Bots are a pain because you need to get Wikia Staff to give them the bot flag (Special:Contact/general), but you can do everything else. Promote them to Content Moderator (rather than admin) so that they can't wreak total havoc if they become sentient. You're also supposed to have a link pointing to the operator on the bot's profile.

Admin Dashboard
Accessible from Special:AdminDashboard. Lots of great stuff here. You initially start out on the "General" tab, but there are quite a few additional links on the "Advanced" tab.

Theme designer
Don't touch this unless you know what you're doing. Elchzard happens to have a backup of many of the wiki's files just in case you totally ruin everything, but honestly there's no reason 99% of the time to mess around with this.

Wiki navigation
The local navbar is controlled via MediaWiki:Wiki-navigation. One bullet is the first level of category tabs; two bullets are the drop-down tabs; three bullets are the contents of the drop-down tabs. That's as far as it goes, though. Keep in mind that there are size limitations on this, so you can't add an unlimited number of links here. You can write in plaintext here, but you need to use a pipe link for anything that has a prefix.

Wiki features
Administrators have the ability to enable/disable various Wiki Features. Polls, blogs, article comments, message walls, barring anons from editing, and various "Labs" features such as Chat and Achievements. I would advise not to enable or disable any of these features without prior discussion with the rest of the staff and approval from the community.

Community corner
Distinct from Special:Community is the right rail that appears on Special:WikiActivity from MediaWiki:Community-corner. Edit this sparingly, as it notifies every logged-in user on the wiki of the change, similar to a talk page notification.

Protect site
The "Advanced" tab of the Admin Dashboard features a number of Special pages, one of which is Special:Protectsite. If the wiki is in a state of emergency and you need to temporarily shut down anon/user access to user account creation, article creation, editing, page moves, and/or file uploads, this is where you would go. Be extremely cautious about using this sort of thing, because it could potentially affect thousands of users. You can only limit access to these tools for a maximum of 12 hours, for obvious reasons.

Qtables
Qtables, the tables that are used for journals (example), are controlled via MediaWiki:Wikia.css (Special:CSS). If you want to add a new table color, copy+paste all of the existing code for one of the tables, then change the name. Don't forget the commas. You can find a list of infobox colors here.

General scripts
A number of the scripts on the wiki are currently located on MediaWiki:Common.js. It's probably a good idea not to mess with these unless you happen to know what they all do, because you could inadvertently remove a commonly-used feature or something. You can import a script by adding the name under the importArticles section, or depending on the script you might want to keep the full code below. If any existing scripts need to be loaded before or after others for whatever reason, make sure to respect this. Once you make a revision, you have to submit it for approval by Wikia.

You can also bypass the whole verification thing by just importing directly to MediaWiki:ImportJS. This should work for most scripts.

Achievements
You can edit the names, icons, and groupings of achievements from Special:AchievementsCustomize, which is linked on the right rail of Special:Leaderboard. We have a backup of the achievement images here, in case you accidentally replace an icon with something unfitting.

Since Wikia doesn't give us access to Special:Platinum, you need to get a Wikia Helper or Staff to update the page to include new Members of the Month, which will grant them a Platinum-level achievement for MOTM.

Community
To edit the to-do list on the Special:Community page, you have to go to MediaWiki:Community-to-do-list. Making this list too long results in a scrollbar, rather than extending the length of the page.

Edit Tools
In Source Editor, users can see a small button on the top that says "More," referring to additional symbols that are not included on standard keyboards. To make a change to this page, you have to visit MediaWiki:Edittools.

Discussions
In addition to being stored on TES:Discussions, the guidelines are also included here for optimal use on the app. These have to be updated separately. Also note that not all formatting works properly in the latter page, as Discussions does not presently support wikitext.

Main page
A lot of stuff on the front page is displayed via templates, so it can't all be edited in one place. Fortunately, it's not that complicated. Anyway, if you go to the page's source code, you'll first notice the code for the Slider, which is probably the most visible part of the main page. This is simply a type of gallery, and you can use the existing formatting as a baseline on how to change the images and text on it. The Portal section below that doesn't have to be updated until a major new game comes out.

Next is the News section, which lists recent blog posts in a given category under a group of tabs. To make a blog post appear here, you have to add it to the category specified on this page. For example, if you want a news blog to show up under the News tab, you have to add the category News to the blog itself. You'll see a few other templates underneath that which you can leave alone. After those come the widgets on the right rail.

The advertisement for the wiki's mobile app doesn't require any maintenance unless the URL to the app changes for some reason (unlikely). The "Helping Out" box contains a few links to get readers started on editing; you can change this if you feel it is necessary, but be careful not to make it too long. The Twitter and Facebook widgets update automatically and require no input from you.

The MOTM (Member of the Month) section needs to be revised every time there is a new winner of the award. The recipient's name should be updated from here, and you should write a short blurb detailing how their edits have helped the wiki here. Be careful to write the text inside the  tags, and leave the text within the   tags alone.

Try to update the main page's Poll every so often, just so that visitors have something to do on the page. It uses the standard poll tags, so text on the first line after the tag is the question, and text on every new line after that is an answer choice. The code below that is necessary to keep the page from looking like a normal article, so there's no reason to touch it.

The final thing you have to do is to update the list of languages every time a TESWiki in a foreign language is created. Each language that the wiki is written in (excluding English) is listed by its ISO 639-1 code, a two-letter abbreviation of its name in English; you can find a list of these codes here. These links will appear the way they are written in their respective languages so that foreign readers can access their proper wikis with relative ease.