Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-454133-20170518164324/@comment-454133-20170605014901

At least one person has ownership of the wiki (and full, wiki-wide powers), be that the creator or someone he entrusts the role to. Ownership can be shared or passed on to someone else; I know this because I did so with the D&D 4E wiki, which I passed to other contributors when I quit playing 4th edition.

Below the owner(s) are admins, who have powers to delete, ban, etc but not the power to name other admins. These power-accounts are necessary specifically because Wikia is so open. With anyone being able to edit anonymously and with no accountability, you need someone who can step in with more power than the average user and correct problems, ban trouble IPs/accounts, delete spam, lock pages that keep getting incorrectly changed or vandalized, etc.

With that said, on Wikia nearly all other features are open to all users, including editing the front page, creating new pages, modifying other people's articles, etc. I think a few features require you to create an account (can't do some edits as an anonymous user), but an account is trivial to set up. Wikia is ridiculously open to anyone coming from anywhere to contribute, and nearly all the time, that works out great. I'm constantly amazed at how hoards of basically anonymous people can come together and make something so positive; it defies my cynical worldview.

Sadly there's always a small number of trashy people out there who love to damage and harass, especially when they can act anonymously, and that creates headaches for those who are trying to keep the wiki a nice place for everyone. Ideally a wiki has 3+ admins ready to step in to solve problems (ranging from correcting honest mistakes for people, to censoring hate speech and spam), ideally covering all time zones so the whole wiki doesn't burn while we sleep. Right now I think I'm the only active user here with admin priviledges (at least I think so...?), and I'd welcome help from some of the other established users like Dragoon. Things are thankfully quiet here compared to my time managing D&D4e... This Korean spam thing only hits about once per day and a half, and that's incredibly tame. We have really only dodged ugly problems by luck thus far; if we were hit hard by a network of spam bots or a very devoted griefer in his mother's basement with all the time in the world, I'd be in over my head. I have a job and a life, and the worst of humanity that visits wikis apparently doesn't.  >.>

We've gotta be careful though with who we select for the admin role. Admin powers are vast, and one of the meaner ways to chase away visitors and budding contributors is to abuse those powers in even minor ways, even non-maliciously. I joke all the time about wanting to abuse my admin rights, rule with an iron fist and play god. You know, good wholesome evil. But in truth I have some cold memories of being the target of that sort of admin abuse (on the Minecraft Tekkit wiki, right here on Wikia years ago; wasn't even malicious, just incredibly stupid admins), and those experiences inform my methods here. I try to work with a very light touch in all cases except overt spam, vandalism, or harrassment. Once we manage to contact Big Boss, I'd like to sign up Dragoon and maybe 2 other contributors who can wield the responsibility... well... responsibly, and share some of the load.

So uh... to close this bizarrely long essay... (which started out as one paragraph)

Hopefully everyone feels I'm doing a good job here. If not '''I'll ban you! AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!'''