W odpowiedzi na niedawny post na temat zmian w wymaganiach adopcji, osobiście przesłałem swoje własne przemyślenia na ten temat przez system ticketów Zendesk. Aby nie powtarzać swoich opinii, postanowiłem opublikować go w oryginalnej formie (angielskiej) z wyłączeniem drobnych poprawek w formatowaniu.
" Hello!
I wanted to note my feedback in regards to recent changes of adoption policies and specifically requirements for assigning bureaucrat user group. Especially when it comes to Polish communities. I'd appreciated if this feedback piece reached to MtaÄ.
I've read recent changes to adoption policies (described in this post) and I believe they are not adequate or possible hostile for ability of communities to self-govern.
Here is my argumentation:
1. New policies for acquiring Bureaucrat group are out of touch with reality, specifically requirement of 25 active editors with 50+ edits. In language communities such as polish these numbers are hard to reach even for established communities. It's not a secret that wiki editing is a very rare hobby that involves a fraction of a fraction of community of any given fandom. International communities are additionally constrained by the language requirement for making meaningful contributions.
When I consulted multiple people, who are familiar and worked with many Polish wiki communities they all say the same - the requirement for Bureaucrat role is too extreme.
This leads to wikis being often developed by 5-10 individuals, with dozens of occasional contributors who never reach more than 50 edits. Even many established communities will fail to reach this incredibly high mark. My suggestion is to lower this number by at least 50% (to 12 active editors with 50+ edits).
2. Policies for obtaining any kind of group are also not taking into account the variety of communities on Fandom. For example, I'm in a community, which doesn't communicate on the wiki at all. The usage of talk pages is marginal and community portal sees no activity at all. Discussions are disabled as wiki is originally coming from Gamepedia. The heart of discussion lies in official Discord server for a video game, where developers want to foster a healthy wiki community for their game.
While this approach might or might not have some of its own drawback, the reality is that this is more and more often represented communication model for wikis. While requiring users to participate in discussions on the wiki is an option, to me it leads to comical situations, especially since many editors are not familiar with communication methods on the wiki.
I do not have a good suggestion for changing this on Fandom. I understand the requirement of having community support for a "promotion" being expressed on the wiki itself, however the reality of communication methods is changing and people are increasingly going away from forum like communication methods. It would be a good idea to find accommodation for this.
3. Ability for communities to self-govern is an important part of how any wiki community works. There are existing mechanisms, even on Wikipedia, where community has the ability to discuss changes to staffing of their wikis. I believe setting impossible to reach goals for communities, to have this ability to self-govern in regards to appointing new administration personnel is inherently in contradiction to this idea. It goes to point 1, this is not a standard that should happen on any international communities, they are too small for that and having bureaucrat allows them to make decisions for themselves, without additional approval by Fandom, which by further explanation in post mentioned above, will be a subject to subjective opinion by Fandom employee, thus possibly even blocking community decision.
4. The reasoning for changes stated by IWR Rail is extremely weak. This point I want to back up by my personal experience as a SOAP member. In response to a user who disagreed under the post, Rail stated the following (translated to English for your ease):
"This choice has been made because of experience we've had with a few wikis, where abuse of bureaucrat role lead to damage on the wiki, which not once required a lot of time to revert, or sometimes even need of help of Fandom engineers to help revert the wiki to state before the damage. It was so with Rayman wiki as well as some wikis in other languages for example Italian"
This quote cites one example being polish Rayman wiki. As someone who was on Fandom, and was in vandalism reverting group at that time, I were quite aware of situation that happened on Rayman wiki, and it's pretty easy for me to conclude that the explanation given by Rail is not genuine. The software we use for creating wikis – MediaWiki is great at reverting damage made by standard adversaries. It's easy to revert vandalism made by someone who never contributed or didn't spend any effort on vandalism. However when adversary does know how software works it's extremely easy for them to commit actions that will leave extremely difficult to revert changes. This was the case on Rayman wiki, where the people had experience and used it to fork the wiki. While it's true that bureaucrat group was used to commit damage, it was absolutely not necessary for this incident to occur. Having just 2 Fandom user accounts (no admin or any other privilege on wiki) and given a month (in Rayman's case it were multiple months) you can turn the wiki to irreversible state. This can be done so easily in case of move and edit tools that any user is equipped with. In Rayman's case having a single admin account could lead to the same outcome. While using admin account is preferred to deal most "damage" to the wiki, it is not required.
In addition to this reasoning, I find it unacceptable to use few examples of bad apples to penalize ALL Fandom International communities. Further explanation by Rail points out how somehow fixing damage coming from bureaucrat user group abuse is taking more time than appointing administrators by requests, however I do believe it follows a flawed logic. Fandom does not promote very well where to go in case active user wants to make certain actions such as deletes. This, combined with a fact that communities might not be so inclined to spend more time dealing with making requests for support (a notion that I share while writing this very ticket) might make the amount of requests for rights lower than it should be in reality.
Navigating Fandom's bureaucratic policies is already time-consuming, a notion shared my many of people I work with who work on international communities. Having a bureaucrat eases this problem quite a bit.
Thus, I doubt that the time required to deal with rowdy crats on international communities is really that significant to further strip the communities of ability to self-govern.
In conclusion, this specific reasoning for changes to requirements is not a valid concern, because it starts with flawed assumption that bureaucrat group is somehow required to do extreme damage on the wiki. In my experience, it is not. It is a bonus, but not a requirement. A single person with knowledge of scripting is capable of doing the same if not more with no additional rights whatsoever.
At last, I want to give my personal, perhaps harsh and misguided opinion but one that describes how I feel this change has been introduced to communities, so hopefully in the future you can use this reasoning to make communication with communities smoother.
Considering weak argumentation behind this change in adoption policies, it leads me to believe that the change itself is ultimately motivated by imposing more control by Fandom staff over wiki communities. The impossible to meet threshold is seemingly there just to make a feature defunct but not in obvious and clear way.
The content of my ticket will further be shared with Polish community over on Polish Community Central, not to duplicate my effort in explaining my reasoning for opposing this change. Hope that's understandable.
Best, Frisk."