Board Thread:2015 - A Year of Community/@comment-4139585-20150726023751

Recently I've noticed a lot of discussion on the wiki about whether or not the admins should consult the community (that is, all users on BTFF) before making changes to wiki policy or endorsing innovative, new projects. By definition, this would make the wiki a democracy, where the entire community votes and the result with the most outcomes, arguably the one that benefits the most people, is the course of action taken.

Currently, based on the user-rights groups made available globally on Wikia, the wiki operates under a pseudo-bureaucracy, where the administrators (and the user group that can promote administrators: the bureaucrats) have access to many tools that the common user does not have, such as being able to delete pages, edit wiki design and achievements, block users from the wiki, ban users from chat, add or remove chatmod and rollback privileges, and many others. Under this system, it at first appears that a small group of users (technically six on this wiki, but realistically five), making up a very small percentage of the community, make all the decisions, without consulting the community-at-large.

However, I call this a pseudo-bureaucracy for a reason. As Wikia Staff like to boast: admins are just normal users with access to a few extra tools; their status as admins doesn't actually give them the right to exclude non-admins from making decisions on the wiki. This false interpretation of the name "bureaucrat" is why I have never liked the name; it causes too many users to feel as if they have no say in decisions that affect the wiki.

On the other side, however, democracy, a system wherein anyone can actively participate in the governance of their state, too, has its flaws. As Winston Churchill once said: "the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." The meaning is clear: he believes that, while everyone can vote, not everyone should, and all it takes is five minutes to realize that many of the people who are voting are not qualified to do so. That being said, I wouldn't go so far as to call this community, nor any on Wikia, inadequate to decide what they want to do with the wiki.

I guess the point of all of this is to answer the discussion that I've seen about what system the wiki should operate under. My answer, then, is that decisions should be made by the community, not just a group of five or six users, especially considering that the community had little to no say in choosing those five or six users. That being said, I still believe that only administrators should be allowed to decide who should become chatmod, and only bureaucrats should be allowed to decide who should become admin. Other than that, I hope there will be an increase in the amount of community discussion over the next couple of months; this is the Year of Community, after all. I want to see more suggestions come directly from users instead of users contacting admins asking for them to make a thread about a suggestion; I want to see more users helping out in wiki cleanup and upkeep; bottom line: I want to see more users enjoying the time they spend on BTFF, not that there aren't a lot doing that already.

UNRELATED NOTE: it's been over three weeks since the deadline Sci mentioned in his post about article stubs passed. That means, as of this posting, all article stubs--pages that appear on Special:ShortPages--will be deleted. If one of your pages is deleted, and you want it back, please contact an admin and they will undelete it for you, but if remains an article stub one week later, it will be deleted again.

Thanks for reading this especially long post.

--Paper 