Policy Options Wiki:Administrators

Administrators are experienced and trusted members of. They have access to additional technical tool to help them with wiki maintenance. Their experience as users makes them also useful as moderators in community discussion and interaction.

Those seeking help can turn to an administrator for advice and information. However, administrators are not a smaller, "more powerful" subset of users, and content and policy decisions are the responsibility of the entire community. Every user's voice counts.

See a list of users with adminship rights here.

Abilities

 * Deleting and undeleting pages, page histories, files, and comments.
 * Rename files
 * Protect a page so it cannot be edited or renamed by users without admin rights or autoconfirmed status.
 * Blocking IP addresses or user names from editing
 * Revert undesirable edits more easily using a "rollback" button.
 * Editing the interface by changing system messages and skins.

Administrator tasks
As part of adminship, administrators are expected to use their abilities where it is considered necessary.

Administrator conduct
Administrators have been entrusted with the means to maintain the overall quality of the site. With this in mind, an administrator is expected to:
 * be friendly, welcoming, and helpful to others
 * respond to messages on their wall in a reasonably timely manner
 * addressing disruption on the wiki by other users, including breaches of civility.

In addition to following all relevant behavioral policies, an administrator must not:
 * act like they own the site. belongs to the community, and administrators are the protectors of the community.
 * abuse their administrator privileges to censor or otherwise unfairly inhibit reasonable discussion.
 * misapply or selectively apply behavioral policies in their moderating role.

While administrators are not above regular users in terms of importance, they should be aware that their status makes role models out of them, and they should carry themselves accordingly.

Removal of rights
If it is believed that privileges are being abused by an administrator user, the following process should be applied.
 * 1) Communicate with the administrator user, instructing them that their conduct may be harming community cohesion. Reference relevant community policies, which are universally applicable to every user of.
 * 2) If attempts at communication fail, bring this to the attention of another administrator and/or bureaucrat to mediate.
 * 3) Removal of admin rights will be considered by an active bureaucrat. If a decision to remove admin rights is taken, detailed reasoning must be provided in order to satisfy a standard of accountability. One or more of the following must be shown:
 * 4) * Sustained, deliberate misuse of the privileges given
 * 5) * Sustained failure to follow behavioral policies in their entirety
 * 6) * Sustained failure to follow the conduct guidelines outlined further above

Administrators users should remain active to assist the wiki, having been entrusted with additional user rights by its community. If they continue to be inactive for a prolonged period of time, removal of user rights will be considered by an active bureaucrat based on the needs of the community. Where removal may be contentious, an active bureaucrat should also consult other community members.

Requirements
There are no concrete requirements for a user to be an administrator. However, administrators will usually:
 * Be a capable and constructive contributor to the wiki
 * Be mature and trusted by the community
 * Adhere to common principles relating to adminship

Procedures
Users must have made 50 edits in a regular fashion and have been active for at least two weeks to be able to vote or nominate. These edits can be from the wiki mainspaces and/or from the discussions.

Stage 1: Nominating
Community members have 1 week to nominate an administrator for the position of bureaucrat. Community members may ask them any questions they may have.

Stage 2: Voting
Community members have 1 week to support the administrator of their choosing for the position of bureaucrat. Attach reasoning to your position. Every vote must be logical, reasonable, and in line with the stated requirements for adminship. It is the responsibility of the voter to ensure compliance. Unless they are later clarified in an acceptable way, non-complying votes may be discarded without notice. Always be respectful.

Individual votes may be critiqued or discussed at any time in a civil and reasonable manner.

Stage 3: Resolving
The candidate with the highest number of well-reasoned support votes and a very low percentage of well-reasoned neutral/oppose votes (therefore fulfilling "consensus") will receive the admin rights from an active bureaucrat. Strength of argument is always of strong importance.
 * If the candidate with the most support votes has a high rate of opposition, then the next candidates in order of number of support votes will be considered until one is found with a suitably low rate of opposition.
 * Any draws will be resolved by choosing the candidate with the highest support from current admins. If there is a draw in admin votes, then the process will start again from stage 2 with only two candidates.