Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-5645428-20150510004001/@comment-11060907-20150510063940

There are flaws with the process which you suggest, which I notice because of the 1.5 years I spent on the DragonVale Wiki. Their procedures are very thorough, and I'll write as much as I remember of them.

Step 1: A rollback with 200 quality edits (quality edits are edits to main pages with relevant information/fixing problems with an article/whatever the admins think is quality) and a good amount of activity is nominated by a registered user in the Wiki Moderator nominations thread.

Step 2: The user must receive three registered user vouches and one vouch from a current wiki mod or admin. If this is not met within a week, the nomination is dropped.

Step 3: The admins contact the nominated member and notify them that they have been nominated. If the member does not wish to become a mod, the process is dropped.

Step 4: A thread is created for the discussion of whether the member should become a mod or not. Only registered users may participate. Common points addressed are the user's helpfulness, their attitude, their spelling and grammar (yes, they matter), their thoughtfulness when editing, and so on. Forum activity is considered as well as main page editing.

Step 5: After one week, the discussion thread is closed and a voting thread is created. Users who have been registered on the wiki from more than 30 days (i.e. they have experience and are not multis) are allowed to vote. Every post in the thread should say either "support" or "oppose", and nothing else - any reasoning for the vote is removed, as that is for the discussion thread.

Step 6: After a week of voting, the thread is closed. If the fraction of voters supporting the nomination is more than 2/3, the user is evaluated by the administrators and wiki mods in another thread, usually on an external site so that normal users cannot post there (I would suggest Quicktopic). They ultimately have the final decision on whether the user becomes a moderator or not, but they should still take the community's opinion into account. (Of course, if the vote does not produce 2/3 support, the nomination is dropped.)

Step 7: An announcement is made regarding the user's acceptance.

Note that any of this could be changed due to our smaller community (we have about 1/10 of the pages and members that the DV wiki has).

There is also a similar process for selecting new chat moderators and administrators. Rollbacks are selected much more simply: they require 50 quality edits, a nomination, and three vouches from any registered user to gain that position. (Rollbacks pretty much just prevent spam, as far as I know - they can "roll back" edits with a single button. We probably don't need them.)

Thoughts?