User blog:LostInRiverview/Crash Course to Administratorship

First off, I don’t want to sound condescending or arrogant. I know that some of our newest batch of administrators (if not all of them) have previous administratorship experience on other wikis (including The Sims Medieval Wiki). But, just the same, it doesn’t hurt to go a little bit into TSW Admin advice.

This isn’t meant to explain how to use the tools of the trade. Things like deleting, locking, blocking and doing other stuff like this will come as you grow into your position. This blog posting is specifically about when and in what way those tools should be used. Some of this is good practice in general, some of it is obvious and some of it is unique to TSW.

This may seem like a pretty easy question to answer, but is it? Consider that what is appropriate for a 3-year-old, and 13-year-old and a 23-year-old vary vastly. As you all know if you read Policy, this wiki is written for a minor audience; specifically readers 13 years and older. That said, some things are very obviously inappropriate. Links to pornography or sexually-explicit material, sexually-explicit content included directly, blatant profanity, threats against others or threats to cause vandalism, vicious insults against others – all these are easy to spot and easy to remedy. However, determining whether something written on a talk page or a blog posting or forum thread is appropriate or not is much more delicate, and should be done carefully. Also note that bluntness or even apparent harshness in words is not inappropriate. It is a very fine line between appropriate criticism – harsh as it may be – and flat-out attacking, but it’s important that administrators determine what is happening and can see the situation clearly before issuing warnings or blocks.
 * What is (in)appropriate?

This part is simple; just because you can delete something doesn’t mean that you should. For example, deleting the Main page would be an example of a very bad idea. Although you have the power to delete every page on the wiki (minus some MediaWiki pages), you obviously should not delete a page without good reason.
 * Deleting stuff

Determining good reason itself is sometimes difficult, but here’s a good rule of thumb: When it doubt, don't delete. Obviously, when spam or vandalism pages are created, those go right away. When a page is created that is completely empty, that goes too. But if you go to a page and are either unsure if the topic discussed is relevant or you feel the page may not warrant its own article, do the decent thing and nominate it for deletion, then start a discussion about why it should/should not go.

Speaking of Candidates for Deletion, try not to feel the need to keep that list short. Bear in mind that if a page is nominated for deletion (rather than Speedy Deletion), that the page may not be worthy of deletion at all; the purpose of nomination is to allow extensive discussion before a decision is made. It doesn’t hurt to keep pages nominated (unless they are inappropriate, as before stated) while the wiki community decides what to do with it. Also, 100% of the time and without fail, you absolutely positively should check the page, category, or Template's 'What Links Here' to make sure that the page/template/category isn't cited or used on any pages. If it is used on a lot of pages, wait to delete it until those links can be cleaned up.


 * More to come!