About half a day ago, User:KirbyPowerpuff1 was demoted as a content moderator by User:K6ka, in response to Kirby's misuse of the delete tool and other failures.
This thread is partly a way for me to say what I believe to be Kirby's responsibilities ahead of their demotion, justification for K6ka's actions, and general principles for how user rights and responsibilities work, including the rights and responsibilities of bureaucrats on the wiki. This thread is also meant to allow for input from the whole community on any of the subjects I mention, as well as the actual instance of Kirby's demotion.
User responsibilities[]
In editing the wiki, every user—from unregistered contributors all the way up to long-established bureaucrats—has certain duties to perform.
In addition to the most basic and obvious requirement that editors must follow the wiki's rules on editing and personal behavior, there are other expectations of editors which aren't so clearly or obviously spelled out. These obligations stem from the purpose of the project as a whole, as explained succinctly on the main page: "The Sims Wiki is a collaborative encyclopedia." Collaboration emphasizes the need for intercommunication between editors, and this communication can come in several forms. Edit summaries, messages on talk pages and user talk pages, community discussions, and off-wiki discussions via Discord or other venues, can all be valid and useful methods of collaboration. Users have the responsibility to communicate what they are doing, especially when what they are doing may be confusing or controversial. And, just as importantly, users have the obligation to explain their actions and justifications when asked, so long as the questioning is reasonable and the reasons for the user's actions aren't obvious.
So, let's establish these as three key user responsibilities:
- Users need to follow the wiki rules;
- Users need to communicate what they are doing (especially if it's not clear what or why they're doing it), and;
- Users need to respond to reasonable questions or comments from other users about their actions.
I would want to stress that points 2. and 3. above are not optional, but are integral parts of being a wiki contributor. Other editors need to understand, as best as possible, what is going through your head when you hit 'save page'; that's why we have things like edit summaries and talk pages in the first place. These tools exist to reduce editor conflict, and a key part of that is by removing confusion and addressing possible disagreement before it happens. And just as you need to explain the edits you make, you also need to pay attention to other editors who may disagree with your edits or not understand them. You need to be mindful of when you are being asked direct questions and need to do your best to respond to those questions in a timely fashion. By ignoring or not paying attention to these questions or criticisms, you can create confusion and conflict where none existed before, and that does a disservice to the goal of collaboration.
Responsibilites of promoted users[]
The wiki has multiple "user rights" that give specific powers that un-promoted "regular" users do not have. These "promoted user" roles—specifically rollback, content moderator, administrator, and bureaucrat—have different powers and different responsibilities for exercising those powers. However, all promoted users have the same user responsibilities as un-promoted users do; promoted users still need to follow the wiki's rules, need to explain their edits, and need to collaborate when collaboration is requested. Being in a promoted position does not exempt those users from the regular editor responsibilities; in fact, it makes it more important that those users act in accordance with those responsibilities, because the tools and powers available to promoted users can have a much bigger and more dramatic impact on the wiki and its goals. So not only do promoted users need to adhere to the user responsibilities outlined above, they also need to ensure that they are doing the same whenever they exercise their powers (again, unless the cause is blatantly obvious). And, because promoted users are in the unique position of using specific tools and powers to maintain these rules and responsibilities, promoted users are likewise responsible for using those powers when their use is needed.
To that end, let's list out four key promoted user responsibilities:
- Promoted users are not exempt from following any of the key user responsibilities;
- Promoted users are empowered to use their tools only when justified, and then only within the existing rules and procedures for their use;
- Promoted users are expected to explain when and why they have used their tools, and;
- Promoted users are responsible for responding to reasonable questions or comments from others users about their use of those tools.
The case of KirbyPowerpuff1[]
Taking everything established above, let's look at the specific incident.
- 1. Kirby, as a content moderator, used their delete power to delete old versions of files
- A. Initially, Kirby made no attempt to explain what they were doing or why
- B. They justified their use of this power under section F3 of the wiki's criteria for speedy deletion
- 2. Kirby ignored or else did not respond to multiple requests from users for an explanation to their behavior regarding deletion until after their demotion
- 3. After several attempts to pause Kirby's actions or get their attention, K6ka used his bureaucrat power and removed Kirby's content moderator rights
The key points of consideration are whether Kirby was justified in using the tools the way that they did, whether K6ka was justified in using his powers to revoke Kirby's mod status, and whether this revocation is permanent. -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 17:01, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
Discussion[]
For the reasons I've outlined in the responsibilities sections above, I believe that Kirby's actions were out of order. Kirby had the responsibility to follow procedure in deletion, which they failed to do by misunderstanding the purpose of Speedy Delete criterion F3. They had the responsibility, nevertheless, to be available to explain their actions in a timely fashion, which Kirby failed to do.
As to the matter of Kirby's demotion by K6ka... One of the most well-established rules on this wiki is the rule governing how and when users can be promoted. Bureaucrats have the technical power to promote any user at will, but bureaucrats by rule are not allowed to promote users unless the user first passes a request for user rights. But, the wiki has no procedure or established precedent for demotion of a user. Because this is uncharted waters, I think it makes sense to consider the key responsibilities of promoted users in using the tools of their positions to consider whether K6ka's actions were justified. Namely: K6ka attempted to communicate with Kirby multiple times before the rights were revoked; after the demotion, K6ka explained to Kirby why they were demoted; there is no established practice for how this is to be conducted, and; bureaucrats, as a class of promoted user, are obligated to use their tools when their use is justified and in accordance with the rules and practices of the wiki. Taking all that into account, I believe that K6ka's actions in this incident were in order.
Regarding whether Kirby's demotion is permanent... Again, this is a matter without precedent. User promotion is predicated on community consent, so in principle, demotion should be based on the same. Because of the quickness of Kirby's demotion, there wasn't a period to allow formal community consent to K6ka's actions. I think that it is important to allow the community to weigh in, either to ratify the demotion, or else to agree on if/when Kirby should be re-promoted. My personal opinion is that Kirby should not be re-promoted, but that they should not be barred from re-requesting these rights in the future. That said, Kirby would need to do work to regain my faith and trust, and I imagine that the same would be said of other members of the community. -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 17:01, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
- I believe this user's deletions were not helpful to the wiki. As a fairly new content moderator myself, I consider my approach to have been cautious, but this individual did not explain what they were doing. I was very surprised to see hundreds of files deleted in the deletion log, and I do not know if these files should have been kept. Because of the extreme amount of deletions that took place, I do not know how these erroneous actions can possibly be rectified. Should admins or bureaucrats reverse this user's actions in the past few days? RedWizard98 (talk) 18:07, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
- I honestly don't know. The deletions at issue here weren't helpful, but it's also hard to say that they were directly harmful. The harm that Kirby caused was by not being communicative and by undertaking a task that they couldn't adequately justify doing. The actual deletions were of old versions of existing files. The amount of work that would need to be done to separate Kirby's good deletes from their bad ones, and the effort to put everything back the way it was before, would be substantial. I don't know if it's worth the effort to do it. -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 18:18, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
I wondered for some days if KirbyPowerpuff1 was doing a very good deed, by going through Category:Candidates for speedy deletion, which had for years been filled by Fandom bots that had tagged copyrighted unused images; and he had successfully handled more than 500 entries there. But the #wikia-recent-changes feed on the Discord server showed increasingly stranger patterns that made several people very confused about what was going on, and it took a while before we got an answer.
Even for mods and admins, editing 500+ pages in a week along a set pattern, requires first telling someone "I'm planning to do _____". For that matter, this quote from K6ka's talk page, "(…) I don't like the old Sims 3 headshots, because these images look so boring in the image version history (…)", is a career-ender, as it confirmed there were no good deeds involved, but instead a general lack of knowledge of wiki image page histories on any wiki. Let's please never again give official positions to anyone with cartoon names in their profile names. Dandelion Sprout (talk) 18:14, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
- I'm not sure if your last sentence is meant to be a joke, but I sincerely hope so. The take-away from this situation is not "don't promote users with silly usernames." This case should underscore the importance of communication, and especially participation in promotion discussions. Kirby's promotion discussion had only two contributors despite being open for over a week. In a system where the decision of whether or not to promote is based on consensus, it's pretty hard to determine whether a consensus exists when only two people weigh in. Let's keep that as something to address, rather than just taking a blanket stance against people with particular usernames. -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 18:22, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
- Yeah, critcising someone's user name because it contains the name of a cartoon character I find rather irreverent. Given the huge amount of work that would be need to be done to reverse their actions, it certainly would take a long time, and I personally do not want to attempt it. Perhaps at some point in the future, this user can re-apply for special rights, but I think a significant cooling off period is at least required. RedWizard98 (talk) 18:46, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
- Regardless of what Kirby did, I don't think a bureaucrat should be able to unilaterally demote a Content Moderator without input from the other administrators. I am super uncomfortable with some of the actions here and how this went about. My hope is that if something like this were to occur again, it would be a joint administrator decision, especially when it comes to user rights. Ѧüя◎ґ (talk) 15:13, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
- I partly agree with your stance, Auror. I too think the idea of a bureaucrat taking unilateral action without consultation with the community or other admins is troubling. I ultimately support what k6ka did and why, though. I feel that bureaucrats have a special responsibility, as the only users with the power to promote and demote, to be checks on possible misbehavior from admins, content mods, and rollbackers. This should be done in consultation with the community, or at least with the admin team, but this is not always practical or possible. I think that bureaucrats have a "reserve power" of sorts to be able to take decisive action to demote in the clear situation where an admin/mod/rollbacker is doing harm and has been given multiple opportunities to explain themselves or stop. I will say that I feel that this situation was rushed unnecessarily, since the harm that Kirby was causing was relatively minor. I don't disagree with the demotion itself, but I don't think the situation was so urgent that it couldn't have been discussed first, even if it was just in private amongst the admins. In the absence of an established precedence, though, I can't necessarily fault k6ka for acting boldly in this case and using the reserve power. I started this discussion mainly in the interest of us establishing a precedence to govern when and how bureaucrats can demote, since the wiki has no policy or past precedent to govern this. But this may be an area where a formalized policy would be helpful. -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 04:25, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
- In a system where the decision of whether or not to promote is based on consensus, it's pretty hard to determine whether a consensus exists when only two people weigh in. You partly nailed it on the head, LiR. A massive problem with the wiki over the past few years is that we've had a precipitous decline in the number of users that participate in discussions, leaving our consensus-based approaches and decision-making to grind to a halt. On Discord, I hear complaints that Pages for Deletion takes forever because no one participates. Trying to get a consensus is no longer the path that most editors seek, both because they are disinterested in discussions, and because nobody else participates, leading to a situation where discussion forums are unused because they're ineffective, and they're ineffective because they're unused. On the flip side, switching to an implied consensus model where decisions are made if there are no objections (and thus assuming that there is a consensus if no one responds) is also problematic in that it can make poor decisions much easier to pass, since a discussion is not required to explore the options presented. See Forum:Changing procedures for rollback and moderator requests, which was withdrawn specifically because of the KirbyPowerpuff1 debacle. The wiki is very much in a state of decline; we need engaged contributors who are willing to actively participate in the consensus-building and decision-making processes, not just do their own thing. None of what we propose will work until we get that. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 12:44, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
"Trying to get a consensus is no longer the path that most editors seek... because they are disinterested in discussions". While I think your second point (inactive discussions breed inactive discussions) is true, I don't want to jump to your conclusion on the first point. I am more inclined to assume that discussions are inactive because our system of organizing and managing discussions is archaic, confusing for users to navigate, or flawed in some other way that we haven't yet identified. This was part of my justification for proposing opening discussions up on Discord:
It's also worth considering the status quo of discussions and consensus-building, and whether it's serving us well; I would argue that it isn't. The on-wiki forum feature is clunky and not intuitive to use, especially for inexperienced editors. It's also not clear that there are any good Fandom-provided alternatives to the current forums. And all of this is dancing around the elephant in the room – the way that people interact with the wiki and contribute to its development has changed, and probably won't change back. Forum threads may seem like a normal enough thing to a person around my age or older, but the idea of web forums as a concept is largely outdated now; they just aren't how people tend to interact online anymore. Trying to force all substantive discussions to take place in a mode that much of the audience may be unfamiliar with, and a mode that most of us really don't choose to use anymore even if we are familiar with it, just ends up needlessly hamstringing the discussion and leads to fewer discussions (or, as seems to be the case on TSW now, basically no discussions whatsoever).
That aspect is obviously beyond the scope of this discussion, but I do still think it's a valid idea worth exploring. Is there some structural flaw in the way that we conduct discussions—community discussions and consensus threads, user promotions, deletions, etc—that we are just dancing around? I think just blaming people for being disinterested is drawing a lazy conclusion. It seems like there's more to it than that, because we do still have active editors and an active, engaged community chatting on the Discord server. -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 15:03, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
- I would support changes to get more wiki editors involved in discussions, including requests for permissions. RedWizard98 (talk) 12:51, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
- Opening up wiki-related discussions on Discord has helped a little bit, although I should point out that even our two newest content moderators aren't or weren't particularly active on there. RedWizard98 didn't join until after the demotion of KirbyPowerpuff1, and Kirby never joined to begin with. However, RedWizard98 has indeed made an effort to use talk pages to discuss, whereas KirbyPowerpuff1 did not. The editors who did join Discord have used it to discuss wiki-related matters, but as you pointedly observed, it was quite problematic that our newest content moderators weren't even on Discord. This would naturally lead into the can of worms about whether or not a Discord account should be mandatory to participate—a story for another thread, but one I'm opposed to, largely on the grounds of relying too much on a third-party service that's difficult to migrate from (as much as we already do). —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 13:10, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
- Yeah, I'd be inclined to make it a recommendation but not a requirement that future mod and admin candidates be on the Discord server. The more avenues that are open to communication, and the more that applicants and mods/admins are willing to use those avenues, the better. But as you said, that's a topic for another discussion. -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 21:39, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
Closing[]
I'm archiving this thread because of its age. It's hard to draw any definitive conclusions from the discussion (especially while trying to be neutral, given that I was a participant in the discussion) but the general impression I get is that KirbyPowerpuff's demotion is valid. The circumstances of how they were demoted and next steps from there can (and maybe should) be given further consideration, but I think such a thing should take place in a new thread, where we're able to consider the issue more abstractly/fundamentally and with less of a focus on the specific circumstances involved in Kirby's demotion. -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 02:21, 13 November 2023 (UTC)