Board Thread:Wiki management/@comment-5143323-20180113035227

So I had to make decisions after several considerations from a few staff members. We've planned and discussed this for quite a while. We had to remove the voting system (also known as "democratic system). I know this is gonna be REAL controversial, but we're doing this for good. I don't make threads like this for nothing, but instead I do it because either they're badly implemented or a change really has to be made to make the wiki better. If we don't get a move on like this, the whole wiki is just gonna get worse.

Now, before you complain about this being "totally unfair" and the like, we did this for a reason. It's because the current system is totally broken and it won't solve anything, but instead, it causes too much problem that we, the staff, just can't sort out.

Let me point out several major issues we have to face by taking the democratic system:

1. Excess power to regular users makes being a staff member redundant

With the democratic way, even regular users could vote for any and every changes on the wiki, from minor tweaks all the way to critical stuff such as the change of rules, or staff demotions. This is what makes being a staff member unnecessary; any regular members could just make a thread for a change, let the other users (mostly non-staff too) vote, and voila, things change without even trying to be a staff. Staff demotions in democratic system is also a significant impact in this. Since anyone could vote, they could just try and demote anyone by just making a vote, and if it's supported by the majority of users, the staff member in question is demoted regardless of how good they perform in their job.

2. Too frequent changes on same single and/or unnecessary things cause a lot of headache

Democracies also seem to make the userbase unhappy because we're constantly switching voting on something repeatedly (i.e. change X, vote supported, but others are confused/opposed and wanted to change X again, vote supported, repeat and go on an endless loop - e.g. pronoun changes) and it makes change extremely slow. It'd be much better if staff received feedback, and properly responded with a decline to the feedback or to attempt to use it (with staff agreement obviously).

With the democratic system, we're also facing unnecessary changes such as the case of pronoun change or staff evaluation forms. The former forces us to change pronouns every time they're supported, which causes a lot of mess since people might leave some of the traces of the old pronouns unchanged, making things more inconsistent. The latter is fundamentally flawed and we had to remove it because no one used it anyway and it actually could've pushed anyone within the staff circle to deliberation and possibly demotion by just making an evaluation and rate them negatively. People could also make sockpuppets, "masquerade" them as a "real" user by editing articles and doing normal things on the wiki and further add negative evaluations, and no one would've probably noticed it. Seeing this, I've tried to remove the system and it worked, but it's just stupid of how it could be added in the first place when everyone neglected it.

3. Some of the users tend to not know why things are added in the first place

Now this is one of the main culprit of the problem. Nowadays the PvZW community is filled with some members who don't completely get the hang of the wiki's rules and features yet, so when they do vote, they usually do it blindly, not knowing if it's gonna have a poor impact or not. Democratic system doesn't work very well when in conjunction with this. People tend to vote for the wrong thing for the wrong reasons since they don't know exactly what's going on.

4. People tend to vote subjectively, not objectively

For example, one sometimes support a demotion thread simply because they feel that they don't see them that often, and completely ignoring the fact that they've, for example, made some frequent changes behind the scenes, such as blocking users or removing unwanted pages (they tend to be unnoticeable on the contributions log, but viewable in their respective logs, e.g. block log to find out how many times they've blocked some abusive users recently). They just don't peruse at the detail thoroughly enough, and this results in a subjective vote (i.e. votes that are purely or mostly opinionated).

Now it's obvious that we should take a system that allows the staff to have more power. Just take a look at our Discord server. The staff there has done an effort to change from a democratic system to a staff-based one, and it has a good impact on making the userbase less toxic than before. While some people will initially disagree with this change, as time goes on, they'll get used to it. The old system is defective by design when used on wikis, and it's pointless to enforce it. LPVs won't change the fact that it's useless. Instead, it points out the system's fault even more, such as the pronoun changes and anything listed in it.

This is not the case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". The system IS indeed broken in this case. It's a total mess. We can't just keep something like this because "oh, you're trying to change something as critical as this." If something looks broken and feels broken, then you try to fix it. When we didn't have this yet, the whole thing wasn't a disaster like this. Note that this came from a user who has experienced the past days of the wiki, and was active inside it. It's about fixing up something that just can't be implemented correctly here. At least the users can still leave some suggestions to us if they want certain things to be changed, then we'll take some considerations.

I think it's time to change to a staff-controlled system because it really makes changes on the wiki more efficient and effective. When a user gives us a feedback or suggestion, the staff members (from bureaucrats all the way to rollbacks) will decide whether it's worthy or not, instead of the members voting which tends to be screwy as I've explained before. If it's worth it, then we add or change the respective things they've asked to us, and if not, then we won't do it and state a reason why, so that they can understand that it could be a bad or pointless thing if it was implemented or changed. This helps keeping unnecessary and/or repetitive things such as the former LPVs (e.g. pronoun changes, staff requirements changes, or adding things like "staff evaluation forms") to a minimum.

If you're asking, "where should the staff members discuss about the suggestions?", simple really. We have a staff-only Discord server, and we could discuss things there. If any staff members decide that they wouldn't like to join the server, then we could just leave messages on their talk page and discuss it that way. It's that simple.

It's going to be way easier to keep the wiki's quality in check when there's less users complaining about the system. As I've said before, a lot of them will disagree, think that we're abusing our powers and want unjust things, but we're doing this since the userbase quality has significantly deteriorated and less people are applying for staff membership. Trying so hard to be a staff member is redundant when anyone can vote for changes in every single aspects of the wiki.

Before you think that this is going to be harmful, let me tell you that the democratic system is even more harmful than a staff-controlled one. A while back we had a vote that let users to post completely blank neutral templates as some kind of vote, but really, any staff will think that it's spammy and adds absolutely nothing to discussion, cluttering the thread replies, but the users wanted and agreed to have it anyway without thinking of the consequences.

Last but not least, the democratic system relies on votes so much that people can get away by voting with thoughts that are completely flawed since it fulfils the requirement of being an opinion, and you can neither discuss nor refute the opinion in question as it's a vote. I don't think that users should have such privileges that they're allowed to have excessive control of the wiki. I think it's better if we had experienced staff ensuring the changes here instead. Once again, having a wiki that's mostly controlled by users and constantly changing makes it difficult to perform quality control since all users, even those who don't know exactly what's happening and why we have things in the first place, have that power.

Draft composed by Drek, with aid from many of us on the staff. 