Moderator Fiat

Direct, indisputable Moderator orders make sense when issued relating to conduct, inappropriate content, and site-wide administrative rules.

They do not make sense when used to enforce a trope definition.

Simply put, as a longtime lurker who only recently began attempting to contribute, I am dismayed by the tendency of moderators to use their authority to determine the wiki's content, rather than enforce its rules.

If any moderator can simply override a consensus on an entry based on personal opinion, what is the point of structuring the site as a wiki?

Please note: I am not objecting to the practice of locking controversial pages, or removing/moving content based on existing trope definitions, or any other administrative uses of Moderator authority. I am specifically referring to circumstances where a moderator determines the content of a trope's definition page based on nothing but his or her opinion of what that page should contain.

edited 27th Apr '15 4:07:43 AM by Khyron42_Prime

For context, they are referring to the Five-Man Band trope and its restriction to one particular gender for the The Chick role.

Moderator fiat is needed in cases like Five-Man Band when it is clear that the community wants to broaden the trope to the point where any collection of five, or maybe six or seven, or three or four, or in fact any number of characters at all of any gender can qualify for it.

That trope is basically a legacy trope that's morphed into a number of permutations to the point where it's hard to say where one trope ends and another begins. Personally I don't think it's a trope anymore either for that reason, as the pattern has watered out with all those variations.

It's also something that's been discussed time and time again, so a moderator stepping down on it is reasonable in this case.

edited 27th Apr '15 6:38:33 AM by AnotherDuck

The funny thing is that we have a ridiculous number of ensemble tropes, so that it ought to be possible to find one that fits any grouping without all this shoehorning.

The Team, which only requires teamwork and a team.

Out of all the groups I can call a Five-Man Band only one of them has a male that fits the role of The Chick so it doesn't really seem worth it to change the gender restriction. FMB is so prone to shoehorning it's ridiculous.

Sadly, this has turned into the Five-Man Band argument all over again, which wasn't the point.

Nothing is more frustrating for me than people with good intentions who abuse their authority without considering how that affects the landscape of the works they're moderating. I don't think it's intentional, I just think it's not thought through - it's born of thinking you're right, and having so much authority that you're never challenged. It leads to not even considering changing long-held stances, because when someone challenges them, you lock the thread, you lock the page, or you ban the person in question.

The real loss is to the wiki - when you silence voices on a whim, you end up with a very insular community, very resistant to change or self-examination.

I don't give that much of a shit about Five-Man Band (I think the real answer is to simply make a historical note of its original intent and then merge it with The Team), I don't like seeing a space, especially a wiki, where moderators act without oversight to enforce their own ideas about content rather than the rules of the site.

We are not entertaining debate about whether we are allowed to make decisions for the wiki. Thread closed.