A ship without a captain

Policy- and leadership-wise, I feel like for six months we have been coasting on what Fast Eddie established. I realize that, in some ways, TV Tropes is a democracy and an elaborate hierarchy would be weird... but I think we need a wiki administration leader, a third person beside or beneath the two new admins, someone who has been active on the wiki. Maybe a forum head, too. If it was up to a vote, and assuming Eddie can't or doesn't want to do that, then I would nominate Fighteer or Madrugada.

Added 6/24: I don't think the reason nobody has responded is that nobody has an opinion. What am I missing? Is there a master plan I don't know about? Is it really just me? Is it something I can't imagine? I am not, like, demanding Big Changes Right Now; but I do think it's a worthwhile thing to talk about.

edited 24th Jun '15 9:46:41 PM by rodneyAnonymous

What do we need a leader for? Is there a specific issue you're concerned about?

Personally, as much as I respect Eddie for all the hard work he put in to make the site a success, I think that the site is better off without autocratic leadership. An Eddie-fiat decision was very rarely a good thing for the site, for several reasons (the chief one, but not the only one, being that they tended to be made against consensus, and that often led to a lot of resistance and implementation problems).

Now see, I had the impression that Eddie would take decisions unilaterally with the purpose of sorting out issues afterwards in the discussions that would invariably arise.

Is it even possible for this to be a productive conversation? The wiki is an organic machine, growing on its own, with guidance from the staff but little in the way of power to compel anything. There is a large amount of investment being made in tech, which will be seen very soon on the beta site, and after that we can look towards the database overhaul. But what, if any, administrative decisions are being delayed or avoided? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Policy decisions about things that aren't up to a vote, for instance. Some page image policies, for example, are officially "whatever the rules were when Eddie left, including his fiat decisions, until some unspecified point in the future when they will be reconsidered". Those decisions are explicitly being delayed and I don't know when (or even if, really) the unspecified point will occur.

I am surprised at the general resistance to the idea. Almost every organization on Earth (including organic machines) has a head of some kind, even if the "council" actually has more authority. I understand that unilateral decisions tended to be bad for the wiki, but that isn't the only way to be. I'm not suggesting that we need a dictator, but I do think we need at least a club president.

For all I know, the current admins have many excellent qualities, but they are also very distant. I am not sure they are tropers at all. I couldn't remember the name of one of them without looking it up. Neither even has a contributor page. (One is nothing except an image, the other literally doesn't exist.) drewski posts once in a while, and itcdr almost never. Actually being active editors would be great, but wanting regular communication from the people in charge (and feeling various flavors of despair due to not getting it) seems completely reasonable.

If the day-to-day administration is progressive (as opposed to relying exclusively on precedent) without a leader, okay, but that's news to me. It's very opaque. It'd be cool if there was more transparency, maybe more mod-to-user communication, or let us see (but not post on) the moderator forum.

edited 25th Jun '15 3:38:26 PM by rodneyAnonymous

Check IP.

Rodney:Why the surprise? There is simply no need for it. You still haven't exactly given any specific policies. What are you trying to refer to specifically?

edited 26th Jun '15 1:52:34 AM by TuefelHundenIV

At worst sometimes the mods come across as The Omniscient Council of Vagueness, but that's because there are thousands of tropers and a relatively small number of mods having to deal with all sorts of problems. There isn't a lot of direct communication between mods and tropers because they don't have the time to convene court over every issue, so they are forced to be fairly curt with their citations and judgement calls.

I don't know if there has to be a whole other administrator to address this. I guess Wiki Talk is theoretically the forum where the mods would have the most presence, but it still invites general troper discussion on matters and not a place for regular tropers to understand to expectations of the mods. Administrivia can only do so much.

edited 26th Jun '15 4:04:22 AM by KJMackley

We would have the same problem with an admin. I hate to tell you folks but the site can't be run by committee and frankly tropers collective judgement is at the best of times hit and miss.

Frankly, I'm just happy with the way things are. I would spam this thread with "vote X for the next global mod" but what's the point? They're all equal and we haven't been raided by barbarians to warrant and surge of new custodians lately.

Drewski and itcdr are the official replacements for Fast Eddie. Their focus is on rolling out new features and eventually the database overhaul. This isn't really any different from the Eddie era, when he had a bunch of things he'd implement When He Got The Time; the difference is what the new admins prioritize. Eddie prioritized mucking in the day-to-day operations of the wiki over implementing large-scale new features (in part because of the difficulty of implementing new features and fixing bugs given the twigs and baling wire the old wiki ran on); the new admins prioritize rolling out new features and global overhauls over mucking with policy minutiae.

You're basically arguing for a separate admin to handle policy reassessments, which in the Eddie era, would have amounted to a separate admin to handle coding. Which is what the existence of two admins to replace Eddie is supposed to be, but the new admins are busy with an overhaul wide-ranging enough that it requires both their attention. Until then, the policy seems to be "whatever worked for Eddie works for us"; if there are specific policies you believe are not working and need to be fixed urgently, feel free to bring them up for drewski and the mods to consider.

It's worth noting that a lot of existing policies are likely to be moot or require massive overhauls once TV Tropes 2.0 starts getting rolled out.

Let's be clear here. The policies regarding what sorts of content we permit are not likely to change much, if at all. Drewski has talked about relaxing the standards of our Content Policy a little, but mainly from the standpoint of reintroducing some of the tropes that were cut. He agrees that the porn can stay gone.

Otherwise, the core policies of the site: natter, example indentation, first person, segregating YMMV, Trivia, and the like, good page images, spoiler tagging, all of that is not changing in the least, except in as much as new tech might render them moot by automating certain processes.

It seems that a lot of the questions that have come up recently are about minutiae, such as how you choose between translated titles for foreign media, or whether you alphabetize The '80s under '8' or 'E'. Eddie seldom got involved with those even when he was in charge, preferring to leave them to consensus. He only weighed in for serious issues, or, let's face it, when something bugged him a whole bunch.

All in all, if there is a major policy issue that needs settling, the staff will collectively decide, and let everyone know as publicly as is necessary and appropriate. I haven't seen very many that qualify for such treatment.

^^ Okay but he was like 75/25 and they are like 1/99, as far as admin/tech goes. Calling their day-to-day involvement in the wiki a "lower priority" is a massive understatement. Would just like there to be more communication / transparency. For example, often we don't know whether something was discussed until after a decision has been made, and then only if something changed. I haven't heard very much at all about the "new system" other than that it exists and it's being developed... nothing about how the development is going, for one example (among many) of something that we could be kept informed about. There are hold-ups in Image Pickin' that would definitely be addressed by having someone officially in charge of it.

_v Great, though that's news to me, and maybe shouldn't be. I promise to think about how that's my fault if you promise to think about how it's not :)

edited 1st Jul '15 1:08:14 AM by rodneyAnonymous

They are still involved in admin decisions behind the scenes. The mods talk with them quite often. They're just prioritizing the update right now and trusting us to handle the day to day while they get things done. It doesn't mean they aren't involved in the admin. They're just not trying to do all the things all the time.

I am sorry I am not seeing how anything is so desperately urgent. To me it looks like you are making a mountain out of a molehill.

It sounds like your issue has to do with Image Pickin', which Willbyr seems to be the de facto leader of anyway. Care to explain what, specifically, your actual issue is and why you find it so urgent?

Yes, there is a problem there and I mistook that for being a problem everywhere. (Although I do think that is evidence of a problem with transparency and communication. I am wrong about it being a problem with leadership.) Willbyr is practically in charge of IP, but he isn't technically in charge of IP (note that I think he should be!), so we often have to wait for input from mods who don't care. (Madrugada and Septimus Heap are the only other mods that have posted there regularly in the recent past... I guess the wait is for more than those three?) Often we get "I need to talk with the other staff first" and the issue otherwise sinks without a ripple. I would vastly prefer a decision I disagree with, to no decision at all.

We are talking about the issues now, but for starters they are 1) reviewing the Eddie "no pic" and "don't change the pic" fiat lists, 2) the thread approval system in IP, 3) updating (or maintaining) some site image policies (like whether images that read right-to-left should be edited to read left-to-right, and copyright policy), and 4) issues with the image uploader. We are on #2, if you want to join the conversation.

edited 7th Jul '15 4:48:12 PM by rodneyAnonymous

I just posted there.