User blog:Hockeyben/Adminship

Some tips on adminship. I am an active admin on ~ 10 wikis, and these are some of the policies that I have used.
 * Use your CSS wisely. I do not think that you should remove read more, category galleries, shrink the sidebar for the whole wiki. There are (very few) users who like these features, and removing them from the whole wiki makes it (seem) autocratic. I do however suggest removing the image added by feature from the whole wiki. Do alert people that you can make these changes personally. Use a page like Help:CSS to inform them.
 * Be Welcoming -- I'm not a big fan of the Auto Welcome tool,although it should be used in addition. I prefer personal welcome messages, thanking them for joining the wiki, and what areas they would like to specialize in., and pointing them to the rules/help pages. Also clearly highlight the My Preferences page. This is extremely useful if you want to inform people about the MonoBook skin.
 * Don't veto too many ideas, If someone wants to activate/re-do the forums, let them, if someone wants to customize the skin, let them, if someone wants to tweak the main page, let them. But don't let everything past, like someone wanting to design a Pink skin, or wanting to rename the wiki, or massively changing the wikis navigation.
 * Don't have too many rules, one page linking to some basic policies, like image and article policies, template policies, blocking policies. Link to pages like Community Portal, Rules, Manual of Style, About, and FAQ.
 * Don't be too hard on vandals, an infinite block for the first time the user vandalizes is too much. Use something like a three-strike system First strike, a warning 2nd strike a week or month ban (depending on severity) third strike infinite ban. Clearly highlight this in the rules page. Also be nice to the new users, recognizing they may not have much knowledge on Wiki writing and Wiki markup. If you bash them, they will likely leave after a few edits, and never come back. NOTE: The three strike system only applies to disruption/harassing. For trolls/spammers/page blankers, use a one year block for the first offense, and an infinite block on the 2nd offense. It is unlikely they will ever show themselves again, after one year.
 * Don't have incredibly high admin promotion standards, Use something (on a moderately small wiki) like 250 edits makes you a rollback, 500 edits makes you an admin, and 2-5000 edits makes you a bureaucrat. On larger wikis something like 2000+ 5000+ and 15,000+ works for promotions. Always have an asterisk stating that this amount of edits does not guarantee a promotion. Also factor things like maturity, how user deals with messages on talk page, how user deals with other users. Don't just use the edit count
 * Semi-Protect your main page. Quite a simple one here, how many new users and IPs are going to do anything other than vandalize the main page? This will cut down the number of blocking/reverting times down immensely.
 * Clearly design the main page and sidebar. Include links to top content, and the Block Policy, Rules, Request for adminship, and Help pages (via the template which is discussed below).
 * Use the about page to describe the vision of the wiki, and include links to the Help and Rules pages.
 * Intertwine the prefix pages. Make a template with the About, Community Portal, Forums, Block Policy, Rules, and Help pages. This makes it very easy for users to jump from help page to help page.