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 such as Help:CSS to inform them.
 * Customize both the MonoBook and Oasis skins. Users use both skins, it is unfair to users using either of the skins not to have it customized just because of the admins personal preference.
 * Be Welcoming -- I'm not a big fan of the Auto Welcome tool, although it should be used in addition to personal welcomes. 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.
 * Be careful with block lengths for vandals. For spammers, immediately use an infinite/1 year block, they are just advertising a site and will never contribute to content articles. For vandals (Adding gibberish, swear words etc.) start off with a one week ban, and leave the user a message on their talk page that if they vandalize again, the block length will increase. If they come back and vandalize again, block them for 6 months, and again leave them a message with the block details. If they come back after 6 months, use an infinite ban, as they obviously have no interest in contributing to the wiki. Do not block users for doing things incorrectly or harrassing if they are contributing to the wikis content. If you block them, for any length of time, they will most likely leave and never come back again.
 * See Request for adminship tips here
 * 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, and Wiki history. (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 nav-box 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.
 * Use around 5 rules/help pages. Using too many results in confusion for new users trying to learn how the wiki works.