User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Tips for being a great admin/@comment-3508190-20121028181502

Having read not only the blog but most of the replies, I get the impression that technical and design skills aren't particularly high on the priority list for picking admins. That's understandable. To a degree. Creating a welcoming and productive atmosphere doesn't require much of either. But at some point you will either have to find that magical admin who has a deep knowledge of the wikis' topic and great social skills and great communication skills and great technical skills and great design skills or you will have to bring in somebody from the outside. If you're not incredibly lucky and find the magical admin, then things start to get a bit complicated...

The point I'm trying to get at is that adminship has a far too wide scope in the Wikia privilege system. It would be helpful if the privilege system would allow to bring in people with different skills. Speaking for myself: I'm not exactly admin material by Wikia's priority list and that's fine. But I am one of those guys who can solve technical and design problems and it irks me to no end that I constantly have to ask for file access rights. I would be much more useful if I could access the MediaWiki namespace where ever I go. Never mind the right to block or unblock people. I wouldn't know what to do with that. Or the right to kickban people in chat. I don't need that either. Those privileges are in good hands with the "real" admins.

In a post below I suggested a temporary adminship as a fix. A temporary adminship could be granted by a regular admin and would expire automatically. This should give an outsider like myself plenty of opportunity to go in, fix the CSS e.g. and then become a regular user again. Another possible solution would be to create a new kind of privilege - let's call it "engineer" - that would be much narrower in scope than adminship.

I'm not trying to recommend a particular solution here, but I'd like to point out that preventing people with technical and design skill from doing what they do best by promoting other skills over all else, is a serious problem.