User blog:BaconBoi1111/Choosing staff

Hey guys, welcome to the blog! In this blog, I will be giving advise on choosing staff members for your community. Most of the communities might choose staff randomly just because they have applied for it, or because the wiki is sort of 'dead', or that they only know how to edit. However, would anyone suspect them as people who vandalise? Would anyone know them as untrustworthy people? Perhaps not, because they are already a staff member. But then, you would never know if they have a hint of wanting to vandalise.

Of course, I’m not telling you to suspect all the staff members in your community just because they have less than 100 edits or because they are the owner’s friend, or because they applied while the wiki was dead. But there might be some staff that abuse their powers, and this would be the blog to advise you on how to avoid choosing wrong staff members without 'suspecting' anyone.

Requirements

 * When choosing staff, you can put some requirements! Write it down in a page or blog post. For examples, check w:c:bgs-community-content:Staff Applications. You can make it more strict from the most junior role (rollback) to the most senior role (admin, or maybe bureaucrat). You can set how many days must they have to be on the wiki (recommendation: 2 weeks to 1 month), the editing and/or coding experiences that they need to know, and maybe even staffing experiences as well! The reason that you might ask for staffing experiences is because you would know that they might be more trustworthier. Just remember that anyone can get a staff role by founding a wiki, so you can go deeper whether if they are really a bureaucrat or they founded the wiki. Check the stats of the wiki as well, for example how active the wiki is. If it is active and founded by the person applying for staff on your wiki, it might prove the person as trustworthy, but if it is not active and joined by one person only, and made for no particular reason, it might (only might) be just so that the person applying for staff in your wiki is just trying to gain your trust to get a staff role.

Choosing Staff: Moderators

 * When you choose moderators, you can relax a bit and not fuss too much around them, such as asking every wiki that they have experience as a staff on, or their personal life, or where they live, or how many years have they edited on fandom, or what types of editing do they know, or could they create 10 different useful templates. Remember, they are just moderators, they can't just do everything that a bureaucrat can do. But you might as well set some requirements! For example, you can ask them on how they plan to improve the wiki, whether if they have editing, coding, or staffing experiences (you don’t need to ask for every staff role that the user have, just some general ones), and et cetera. Just note that thread moderators aren’t given to moderate the wiki articles and you don’t need to ask them if they know Wikitexture, HTML, editing, etc.

Choosing Staff: Admins

 * When choosing admins, you might want to get a bit specific on their experiences, knowledge, style, and 'backgrounds'. Take note that admins have rights to block users (make sure they don’t block innocent people), unblock users (make sure they don’t unblock users just because it’s their friend, otherwise show favouritism), and access the admin dashboard (they can give thread moderator rights and edit the CSS and JS now! It can effect all users, so make sure they don’t abuse it). Now in UCP, you can give temporary staff roles, so if you’re going on vacation and you don’t know if you can trust your friend on admin, you can set it to a temporary time, likewise if they want to access admin only tools for a particular reason?

Choosing Staff: Bureaucrats

 * You might want to be really cautious when choosing bureaucrats. Remember, once given bureaucrat rights you can’t remove it anymore unless you’re a fandom employee. You can remove your own bureaucrat, however, but it’s an unwise thing to do if you’re going on holiday and you gave temporary bureaucrat to a person and remove your own bureaucrat from yourself, because the person can change his on bureaucracy to permanent. You can just give them admin instead. Of scourge, once again I’m not telling you to suspect everyone, but just have an eye out on the person W you gave temporary bureaucrat unless it’s someone like your sibling, cousin, or friend who is staying at home while you go on vacation.

Hope it helps!

 BaconBoi1111 talk