Hi all!
Oh look, it’s my blog debut! My name is Jenny, & I am one of the Community Managers on the Community Safety team. One of our goals on the team is to work on ways we can help make sure wiki communities are safe, healthy places for all fans, and I am excited to announce that we are taking another step toward that goal! On April 4, we will be launching an updated version of the Wiki Rules and Blocking Policy.
In this blog, I’m going to go over some of the changes we are making to the policy as well as why we are making them.
The Why[]
Let’s start with the why - why are we updating the policy? Good question, and thank you for asking! The policy went live a year ago, and since then, we have received a lot of feedback from many users and communities. Users have stated that they wanted clearer guidelines, more examples to base their own rule set off of, and clarification of some of the vaguer parts of the policy. Over the last year, we have taken note of that feedback and brought our heads together to see what we could put into action.
After putting everything we received together, we realized that the first version of the policy had a lot of room for growth. We’ve spent the last few months talking about what could be clarified, what could be updated, and what could be changed. We also worked with Community Council and incorporated their insights into our revisions. (Thank you for your help, Council!)
We had to go back to the drawing board a few times, but we feel confident that this newest version will help communities find even more stability and direction.
The What[]
Let’s talk a little about what has been changed in the new version of the policy. Here are a few sneak peeks:
- We added a section outlining what it means to be a good administrator. Some of the tips we’ve included talk about being open to users asking for advice, not acting as if you are the “owner” of the wiki, assuming good faith, along with a few others.
- We moved the “Need ideas for rules?” section to its own page and added more example rules to be used if needed.
- We added a section requiring a pathway to adminship - this is a system your community can set up to allow for long-time users who care about the wiki and community to eventually become admins or another wiki role. It will be up to the community to decide what works best for each wiki, but we have added some guideline suggestions to help get you started.
- We updated wording in a few sections to clarify vagueness.
A few breadcrumbs for now, but you can see the new policy here! TimQ and I will be holding an AMA on the Fandom/Gamepedia Discord server on March 25 - we will be talking about Trust and Safety on the platform, and we will be open to answering questions about the new policy there. (Head to the server to see the time for the AMA in your local timezone!)
Finally, I want to point out that this, along with other policies at Fandom, is a living policy. Even after it goes live, we will continue to consider thoughtful feedback from users and communities, and who knows? Maybe we’ll see another update in the future!
UPDATE: I changed the wording in the first section of the policy from "Rules must include guidelines regarding wiki formatting, how and when blocks happen, page protection, and how users can be nominated for promotions." to "Rules must include guidelines regarding wiki formatting, how and when blocks happen, page protection, and how users may become admins or other roles." to help give some clarification.
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