Hello everyone! I hope you don’t mind the long post. Here it goes.
You probably know that Bureaucrats are Admins who can promote and demote other admins. Currently, the only Bureaucrat in this wiki is Utter solitude. Although she tries to be as neutral and professional as she can, she isn’t always objective or fair.
In a community-run site like this one, NO ONE should be alone in the position to make this kind of final call on their own. Everyone has the right to express their concerns about how things are being dealt with publicly, and their voice should be heard, not censored. Therefore, this wiki should NOT have a single bureaucrat, or things like this will keep happening. Decisions are handled very poorly, and users get censored when they try to bring them up to inform the rest of the community about them, because ONE user finds it unnecessary or inflammatory.
I think I am ready to become a Bureaucrat and SHARE this right with Utter, because of several reasons.
- If both of us are bureaucrats, neither of us would be able to make a single-handed call like that. Because let’s face it, none of us is perfect. We all make mistakes, and we shouldn’t be alone in that.
- With a second bureaucrat, the chances that a biased final decision gets taken are reduced significantly.
- Utter has told me several times that she likes having a staff that disagrees with her, because it’s always best to have differing points of view over each issue. I agree with her. She and I think a lot like each other, but we also disagree with each other a lot, and we always end up finding a good solution and on great terms with each other.
I have been around for a really long time, so I am extremely familiar with the wiki, its history, and its users. I have experience in most areas of the wiki, such as templates (having created/improved a lot of them myself), design (again, having designed a lot of what we see now on our screens), formatting (i.e. all the list pages, the interactive parts of the homepage, etc.), dealing with trolls and vandals, as well as answering to user requests and feedback. However, being a bureaucrat is not just about who has the most experience. It is about who knows the community and who would strive to make the wiki’s administration the most unbiased, transparent and based on community-consensus.
In addition, I would never do anything to put any other user in an uncomfortable position, and I don’t think I ever have, except for the one time where I myself was put in the most awkward of them, rightfully feeling "cornered, alone" and accused by my fellow admins of willingly neglecting an important discussion, so I decided I the community had the right to know what had happened for transparency. That being said, the post was written as respectfully as possible, and had ZERO insults or implications about anyone, just exact quotes. Nothing was being twisted or rephrased in any way. If you want to check that, you can read the post I’m talking about here. It was closed, un-highlighted, and removed from the forums, but it is still on the wiki.
Other than that, I am guilty of having expressed myself in ways that weren’t the best in the past, but I have shown that I have changed. If you remember our Staff Surveys, you’ll also remember that most users voted for me in the most friendly and most useful admin of the staff (not that I think that of myself though, I think Lady Junky was more useful recently). So let’s not make this about pointing fingers at mistakes in our pasts, because if this was about reviving past feuds I could bring up some VERY nasty from everyone in the staff, but I don't think that would be productive. Everyone has been rude, and just going into old Message Walls and article history records can show you.
All in all, I love the wiki and I have always done my best to do what I think is in the best interest of the community. So what do you all think? Should I and Utter share the Bureaucrat rights?
Let us know what you think. You’re just as much a part of the community as any of the admins, so please vote bellow whether you Agree or Disagree with the suggestion, and thank you for taking the time to read this :)