Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-5590118-20150104162634/@comment-25393922-20150109044300

Likferd wrote:

Shining-Armor wrote: VCROC is literally admin. They have almost all of the power of an admin except they lack the ability to undo what they have done. A VCROC member could cause just as much damage to the site as an admin could and do so just as easily as fundamentally there is almost nothing different. As for VCROC being a stepping stone it gives users a false divide between admin and rollback as there really is no middle ground. A user going from Rollback to VCROC will experience the same shock as someone going from Rollback to Sysop because they are the same thing. Again I think this needs to be said VCROC only lack the ability to undo what they have already done and this is not a good idea. Once again, I would agree with you for a wiki specializing in basketweaving and what have you. But historically, VCROC and admins have slightly different jobs on this wiki in particular. The undelete feature gives one the ability to deletion appeal, an additional responsibility that a person may or may not want to do. Moreover, administrators have the ability to close threads and delete comments, which gives them complete control over articles, blogs, and the forums. You can start to see a kind of divide forming; VCROCs are concerned primarily with editing and quality control, while the task of an administrator is of a more bureaucratic nature.

Steam Phoenix wrote: The issue is, there's no real difference. Admins were doing a majority of the Quality Control and Deletions. We had literally one VCROC member and one person who could get it, and they've been moved up to adminship.

TL;DR Admins already were doing EVERYTHING. That isn't true. Although Gator's contributions were iffy, Veronica and I were reviewing and editing diligently. Veronica apparently wasn't interested in administrator at the time, and Underscorre was gearing up to become VCROC, so a lack of VCROC members wouldn't really be an issue. Look, I'm not going to argue and fight about it, but I am going to say this;

Reviewing and editing diligently is the responsibility of every member on this site. Particularly, when it comes down to it, admins and VCROC. Now that chat is gone, the added responsibility of moderating it for admins makes VCROC almost redundant.

It's almost as though you're saying "VCROC should be kept because they have responsibilities!" So does everyone else in a community at large, and as admins we shouldn't be trying to excuse ourselves from everything but deleting a couple of pages and doing a few Deletion Appeals by shoving a majority of the site clean-up onto four or so people.

We should not assign responsibility to a single user group, because as it goes higher, the more it seems like a vacation. A majority of our rollbacks became inactive, and they didn't do much of jack shit at several points. In this event, with this setup, their responsibilities either go unattended to or get shoved to someone else.

Everyone needs to work as a single team - a community - with a coordinated effort behind it. We need to plan out our movements, not try to decide who is more of a grunt. Since I became admin, it's basically the same as VCROC: the reason I wanted admin was to help in Deletion Appeal. That's the only real difference.

On that note; VCROC almost has made us not precarious enough with who is selected as an administrator (Nommeh, for example). It's not an effective tool in determining a person's value or ethics to the community. A person's value and ethics are an effective tool. It's not about reputation or who has to do what with everything. It's about doing our part. With that, the selection of an admin isn't based around who was the best VCROC - it's based around who can work hardest, figure things out, and actually do things when thrown the ropes. If that's the only reason we have to keep the right, then there's even less reason to keep it.

tl;dr It isn't going to hurt anyone by any stretch of the imagination to do a little extra work and put more care and effort into who we choose for user rights.