Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-25393922-20140923214039

I've been thinking on this idea for a bit. I'm personally neutral to it. I'm proposing that the adminstrative staff of the wiki have a collective email that all admins have access to. There are several things I can see as pros and cons.

Pros: Cons:
 * Need to contact the staff anonymously or privately? Email would be one of the better ways.
 * It offers a back and forth way of providing answers to user questions.
 * It would ensure that anyone who uses it would get a generally correct answer, since the email is in the hands of the admins - troublesome or newer users who may not know how the wiki works wouldn't answer the emails as they can on the forums. This very rarely happens, though. However, this insures that the people who best know their way around are the ones answering questions.
 * It allows for another venue of Block appeals.
 * Users may be hesitant due to the involvement of their own email address. This being noted, sending email would be entirely optional.
 * Administrator promotion and demotion would ineptly make the password to said email largely dynamic. A demoted admin wouldn't be allowed to access the email anymore, thus requiring the password be changed.
 * The admins would need to agree on a host email site - different email preferences (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc) may result in some difficulty getting the email up and running if it can't be decided which has the best benefits.
 * Lack of a paper trail. Wikia is built generally on paper trails and the ability to find records. A private email record accessible only by admins and the users who send emails eliminates this.

So, feel free to throw this idea around. I personally am very neutral and don't think it's a bad or good idea.

 