Yesterday I got a distressed email from a contributor to a community whose master admin appears to have gone slightly crazy. Deleting pages and threatening to delete the entire site. Sadly, we get this kind of thing quite regularly. Which made me think that there is something wrong with the model that gives a single person life-and-death control over an entire community.
So I've designed a safer way to delete sites and to delete pages. Basically it would give site contributors a fair voice over their contributions. It would make life harder for mad dictators (Michal is looking straight at me, as I write this).
What do you think? Is this a problem you've had in your own communities? How have you solved it?
I see a difference in the status of the master admin - is it a pro or free acccount?
In case of "free" the MA is in reality a member of the wikidot "free account" community and not a "private" one like a "pro".
This makes the basis of work different - the pro has bought his rights and no body else can decide what is to do with his sites and pages at the last end,.
On free accounts this looks at the first stage for me different - someone starts a community on the free area of sites and
If there are other admins and the site is more or less open for others - than I would suggest to create very often BACKUP's and save it ( with download by the other admins) - than the question is not so hard what to do…
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
I disagree somewhat, as no matter whether the site is a Pro or free account, if the content has been built up by volunteer contributors, then morally that content is as much, or even more, theirs and not the master admin's.
Now if the master admin is the sole author, then they are within their rights to revoke it whenever, though as a user it sucks when a good site I use as a reference goes away, for whatever reason.
Sorry, but for a pro acount a legal business contract is a contract between the Site MA admin and wikidot and cannot be changed from one side without aknowledgemnt from the other.
The volunteer contributions are on a "pro" site allways in a bad situation..more than on a free account site.
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
We found some examples of very popular sites with hundreds of contributors, zero members, and one admin.
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Where is my wife ?
good question - are we talking about wikidot "communities" only ?
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
Same question. My site isn't a 'community' as such.
I already have a huge problem with the fact I cannot delete forum threads but only move them. I don't want pages that I don't want hanging around on my site anywhere whether it's called a trash bin or whatever. And my site is MY site. I've done most all of the work to build it to the point it is. I would rather not see changes like this because some admins of wikidot community sites go rogue.
These things should be dealt with on an individual basis but it seems to me if you post things on a community site you should probably be aware that you are at someone elses mercy. Anyone can start a blog for free and have control over what happens to the content. It's their site. It seems to me if you start a wikidot site it's your site and if you abuse the contributors shame on you but that doesn't change things accross the board.
Would you elaborate?
Regarding move-threads-to-deleted, what annoys you, is it the clumsiness of the operation or the fact that the threads remain alive somehow? They are not visible to normal users, so how does that matter? (I'm not defending the current model, just wondering what exactly the problem is with it.)
Portfolio
I've made very few community sites on wikidot and none of my current sites are there for communities (yet). Even so, my future plans involve webapps that have participants passively creating pages as data points — which under your plan would give them votes in how I make certain alterations to my content later, for example, whether I can privatize my site. While I wouldn't begrudge this policy for people want to opt for it (having people sign up for a "community" wiki), I don't really want it forced on me either.
There's always a risk if you post information somewhere you don't own that the place you post it will leave, or not like it and remove it.
If you want to promote ownership of the information placed, why not have a user's contributions saved once to the site where they post it and once to their profile (a wiki in disguise). That way you can maintain their right to their stuff and promote cooperation without taking away a site maker's rights to control their content in a variety of ways.
How about making possible to put more MA than just one? Three, for example. And if site needs to be deleted, all three of them should give OK. I don't know, maybe this is too complicated…
I don't have that problem, and never had. But, my active members are very few (3 of us), and we do all after we talk. I wouldn't like to have a never-emptying bin at my site. I like my trash out of my house…
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. - Paul McCartney
Never is indeed a very long time. I suppose if I could make the deleted category private, prevent from being seen by readers or search engines or anything else, the idea might have some merit.
But as mad dictator in training, I do want to reserve the right to fully control what is posted to my site. I don't run any communities at the moment.
Of course, as more and more of us create web applications with wikidot, we'll make more and more people "contributors", even though in many cases, their contributions are less substantial than forum posts and threads, and give more and more people a say in sites that aren't really designed as communities.
What's the difference between spam, and the MA intentionally destroying a site? Nothing. The idea that a MA can wreck a site is devastating, but you assume that he/she won't. Unfortunately, that is apparently not safe to assume. I don't have a solution, because it's the classic issue of giving power to those who won't abuse it, and keeping it from the those who will, but my suggestion is to do a sort of "balance-of-power" thing. In other words, give the members power to stop the MA from doing reckless things, until a SuperMod can look into it.
Also, this is somewhat off-topic, but what about moderators. They get no privilege to ban, yet they can edit a person's post? Or they can't even do a simple task of adding auto numbering. They can reck the site too, just not as bad as the MA.
There is, in my opinion, a big difference in just how a site is wrecked. If pages are changed, no matter how much, you can recover them from the history. A group of people could, though it would be time-consuming, be able to take a snapshot of a site in time, and move it to their own Wikidot site.
But if a page or site is deleted, then there's no recourse, other than to ask to get it restored from backups, if that is even possible.
Okay, then why not a auto-backup of pages. Ya know how we have notifications? Well, what if, wikidot were to send .zip files with the changes for that day. What do you think, pieterh? Is it even possible?
I suppose we could take snapshots of sites just in case the MA decides to wreck them. The problem with permanent page deletion is that there is no recovery possible. So moving to a private trash category seems a clean solution.
Making backups also means sending that data to someone. It's easier just to keep it on the site. Then, if a MA flips, we can give the contributors the site and they can fix it.
Portfolio
Hm, I really don't like the idea that someone else can have my site, if I want to kill it… I mean, it is MY site, I made it, and I have the right to make it dissapear, but dissapear for real.
Would there be any possibility to do this for those who don't have many contributors? I mean, I have a quite number of members, but nobody writes anything. What if I want to kill my site? I can't and any of them can claim it, only because he is a member of it? No, I think I don't like this.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. - Paul McCartney
Well, I wouldn't suggest having a magic button necessarily. I would think that a Supermod should be able look into the matter, and suggest a compromise, or talk to the MA, and see what the problem is. If the MA has lost it, remove him from power. Of course, I would not want to get an e-mail that said I just lost control of my site, but then again, I hope I don't go deleting a bunch of pages, either.
Brunnie,
This is how YOUR site looked like in July 2008
http://web.archive.org/web/20080701201956/http://istorijska-biblioteka.wikidot.com/
I was very careful to write contributor and not member. Is the difference clear? contributors write pages (I said, "create or edit pages") and are not necessarily members.
Portfolio
OK. Contributors.
But, I you never be sure who the real contributor is. For example, many of my articles were created by me, but I was just pasting and formatting the text that one of my members sent me. Therefore imagine now that I decide to kill my site and this member claims his texts… What would you do in this scenario?
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. - Paul McCartney
Oh, no… :) It looks pretty basic, doesn't it? :):):) I have learnt a lot since then…
EDIT:Oh, my God! But you have the whole site from then saved!!!! How frequently this back up is made? How many versions of my site do you have?
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. - Paul McCartney
The early wikidot ones are fun to look at as are some well known ones which are very slick now but were rather basic in 1997.
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
1997? I thought Wikidot started some years ago…
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. - Paul McCartney
s/1997/2007/g12
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Pieter: Is this post a joke?
Everyone knows that cheese works well with pizza.
— hartnell
Shawn, there is no conspiracy here… the idea is not for Wikidot to take over communities. :-/
Anyhow, this is why we discuss ideas openly, so we can get feedback. Seems this one is not a popular idea.
Portfolio
Heh. :)