UDWiki talk:Administration/Sysop Archives

BP always successful?

Hey, aren't Bureaucrat Promotion cases always "successful"? They're not being filed under the losing candidates, right? In that case, do we need to say "successful" next to, e.g., each of Boxy's promotions? Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 18:12, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I've been thinking the same thing, but until I think of more useful information to place there, I've continued doing it. Maybe provide the name of the 'crat whose seat they are filling? If we do that though, it gets kinda hairy for some of the early promotions that didn't operate according to our current rules (e.g. multiple promotions at once or Kevan hand-selecting 'crats). —Aichon— 19:14, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

The demotion description seems over complicated. Surely all demotions are to regular user? --Rosslessness 20:21, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

When 'crats ask for a demotion, it's oftentimes, but not always, to sysop. The majority will certainly be to user, however. If you have any suggestions for changing that text, now is the time to make them. I'm not particularly enamored with any of that text, but I wanted to keep it brief and standardized, so what I put there for now fits the bill, even if it's not that good. —Aichon— 20:49, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

I went ahead and tried to track down the lineage for all of the early 'crat seats, so it should be pretty easy to trace back from here on. To run through it quickly so that others can fact-check me, near as I can tell, Odd Starter was the first one and was promoted by Kevan (if there's a record of a discussion, I haven't seen it yet; I know he was promoted because I checked the user rights logs that 'crats can see, though that doesn't rule out the existence of an earlier 'crat). Odd Starter resigned from the post following some drama related to his promoting Amazing to the rank of sysop. There was a gap for about two months where we had no 'crat other than Kevan, then we had Vista, then Xoid in place of Vista, then Bob Hammero as a second 'crat. With Bob disappearing entirely and Xoid wanting to go inactive, a vote was held to replace both of them, with Boxy and Darth Sensitive filling the seats, and immediately after that the 'crat cycling policy was passed, which is how things have been run ever since. If someone can find contradictory or additional information, please let me know, but for now I went ahead and made note of whose seat was being filled in place of the useless "Successful" we had on all of the BP links. —Aichon— 21:45, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Related to finding some of this history, I went ahead and made something fun to display it. I'm definitely missing some of the earliest sysops still (though I did track down a few we're missing here), so feel free to rattle off names I'm missing from the early days and I'll find the relevant user rights logs for them. —Aichon— 00:00, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

If you're willing to trawl through it you can check the entire user rights log, which includes every promotion/demotion still on the servers. That says that Odd Starter was 'crat from 19 Jan '06 to 8 Apr '06. A ctrl+F for "bureau" should give you all the bureaucrat data beyond that. Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 14:49, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Also, Odd Starter's demotion lines up suspiciously closely to this demotion case, which (although LibrarianBrent ruled no punishment was necessary). Thoughts? Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 14:57, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh, they're directly tied together. Reading through some of the last parts of Amazing's A/M case, it's apparent that Kevan demoted Odd Starter, probably because he no longer felt he could be trusted to act in the best interests of the community. Odd Starter was planning to re-promote Amazing, despite the objections to his initial promotion and the A/M case that had been ruled against him after just a day on the job. —Aichon— 15:43, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Also, so people know, some further discussion has happened at Aichon's talk page. Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 14:49, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Regarding missing 'ops

Just as an FYI, we're missing quite a few since the list was copied from the A/M archives. Especially as we hit the A/M archives, I expect we'll see a lot more missing 'ops. —Aichon— 04:52, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh, ok. Sorry for assuming. Also, why would the A/M archives have a different list than... the A/M archives? Am I misreading that? Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 05:00, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Oops, meant A/PM archives for that second one. —Aichon— 05:26, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Dating

Something that's worth a quick chat: what dates are we using for the file names? In the cases of A/BP and A/DM, I've so far been doing the date that they closed or were made effective, since those are the dates we'd work from/with if determining when someone was no longer a sysop or had become a 'crat. Likewise, it seems to make sense to do similarly with A/RE and A/PM since those are the dates that we'd work with after that. But what about unsuccessful A/PM bids? In that case, the closing date is meaningless, and many of them were even closed early, so it may make more sense to use the start date. And for A/M, I've been using the start dates since the closing date doesn't affect anything most of the time and the start date allows us to reference them in relation to other events from around the same time.

What are your guys' thoughts on the dates we should use? Always the close date (what if you can't figure it out?)? Always the start date? Some mix based on type of archive or circumstances? —Aichon— 19:52, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

I would say try to stick consistently with the closing date, except for A/M which doesn't have a clear one. For unsuccessful (or withdrawn) A/PM bids, it should close on the date that the 'crats rejected the bid (or it was withdrawn etc.)

An alternative option would be to abandon the precise dating, and date things by month. (So this DM would be listed as "2008-05" rather than "2008-05-06".) It's pretty rare for two of the same kind of event to occur to the same person in a month - I can't think of any examples of one person having two PMs, and I'm certain there are no BPs, REs, or DMs in a single month. There might have been multiple misconducts against one person in a calendar month, so those could be listed by day when necessary. The month would still be the one of closure, or the one in which most of the content of the event occurred. (It would involve moving all the pages again, though.) Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 14:54, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm fairly certain we could easily find quite a few examples of multiple A/M cases against a person within a month. Anyway, I generally agree. The only thing I'm unsure of that you said are non-successful A/PM bids, since I'm not sure that they all end on clear-cut dates. For everything else but A/M, I agree with you that using the close date is appropriate. —Aichon— 16:20, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

In that case, we can declare A/PM to start on the starting date. Actually, it might be better to do A/RE on the starting date too then, for consistency (since they're the same format & closely tied together.) Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 16:58, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

lotta work

whoever does my misconduct archive, is going to have a helluva work :D --hagnat 00:32, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

The old archives?

So, once the old archives have been transferred over, what do we do with them? Will, e.g., the Demotions archive be maintained so that every DM is recorded in two places? Or should we transform it into just a master list of links to the relevant Sysop Archives pages? Or just delete it? For things like the A/BP archives, should we change the links to point directly to the relevant Sysop Archives page? Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 21:00, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

In the case of A/DM, I expect that we'll simply fix all of the existing links to point to the relevant case, since there's less than 50 of them, then delete the original archive page. In the case of everything else, there's more or less a one-to-one mapping between old archive pages and new ones, so I think we'll just leave the redirects in place. Going forward, I expect that the categories we've been creating will serve as hubs for folks who want to trawl through a particular type of archive, so we may want to consider ways to make them more useful (e.g. create a navbar for them that allows you to jump between the five types of sysop archives), then should link to those from the appropriate admin pages in place of the archive links that we currently have. —Aichon— 21:38, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Misanthropy (talk • contribs) at an unknown time.

Why

Why are we recreating archives in new locations? Surely it's better to leave them where they are -- boxy 06:02, 18 May 2013 (BST)

For the most part, we're simply moving them to be in a common location, rather than recreating them. The Sysop Archives are intended to simplify archiving by making it consistent across more of the archives. I.e. Common naming conventions, common ways of dating events, common headers, common way of linking to them, common way of finding them, that way it's easier for both the sysops and the users to use. Having some of the pages in a different part of the namespace means that we'd have multiple systems in place, which runs contrary to the purpose of unifying them, and some of the Misconduct pages also have multiple cases per page, which runs contrary to the established convention of one entry per page. That said, I think that merely linking to the existing archives, as you've been doing, is a GREAT mid-term thing to do, since it lets us get the archives fully functional faster. Getting the existing stuff better-organized will be an ongoing process. —Aichon— 21:59, 18 May 2013 (BST)

Also, regarding that organization, the reason we're editing the pages is as part of an effort to more effectively make use of categories and to provide a common header/breadcrumb system for all of the archives, that way they're more navigable. For instance, if you go through the categories for Demotions and Bureaucrat Promotions, you'll see that Bob and I have used the breadcrumb template to get them categorized by year, as well as to categorize them using additional details, such as if a demotion was withdrawn or was done because the sysop was inactive. As a result, someone coming along later who wanted to know just how often sysops have been demoted for inactivity could bring up a list of all of them with just a few clicks, rather than having to check on every one, or, when we do the same categorization for Misconduct, could see all cases from a particular year on one page, allowing them to better understand the context of events that happened around a particular time. —Aichon— 23:45, 18 May 2013 (BST)

Why?

We've always had problems with people forgetting to update links and various lists getting out of sync with others. A big part of the reason why we migrated to this system was to avoid having all sorts of different places where we needed to remember to add links and update things, since we could let automated categorization via templates handle that stuff for us. Adding lists like these back in introduces the same issue to the new system. They are nice for at-a-glance info, but we already have categories for each year, whether they were successful or not, etc., so there shouldn't be a need for having extra lists to manually update, since it's already easy to drill down to the info you might want in a greater level of detail than we provided before. —Aichon— 22:06, 20 September 2013 (BST)

Ok, I'm convinced. Will move them all into my userspace. Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 22:08, 20 September 2013 (BST)