Wiki Monitors

Wiki Monitors
Abbreviation:	WM
Group Numbers:	2
Leadership:	Matthew Fahrenheit
Goals:	Our four maxims: To record, to discuss, to illustrate and to denounce
Recruitment Policy:	Read the specific rules here
Contact:	You can contact this group from the group's discussion page or our leader's Talk page

There has been a lot of talking about Mod behaviour and perceived misuse of Mod abilities, ranging from bullying of single users to self-patting-in-the-back from Mod to Mod following a you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours philosophy. This page was inspired on the Mod Conspiracy group created by Jedaz, but is meant to be a much more evoluted form of the group, for example covering the need of a clear set of rules on how to participate and an active leader. That said, you can find a good description of our objectives and structure as a group here.

Record

Rules on how to post a record can be found at the Record archive here.
If you want to discuss the Records, by all means do it, but in our talk page!

January 2007

January 8^th

Those annoying signatures

Today it seems that Gage awakened a little overrestrictive. He started a vandal case about The General's signature when he himself voted against a policy regulating signatures and didn't even take the time to vote for another policy doing the same. Not mentioning that we already have precedent of users using blinking signatures, tables with bright colors, images, extremely long signatures (a club of wich Gage formed part too), or hedious combinations of these things mentioned above. Anyways, looks like other mods didn't share his POV on signatures and then dismissed this petty case. This group leader wonders why everyone that grown an oversized signature has been ignored until User:The General did, and why other users get repeated unoficial warnings about their signatures (even by Gage himself!) and The General didn't.

Resume:

• What has happened: Gage started a vandal case against The General because he didn't like his signature. Luckily, the case was dismissed.
• Rules broken or made: It seems that Gage enforced some unaproved policies, or some unexistant precedent.

Update

It looks like The General signature in particular, but including Cyberbob240's sig too (that seems to have been made as a parody of The General sig when the case was ruled upon), have awakened a bit of hartred towards Mods. It's an understandable reaction by the community that still try to think that Moderators are to be held as a role model for another users to follow, as Hagnat stated, even when they repeatedly engage in childish attempts to look cool or just annoy people for the hell of it. A call for reason echoes in the UD Wiki today.

January 07^th

Beyond the monitors

After the creation of this group, it seems that a faction of the Wiki has taken the opportunity to satirize it and create the Wiki Monitors Monitors. We understand that the manly (if not only) purpose of this group is to make a good joke and maybe mock us a little bit, but an idea behind that group's constitution has caught our eye and thus we need to make an acclaration:

In no way as normal users of this Wiki we are out of the reach of the Moderation Team, and in fact if there's someone that "monitors" us, they are the Mods themselves, as it's their duty to keep an eye for the whole community. Not only this group's structure is completely based in the wiki (and thus there's not any kind of forum or other channels where we do "hidden" things, so all of our actions are transparent and public), but we are the same as normal users and in no way above the law. Thus, the need of constant "Monitors of monitors of monitors of monitors of..." in a linear patern isn't correct, as we follow more of a circular pattern, and as a last instance the ones that have the less power to enforce our monitoring are ourselves and not the Moderator team.

December 2006

December 31^st

Rewriting history?

There has been a good deal of controversy about Grim s's removal of the BBB bid for historical status. The group, very well known in the UD world because of their repeated incursions on Ridleybank's harsh enviroment, has been officialy disbanded both by it's former creator and the leaders of the dozens of different groups that conformed it. It was well into it's 12^th day on their Category talk:Historical Groups bid, with 63 votes, 44 of them For, when Grim s summarily moved it to the archive, to an appropiately new section created by him called "Disqualified", adding a "Mod note" at the end explaining that the group still shows in the stats page and thus it isn't inactive.

Later discussions with the Mod in question showed to be useless, as he can't be persuaded to follow reason, neither to respect the majority's opinion (44 votes say he's wrong, and the other 19, except maybe his own vote, only say that the group isn't Historical, not that it doesn't qualify for an Historical bid). An example can be made by making a comparison of the BBB with Shacknews, that has still a good ammount of people in the stats page too, but for some reason when the leadership of Shacknews say's they´re gone, their word is more valid than the voice of dozens of groups leaders and the BBB's creator.

Also, taking in account this Mod's affiliation with the RRF, the group wich reputation got tainted the most with the BBB actions in-game, he can't be seriously taken as unbiased. Neither does him take a position where he could be taken as such or acts for the community's sake, but he even hardens his position by stating that it can be argued that the BBB's status as a metagroup which counted among its members a large amount of very active groups, and also the fact that if you get right down to it, it was a post hoc collaboration to hold a goal and would more accurately be referred to as an event rather than a group, and thus could possibly be eliminated from the running that way as well, trying to eliminate the possibility of reposting the bid in the future.

Resume:

• What has happened: Grim s summarily removed the BBB bid for Historical status when it was almost sure that they would succeed in obtaining it.
• Rules broken or made: Grim s has repeatedly shown he has the wrong idea that only Mods can manage the Category:Historical Groups pages when no such a rule exists, and has tried to limit other users actions by stating that his decission "is final", and implying that any action taken to reverse this decission will be taken as vandalism. The removal itself is a clear opposition of the community's wishes (as the massive quantity of bid votes shown) in order to satisfy personal desires and/or vendettas.

The four pillars

These four pillars were thougt as the basis where our actions shall rest: our group is an official Wiki group that helds sacred the principle of good faith and as such we will not engage on other practices such as vandalism or counter-bullying. The four pillars then are meant to give an idea of what will be the reach of our actions as a group and as such single member's actions outside our maxim's reach will not be treated as representative of our group as a whole. The exact opposite is valid too: activities made inside the scope of the four pillars will be backed up with the full strenght of our numbers.

• To Record: Because the community, as with any mass of people, has a very short memory. There's not a centralized Record of whatever happens on the Wiki, neither there's an organized group willing to carry monitoring duties on the Moderators and the subsequent record of them, giving Moderators ample marging to abuse their powers. Thus a need has been generated, and we will satisfy it.
• To Discuss: Our group as a whole is no dictatorship. The leader's toughts will only give a general idea of the course of the group and a set of ever evolving rules in order to propice a safer enviroment to Discuss, but free discussion within our members and then with the whole community including Moderators is one of our main objectives. If our records show just one person's POV, then the value of the content within them is likely to be low.
• To Illustrate: The great majority of the community, and many of those that actively participate on community's discussions and votes, don't have knowledge of the ammount of drama going on on some unknown user's talk page. Neither do they know that a Mod's Misconduct case just have been hastily ruled upon or an Arbitration case was archived before anyone could see it. When how much does an Arbitration or a Misconduct case remain visible on their respective pages depends on the benevolency (or conveniency) of the Mods, our page will try to keep an high visibility and access to everything that is recorded, with commentaries about the effect on the normal user and specifics about what rule has been bent, broken or altogether created out of nowhere, with the purpose of Illustrate users that otherwise will ignore those facts. Publicity in the form of templates and signature links are helpful to this objective accomplishment too.
• To Denounce: Altough there's little space on this Wiki, if any, where our concerns and reports will be heard and given the consideration they deserve, it's an objective to, within the borders of plausibility, Denounce what we see as clear violations of the concept of good faith and the trust that as a community we have given to the Moderator team in the form of special powers. It is strongly adviced to take in account that any case you start either in Vandal Banning, Arbitration or Misconduct will be ruled upon the Moderator by fellow Moderators, so there's a big futility to do so even in cases that you see as "obviously guilty", and to do so can even deteriorate other cases that could be brought in the future. To be succesfull on this objective will prove to be our greatest challenge.

Membership

There are several things to take in account before you apply to be a member:

• Read all of our rules and keep yourself informed on whatever new rules are made.
• If you don't plan on taking the group with at least a certain level of seriousness and proffesionality, by all means don't apply to be a member of it.
• If you have an history of vandalism/bad faith edits/trolling/creation of drama/denial of reason, don't apply neither.
• If you're a Moderator, don't try.

Of course, this rules issue won't be exaggerated, but try to keep yourself updated in order to keep a sense of armony on the group. Whenever you decide that you won't like to be part of the group any longer, take off the name of the membership yourself. No one is going to reprimend you if you don't have an active participation in the group's discussions and constant recording, but it's strongly recommended to do so. We don't want to atract bad publicity: it's enough that we oppose a team with plenty more of powers than we have so, if you want to stir up some drama, make it somewhere else. And of course, if you're a Moderator then it is a real problem to have you on our team: Moderators already have the fake duty of monitoring themselves, so why bother joining our group? Do it right and we won't bother you: we may even give you some prize!

What can I do as a member?

First thing you can do is keep you eyes OPEN: There's a lot of things on this Wiki that happen in hidden places. You don't need to keep looking at the contributions of every Moderator to monitor them: you can monitor a Moderator's actions at the same time that you do anything else by just keeping an eye on Special:Recentactions. If you see a Moderator's name show up, spare a second to the cause and have a look! Whenever you find something worth recording, by all means do it! If your prose is bad, remember than mine is worst!

Discuss! If you see a Record made by another member or the Leader, and you have a different view of the event, then share it. Nothing is achieved if we all shut up: that is exactly what we're trying to avoid with the creation of the group: indifference. If you see further implications on an already reported issue, then discuss them and they may be added.

Then, you can show your membership and publicise the Record's (and group's) existence by having a link to it in your sign. You can add it like this:

1. Go to the Preferences page.
2. Check the box labelled "Raw signatures" (This way an automatic link to your page won't be added by default)
3. In the field "Your nickname (for signatures)", put the following (replacing Your name with your user name):

   [[User:Your Name|]] <sup>[[Wiki Monitors|WM]]</sup>

4. Press Save Preferences.

This will make your signature look exactly like it normally does, except it will now have ^WM appended to the end of your name, with a link to this page. In the near future some templates will be made to further publicise your affiliation or adeption to the group.

What can I do as a non member?

You can do pretty much everything a member does, including reporting and discussing and publicising, but you will be able to do so only on our discussion pages. Edition of most of our pages will be forbidden to you, and you won't be able to make new Records or edit old ones. Some decisions will be taken without taking your judgement in account. You can even be accused of vandalism if you edit some of our pages without membership, or get your commentaries deleted wholly with replies included as soon as they appear on our discussion pages, but that on extreme cases.

Anyways, beyond the negative connotations to be a non member, as such you're one of our main objectives. You can keep yourself always informed by reading our Records, and to Illustrtate you as a part of the community is a service we will always provide.

Templates

Our leader has made a couple of second grader level templates to satisfy that thirst of publicising our group affiliation and afection to whoever visits our personal User pages! They are:

	Wiki Monitors member
	Wiki Monitors is a Monitor. Wanna know more?

for members that want to add it on their personal User pages and...

	Wiki Monitors reader
	Wiki Monitors keeps himself informed. Wanna know how?

for non members that want to express their liking of the group activities, to add on their personal User pages too. Look at their pages to find instructions on how to use them here: {{Monitormember}} & {{Monitorreader}}.

Membership

Actual Members

1. Matthew Fahrenheit - Leader

Membership candidates

Sign here with a timestamp and our leader or whoever he appoints to this task will review your request. Do so by placing #--~~~~ below this line.

Group News

• As of 06:29, 13 January 2007 (UTC) - CaptainM was asked to leave the group because of his lack of maturity and contributions. A rewrital of the rules and articles is underway. The group is still in need of a better logo and more importantly, members!
• As of 07:47, 7 January 2007 (UTC) - Our group has just been created! There's a multitude of steps to make, but the most helpful right now would be the creation of a new, more appropiate and visually appealing logo (mine sucks, I know), templates to publicise membership and use of the page ("I'm a Wiki Monitor" and "I read Wiki Monitors"), and Records, new ones and notable old ones as well. There are plans to hold a daily poll to measure public opinion too!