User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Help!/@comment-15755849-20131229214328/@comment-188432-20131230000141

Administration on any Wikia wiki is an informal process. You seem to suggest that we create layers of bureaucracy and start a formal in-service review process for our admins. That's basically never gonna happen. We're just unpaid volunteers trying to make a big wiki work. I don't think any of us has enthusiasm for setting up anything like you suggest.

We just try to use our best judgment in writing and administering the rules of the wiki so that it will flourish. If we make a mistake, we try to apologise to the user in question and move on. We don't really worry about going on public witch hunts against our fellow admin.

Given our phenomenal growth rate this year, that approach seems to be working.

To answer your other questions more specifically:
 * Anyone can nominate a user as an admin, as explained at Tardis:User rights nominations. It's even possible to nominate yourself. But we have denied nominations in the past. A good guideline we use to determine suitability can be found  at Community Central.
 * Of course this process isn't unbiased. All nominations processes are biased. That's definitional.  If you nominate yourself, you're biased towards yourself.  If someone nominates you, they clearly want you to succeed. There's no such thing as an unbiased nomination.
 * The best way to deal with grievances with an admin is to talk to them directly.
 * There's not really an administrative hierarchy, no. The more "power" people get around here, the more janitorial work they get stuck with. If you have any notions in your hand that being an admin is anything other than being the guy stuck with the broom and the mop, you don't understand what it means to be an admin.
 * We don't conduct periodic reviews of admin. That would imply a hierarchy that doesn't really exist. As is standard practice across Wikia, once admin are in, they're in. Although all admin have at some point had to deal with controversial matters, we've never had a case of serious abuse of power. What has sorta happened with our staff is that each of us has a particular focus, and within that focus we tend to defer to other admin.  If there's a question about short stories, I'll defer to Shambala108.  If there's a question about books from the 1990s, I'll tend to turn to Tangerineduel.  And so on. Additionally, to ensure we're on the same page, we tend to talk amongst ourselves.
 * To users, admin may sometimes appear to be acting autonomously. But the truth is that we have hundreds of decisions to make on any given day, and we just don't have the staff to form arbitration committees like they do on bigger wikis like Wikipedia. All admin simply try to look at the rules and act in their best judgement. If you have a problem with a particular decision, by all means bring it up with the individual admin in question. If that admin doesn't give you satisfaction, try another one.  But if you get two similar responses from admin, you should probably leave it at that.  Belabouring a point isn't allowed.
 * This isn't a democracy. Heck even . We make a concerted effort to involve the community in discussions, and we have one of the deepest archives of community discussions anywhere on Wikia. But there is no guarantee of transparency or user participation in decision making.