Template:Admin welcome

Congratulations
 Now you're an admin. And we all know what that means, right? Probably not. There's no one "right" way to be an admin. We all find our own paths. But it's really important to think of yourself primarily as a janitor who cleans up the joint so that other people can use it. You're not "in charge" now. You just have more to do.

The mechanics of administration

One of the first things you'll want to do is check out a . That list is an important overview, but it doesn't tell you a whole lot about how to actually use your new abilities. You'll want to quickly move on to the . The guide explains, step-by-step, how to perform the basic actions of deletion, merger, undeletion, protection, blocking and chat moderation — the five main tools in the administrators' toolbox.

You'll probably wanna check out this video for an overview of the  to which you now have access, as well as some other basic tools of the trade:

If you're not all that familiar with , you'll probably want to check out the following overview. Although it is somewhat basic in parts, it probably will teach you at least one thing you didn't know.

The art of administration

One of the more difficult aspects of administration is knowing when to act. Remember, you're now a steward of the community. It's your job to foster discussions and deal with inter-personal issues as they arise. Wikia have prepared some great videos about this subject, all of which are highly recommended. Please make sure that you view these at some point within the next week or so.

First up is a video about encouraging community discussion: Next comes a great roundtable about how to deal with trolling and vandalism. This is a particularly important video because its participants are all people you'll probably deal with now that your an admin. When admin contact Wikia, they most often deal with someone from ComDev (or CommunityDevelopment), and this video features some of the more visible members of that team. And here is a video about attracting and retaining new users — something that should be of primary concern to all admins:

What now?

These are obviously only a few topics of interest to admin. If you want help with anything more specific, be sure to get in touch with any of the existing .