General Policies • General Guidelines • Manual of Style • User rights • Infractions • Content Policies • Diversity and Equality • Consensus
CommunitySocial Media • Featured articles • Featured editors • Staff • Verified users
User rights grant trusted users extra powers to perform actions on the Overlook Bay Wiki. These additional rights are only granted to users after a well-defined consensus process, where a majority of the members of the community have to agree. There are four different rights that can be requested by users:
- Administrator (user group:
sysop) - Content Moderator (user group:
content-moderator) - Discussions Moderator (user group:
thread-moderator) - Rollback (user group:
rollback)
Requirements
There are certain restrictions as to who can request user rights on the Overlook Bay Wiki. The Overlook Bay Wiki currently only maintains a small but efficient staff team as to keep things running smoothly. Users that do not meet the following criteria may not request additional rights.
- Have an autoconfirmed account.
- An account is marked as autoconfirmed 4 days after its creation, i.e., the requestor's account must be at least 4 days old.
- Not have infracted major policies.
- The user must not have had major infractions on the Overlook Bay Wiki in the past 1 month.
- Not be actively violating any policies.
- All members of the staff team, regardless of their rank are expected to abide by the wiki's Policies and Guidelines.
- Have a Discord account.
- Discord is mandatory to ensure efficient communication between the staff team.
- Not have a bad reputation amongst wiki users.
- Staff members are looked up to when conflicts arise on the wiki, thus, it is important to make sure that the community supports a user being granted certain rights.
- Be able to fluently communicate with other wiki users.
- Knowing multiple languages is considered a good trait and can improve your chance at getting a role.
There are also some generalized requirements for requesting certain rights, due to these rights being powerful and easily abusable. These requirements are only to be followed by users that request specific rights. Though exceptions can be made, they generally aren't.
- Previously have had experience as a staff member of the Overlook Bay Wiki.
- Administrators are the highest rank on the wiki, and thus, this right demands users to be aware of what they are doing.
- Have demonstrated their ability to edit articles while utilizing wikitext and HTML.
- It is necessary for Content Moderators to be proficient in wikitext and HTML, due to them being one of the first users that are approached by wiki users for editing-related concerns.
- It is also recommended that a user has experience as a Rollback before requesting Content Moderator rights for a higher chance at getting accepted.
- Have been actively participating in or reporting discussion posts.
- Discussions Moderators are assigned to deal with the discussions part of the wiki, and should thus know how it works.
- Have a good amount of experience when it comes to editing.
- Rollbacks are not expected to act as an aid to wiki users needing help, but rather trusted users that have enhanced privileges to deal with unconstructive edits.
Requesting Rights
To request additional rights, the user has to make sure that they are eligible for the rights in accordance with the requirements. User rights can be requested on the wiki's Wiki management forum board, and users that request these rights are expected to follow a certain format while requesting their desired rights. There is no cooldown as to how quick a user can request certain rights after being accepted or declined once, though requestors are expected to be considerate and not spam requests.
- The forum topic must be relevant to the subject.
- It should be in the following format: Rights request: Username
- The rights request must be split into paragraphs. Lists are not allowed.
- This helps in evaluating the requestor's proficiency in English.
- The requestor should mention their Discord username and tag while requesting rights.
- Discord is mandatory to ensure that proper communication is met between all members of the staff team.
- The rights request should contain all relevant information regarding the user's contributions to the wiki.
- The requestor is expected to declare what they would be utilizing their additional rights for.
- Vague declarations, such as "I would like these rights to help the community", are unacceptable.
- Any past experience with design, information technology, wiki editing, and/or moderation should be highlighted.
- If the requestor has no past experience, they would have to mention that.
- The requestor must sign their request.
- Users can add their signature by typing four tildes (
~~~~).
- Users can add their signature by typing four tildes (
Rights Consensus
All requests related to the addition of additional user rights on the Overlook Bay Wiki are handled via a community vote, transparently. Any opinions, concerns, questions, opposition, or support should be shared publicly on the request itself. A typical rights request's consensus would last for 2 weeks (14 days). Any votes not cast within the time period would be disregarded.
- To carry out a successful rights request, a user must get support from at least 75% of the members of the community that cast their votes.
- If 10 members have voted, the requestor would have to get 7 (rounded off to the closest, least-count number) votes in their support in order to carry out a successful user rights request.
- Votes are cast either in the form of Support (+1), Neutral (0), and Oppose (-1), all of which have designated templates.
- {{Support}}, {{Oppose}}, and {{Neutral}} are the three templates that should be used while casting votes.
- If a voter has any queries, they may choose to not make a decision and instead Comment on the request under the "Discussion" heading to have an open public discussion with the requestor if necessary.
- A voter may change their decision at any time during the consensus by striking through their previous decision and leaving a new reply. Editing previous replies is considered unethical, and such actions will be reverted.
- Users can strike through their messages using the following block of code:
<s> Message </s>
- Users can strike through their messages using the following block of code:
- If there is a clear conflict between the requestor and the voter, the vote will not be counted.
- This is to prevent bias. The Overlook Bay Wiki aims at being free and fair for all.
- At the end of the 2-week duration, an administrator would create a new section in the rights request thread, the "Result" section, which would house the votes in support, neutral, and against the user's rights request.
Rights Removal
It is sometimes necessary to strip certain users off their additional rights for a varying number of reasons, which include: inactivity, clear abuse of privileges, constant infractions to the policies and guidelines, and hostile behavior towards the community. Rights may only be removed after a proper consensus within members of the wiki administration. Removal of bureaucrats requires community consensus on the wiki.
- The user decides to abandon their rights or account.
- This includes resignations and long periods of inactivity (over 1 year).
- Rollbacks are a special team on the Overlook Bay Wiki, and are exempt from this criteria.
- The user has shown recurring signs of hostility towards the community and other members of the staff team.
- A staff member that constantly gets into unconstructive arguments with users is unacceptable.
- The user acts immaturely and poorly to situations when they rise.
- Immaturity is not tolerated. Staff members are expected to be respectful.
- The user constantly violates the wiki's policies while being staff, or abuses their rights.
- It is the duty of a staff member to follow the wiki's policies.