Forum:Admin retirement policy

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Hey everyone!

So, I'm going to be shortly making a large-scale policy amendment proposal (sneak peek is here), but before I do that, there's one slightly more minor amendment I'd like to put forward first.

This has to do with The Sims Wiki:Policy/Administrative Policies. That policy page contains two distinct policies; the "Administrator resignation and reinstatement policy" and the "Inactive Administrator Policy." What I'm proposing here is that we archive The Sims Wiki:Policy/Administrative Policies and spin-off a new policy page for user "retirement." The text of my proposed amendment is pasted below.

This retirement policy applies to any user who has received one or more user rights on The Sims Wiki. Users who have one or more user rights and who are in good standing on the wiki may resign any or all of their user rights at any time. There are also procedures under which, for a limited time, a retired user can reclaim rights previously granted without submitting a new rights request

Procedures for retirement

When a user chooses to retire, they should notify the administrative team by posting a message to the administrators' noticeboard. If the user has access to Special:UserRights, they should go onto that page and manually remove all rights they wish to remove. If the user cannot access the User Rights control page, they should place a request on the administrators' noticeboard to have the relevant rights removed by a bureaucrat. Note that bureaucrats cannot remove the bureaucrat user right from other bureaucrats, so bureaucrats wishing to retire bureaucrat rights must do so themselves via Special:UserRights.

Users who retire some user rights may choose, at their discretion, to retain 'lower' user rights, even if they did not hold those rights originally. For example, a user who retires from administratorship may choose to serve as a content moderator, even if they were not a content moderator before becoming an administrator. For purposes of this rule, 'higher' roles are implied to also include 'lower' roles, so a user retiring from 'higher' rights can choose to retain some 'lower' rights. Rollback rights are included in content moderator rights; content moderator rights are included in administrator rights; and administrator rights are included in bureaucrat rights.

Procedures for reinstatement

A user who has retired one or more user rights, and who was and continues to be in good standing on the wiki, may choose to reverse a retirement and request those surrendered rights back. Users who retire/resign one or more rights have 180 days (approximately six months) to request that those rights be reinstated. Requests for reinstatement must be made on the administrators' noticeboard. After the 180 day period has elapsed, these users will have no right for direct reinstatement of retired rights and must proceed through the relevant rights request process(es) in order to obtain those rights again.

"Good standing" rule

Resigned users may request rights back under the policy above as long as they are in 'good standing' on the wiki. Users will be considered in good standing if they are not currently blocked and have not been under a block since they retired. However, if a user abuses their user rights or violates wiki policy and resigns to avoid punishment, or violates wiki policy after their resignation, the community may decide, via a discussion in the Community Discussions forum, to revoke the resigned user's ability to automatically request rights back. The wiki administrators and/or the community may also choose to impose other sanctions as necessary.

The main changes I've made from the current policy are:

  • I broadened the policy to apply to any user rights, instead of specifically to admin and bureaucrat rights. This would notably include content moderators and rollbackers, neither of whom are covered by current policy.
  • I changed the six-month reinstatement window to 180 days for sake of clarity.
  • Retiring users can hold onto lower-tier rights, even if they didn't hold those rights before their promotion. Higher-tier rights include access to lower-tier rights automatically (for instance, a content moderator has access to all benefits of the rollback role), so it just makes sense that if a user could qualify for a higher tier, that they'd also qualify to keep a lower tier if they retired. This is already the general practice for bureaucrats and admins; retiring bureaucrats are allowed to retain admin rights, and retiring admins are allowed to keep rollback. This amendment would, in effect, also extend that to content moderators as well.

That's really about it for my amendment. As I said, I'd like to give this policy its own name, like "The Sims Wiki:User retirement policy" or something like that (weigh in below if you have a better name for the policy), and to archive the current Administrative Policies page, since the "Inactive Admin Policy" has been suspended since 2013.

Let me know what you think! -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 07:07, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Discussion[edit source]

This discussion has been up for three weeks now with no input. Because there has been no objection to the amendment so far, what I'd like to do, to help wrap this up, is to request unanimous consent to adopt the amendment.

To be more precise, I am seeking unanimous consent for:

  1. Renaming "The Sims Wiki:Policy/Administrative Policies" to "The Sims Wiki:Retirement policy";
  2. Splitting the (no longer active) Inactive Admin Policy onto its own page, and then setting that page to be kept but archived;
  3. Amending the remaining policy to adopt the wording I have posted in the italicized section above.

I am requesting unanimous consent under the wiki's unanimous consent procedure. To explain:

  • This discussion will remain open for at least five days from the date of the posting of this edit;
  • Any registered user can post on this thread that they object to either the adoption of the proposal, or else object to the use of unanimous consent;
  • If there is even one user that objects to adoption, unanimous consent cannot be used, and the proposal must be fully discussed and consented to instead;
  • If, after at least five days, no registered users have objected to unanimous consent, the proposal is then deemed to have community consensus and is adopted.

I am choosing to utilize this method of seeking consensus because rules amendments are often too dry to get much community interest, and because the amendments I'm proposing are minor in scope and mostly preserve the essence of the already-existing policy.

So, is there any objection to adopting the proposal? -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 01:05, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

support Cassandra1201 19:21, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Conclusion[edit source]

I meant to close this thread out yesterday but it slipped my mind.

So, the five (now six) days for objection have passed, and as there has been no objection, the policy as I've drafted it is now in force. I've made the outlined changes to current policy and implemented the amendment. -- LostInRiverview talk · blog · contribs 17:15, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

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