Forum:Proposal to retire Special positions

Archived discussion

This page is an archive. Please do not edit the contents of this page, other than for maintenance. If you wish to revisit this topic, please bring it up again in a new thread.

Forums: Index → Community discussions → Proposal to retire Special positions | Post

Hey there TSW'ers,

I am writing this thread to propose that we retire Special positions on The Sims Wiki. My reasoning for this proposal is as follows:

• Very few users know of their existence and they are not seen as official user rights (such as rollback, sysop, bureaucrat).
• Most, if not all, of the current Special positions are redundant or unnecessary.
  • IRC contact is fairly redundant after I let the bureaucrats do the same things, the only thing unique to me is the +F flag which a channel requires to remain active. I've even dropped the bragging rights for that.
  • We've never actually had any usage for a Forum moderator or an Ombudsman.
  • Community director is a minor exception but probably could be rolled in with something else, be revamped or something along those lines.
• Hardly anyone ever requests for these and even when there is a request, the requests page is usually pretty dead, particularly in comparison to that of an RfA or RfB.
• Even those who do know of this feature's existence haven't showed any interest in developing this further even with the page stating, "Users who feel that a new Special Position should be created should contact a Bureaucrat with their idea and reasoning."
• In a nutshell, it's dead.

Note that I'm not trying to discredit anyone who may have been involved with or interested in any of these positions. If I could, I would have tried to consider a way of making the system more interesting so that there would be more interest but unfortunately that seems to be difficult if not impossible and there's no point supporting a dead feature forever.

I'm interested in everyone's thoughts on this and if anyone has even the smallest idea of breathing new life into this then I'm open to those ideas. Lost Labyrinth • (c) • (b) 21:32, December 9, 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

I'd like to see if anyone has any points for keeping the special positions. Personally I am in favor of retiring them, but I just want to make sure we consider other opinions before making up our minds. -- LiR ^{speak ~ read} 00:25, December 10, 2012 (UTC)

I feel like the special positions are like members of administrative projects, which makes one's position (as admin) different from another's. We could, however, make some of these special positions as an additional project in the administrative projects, though the difference is, one requires an administrator right. Nikel _{Talk – Vote!} 04:18, December 10, 2012 (UTC)

The only real issue with that is that Ombudsman is really a non-admin thing. Furthermore, APs are also in a dead state for numerous reasons but to list a few:

• Lack of project tasks to steer the system forward.
• Project leaders failing to moderate their specific projects.
• Bureaucrats are unable to enforce the system effectively based on a lack of progress.

It doesn't have to be this way for APs and if anyone has any ideas of streamlining that system to make it work again then I'm open to them. Lost Labyrinth • (c) • (b) 08:22, December 10, 2012 (UTC)

Closed - Long dead. Lost Labyrinth • (c) • (b) 12:58, February 17, 2013 (UTC)