What is this team?
The Maintenance and Ancillary Staff Team (MAST) would be a new team primarily responsible for ensuring the general upkeep of the wiki and 05 Command. This team would be in charge of tasks that are either not currently associated with any team but are intrinsic to the wiki's function, or certain tasks given to it by other teams. Tasks well-suited for MAST include page deletions, tagging new articles, updating staff and administrative pages that require upkeep, and aiding in content visibility and navigation. Other tasks that fit within the confines and scope of the team may be added as staff deem necessary.
In regards to deletions, Non-MAST staff may still vote on and create the deletion votes, but responsibility for this process falls on MAST. Members will be responsible for making deletion votes, voting on deletion votes, and fully deleting pages, once the requisite 24 hours has passed.
MAST can also take over the tagging of new pages, with Tech Teams assent; however, the creation of new tags and the curation of the current tag list and hierarchy can still be a responsibility for the Tech team. As time goes on, we may revisit whether MAST can or should curate the tag system.
This team will also maintain any information pages listing members of staff, such as the Meet the Staff page, the Contact Staff page, as well as the Staff list on 05. This team would also be responsible for updating administrative pages like the monthly top rated pages, and the various page archives that need infrequent updates.
Maintaining content navigation and visibility should also be a primary responsibility for MAST. The team's responsibilities in this regard would include implementing the WikiWalk footers upon the closure of a series and the creation of a new series list. MAST can also maintain pages such as the Underread and Underrated page, the contest archive, Tales, and other content discovery hubs of similar nature. This will most likely be a joint responsibility with the Community Outreach Team
Any Captain will be able to confer with MAST about undertaking tasks, but the MAST leadership have a right to refuse if they believe the team has reached its current workload capacity. Temporary loaning of staff members to MAST may be done to ameliorate this situation should it arise.
Other Possible Responsibilities and Projects
Here is a list of other duties that could potentially be given to MAST
- General Project Gruntwork
- If another team or staff member is doing a project on the wiki that requires a lot of legwork, and that team either does not have enough members or needs it done quickly, members of MAST can help with the gruntwork. For example:
- Changing the name of a tag across the entire wiki
- The Image License project
- Collaborative page upkeep
- If another team or staff member is doing a project on the wiki that requires a lot of legwork, and that team either does not have enough members or needs it done quickly, members of MAST can help with the gruntwork. For example:
- Interviewing Junior staff who are going to be put up for promotion to Operational Staff
- Janitorial duties on both the SCP and 05 forums
- If a user posts an extremely long post that would need collapsing or posts a draft in the forums, MAST would be responsible for collapsing the post or removing the drafts.
- Multiple proposals for aiding navigability of active threads on the 05 Command forums have been suggested, and this team could potentially aid in moving threads that are not active to inactive forums, or marking inactive threads as such.
- MAST could also potentially bump Disciplinary threads that appear to have died or were left unresolved.
How are New Responsibilities Added?
Because of how broad the team's potential scope is, it's important that consideration should take place before a project or role is given to MAST, to avoid mission creep and to ensure the team's assigned tasks and projects are manageable.
A captain may request that MAST take on a responsibility from their team, provided their team can not perform this task due to lack of interest or lack of active staff. Before a responsibility is given to MAST, there must be active staff willing to work on it.
For Discussion of This Proposal
As proposals for this team have been sitting in Staff Limbo for literal years, it would be best that any discussion on this proposal is not bogged down too much. Because of that, we ask that no one suggests additional responsibilities or projects, and that most discussion centers on the specific contents of this proposal.
If you are interested in joining this team, please let either Roget or myself know and we will add you to the proposal.
Discussion will last for the duration of this time, however, if a clear consensus is reached, we may move to a vote sooner.
