[DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

Summary:

Charter? I hardly know er!

[DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

Prismal 14 Dec 2023 03:30

Mainsite Mirror

Link to Site Charter

Intro

The Charter is inconsistent, vague, and somewhat unhelpful, I think we all know that.

In my opinion one of the worst offenders is the section on Admin Fiats ( "Staff Rules and Rights" Section E) which poorly defines such a powerful tool. This is my main focus in this discussion. For the most part my proposal (Proposal II) is defined to be descriptive, and to force admins to be descriptive of fiats when these are performed.

In the process of this I also recognized a number of small inconsistencies in the Charter which I believe are easily fixed. These small changes would not change how we operate and will I have no doubt will be uncontroversial. (Proposal I)

Proposals

I. Minor Charter Edits

In the collapsible below I have listed several noted inconsistencies and how I believe those should be rectified.

Please feel free to note any other similarly minor inconsistencies you may note in the Charter.

+ Show Minor Edits

- The "Site Discipline" section of the Charter refers multiple times to the "Disciplinary Committee". (Note the "Demotions" section of the Charter refers to the "Disciplinary Team")

I would suggest changing that to "Disciplinary Team" for consistency and clarity.

- In "Demotions" section B 2 the charter uses the term "head of disciplinary" rather than "Captain of the Disciplinary Team".

I would suggest making that change for consistency

- In "Staff Rules and Rights" Section A states: "Staff will be assigned to teams upon promotion to active operational staff." This is incorrect as Junior Staff are recruited to specific teams.

(I cannot recall once in my time here when someone has been recruited to staff but not assigned a specific team, nor do I know how that would even work.)

I suggest a rework of that section to state "Staff are recruited for specific teams". The rest of that section adequately reflects reality and thus I do not believe it requires any changes at this time

-"administration", "administrator" "Administrator" (capitalized), "the Administrative team", "administrative staff" and "Admin" are all used interchangeably within the Charter.

I suggest changing all these terms to "Administrator" or "Administrators" for consistency as this is the term defined in "Staff Levels".

-Any member of Staff may make a thread in the Minor User Issues or Major User Issues subforums to document possible disciplinary violations.

We should change these to be "Non-Disciplinary" and "Disciplinary" respectively, and change the wording "document possible disciplinary violations" to "document user behavior".

(suggested by aismallard)

Given the above proposed changes are very minor and the effects on policy practically null I believe having these corrections as a separate vote would be somewhat ridiculous.

As such, I request an Admin Fiat occur to make these outlined minor changes, unless there is major staff opposition to these changes for some reason.

If Admins do not agree to perform a fiat, I suppose I will add these changes as a rider to my Admin Fiat Revamp policy when that goes to a vote, however I will be rolling my eyes at admins if they do this.

II. Admin Fiat Revamp

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BEGIN PROPOSAL

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I propose the creation of a new page in the Administrative Fiat section of 05command.

This page will be pinned.

The intended content for this page at the time of its creation is here.

The content of the current section of the Charter defining Administrative Fiat (Section IV E) will be replaced entirely with a link to this new page.

This new page will be considered for all intents and purposes to be part of the Charter. (voting requirements for edits etc)

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END PROPOSAL

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As you can see the meat of the proposal is in the linked sandbox. Hoping to get feedback on that

I know the example sections are blanks, please let me know if you can think of any good ones, otherwise I may just remove those sections in future iterations.

While this proposal of course affects admins the most, any level of staff (or non-staff) should feel free to leave feedback on it.

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Discussion Timer

Last edited on 18 Dec 2023 17:25 by Prismal Show more

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

aismallard 14 Dec 2023 05:17

I suggest changing all these terms to "Administrator" or "Administrators" for consistency as this is the term defined in "Staff Levels".

This is a fine suggestion except that I think "Administration" is still a useful term to refer to administrators as a whole, whereas "Administrators" alone simply means "more than one administrator", which is not really what "administration" means. If "administration" has discussed something, that means admins in general have a consensus, rather than an unspecified number of individual admins.

Also since we're suggesting wording changes to the Charter, I'd like to add:

Any member of Staff may make a thread in the Minor User Issues or Major User Issues subforums to document possible disciplinary violations.

We should change these to be "Non-Disciplinary" and "Disciplinary" respectively, and change the wording "document possible disciplinary violations" to "document user behavior".

As such, I request an Admin Fiat occur to make these outlined minor changes, unless there is major staff opposition to these changes for some reason.

I will note for the record that this is only necessary because amending the Site Charter is a more involved process, normally having a discussion thread like this end with a clear consensus means a voting thread is unnecessary. Here, for this fiat, we can interpret the discussion consensus as staff acclamation.

This new page will be considered for all intents and purposes to be part of the Charter.

I'm not really sure about this. Is this how we treat pages like Staff Structure? These are important to staff's composition and behavior but don't have Charter-level barriers.

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

Prismal 14 Dec 2023 05:27

I'm not really sure about this. Is this how we treat pages like Staff Structure? These are important to staff's composition and behavior but don't have Charter-level barriers.

You're maybe not quite understanding what I'm going for here. I want to replace the section of the charter dealing with admin fiat with an entirely new section dealing with admin fiat.

Now logically, if we're doing that we might as well stick it in the charter directly right?

Well yeah except throwing this much content into the charter would be ugly as hell and a big pain to read. Like I could stick all this content into a big collapsible and throw the collapsible on the charter or we can entertain the polite fiction that this new page would be a big collapsible on the Charter.

That make sense?

Like I don't know or care how we deal with Staff Structure. Far as I know changes to that aren't restricted in the same way changes to the Charter are (supermajority). I want this to be restricted in the way the Charter is, but I don't want to sacrifice readability to do just stick it in there.

edit: the rest of what you said I agree with, and I'll edit my proposals in a sec with the proposed edits.

Last edited on 14 Dec 2023 05:32 by Prismal Show more

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

aismallard 14 Dec 2023 05:32

I see, so it's just in the Charter itself, but technically on a different page. So then instead of saying "this is effectively part of the Charter" we should say something like "This page is part of the Charter, comprising Section E."

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

Prismal 14 Dec 2023 05:32

Yeah that's clearer phrasing, I'll make the edit.

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

Zyn 17 Dec 2023 08:09

Gave this a look-over and seems solid to me.

The proposed Minor Charter Edits should be made (I can confirm that I use "Disciplinary Team" or "Disciplinary Team Staff/Staff Team" in correspondence rather than "Disciplinary Committee", and that the Critique Teams recruit for specific subteams, not generic non-team staff).

Sandbox looks well-organized. If desired, I can help with filling in the examples sections, specifically the "appropriate usage" listings (we can reference prior fiats and link to them as precedent set?).

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

Prismal 18 Dec 2023 17:21

oh absolutely if you're willing to I'd appreciate, I kind of blanked on examples, and I think your idea of using actual fiats as examples is a good one.

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

EstrellaYoshte 17 Dec 2023 13:19

"captain or the disciplinary team".

Do you mean captain of the Disciplinary team, or referring to theme as separate?

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

Prismal 18 Dec 2023 17:23

typo, good catch, fixed

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

torcsandantlers 17 Dec 2023 16:18

Echoing Estrella on the typo.

"captain or the disciplinary team".

should be

"Captain of the Disciplinary Team."

I agree with ais's point about the forum name issues re: disc cases, but I disagree with changing them to a new named forum that may need changed in the future.

I would suggest:

Any member of Staff may make a thread in the appropriate Disciplinary subforums to document user behavior.

Otherwise supporting the fiat.

Plan to review the proposed page in more detail in the next day.

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

Prismal 18 Dec 2023 17:29

fixed the typo. In terms of the wording re: Disc subforums, I think it's best to be more specific and link to the subforum in question (which we already do just the incorrect names) rather than being less specific. It's true we may need to change this again in the future, but as long as staff is vaguely cognizant of that I think people should just be more comfortable fiating those sort of small things. Or it'd be nice if we had an allowance in place specifically for changing stuff like that on the charter to be accurate so we wouldn't even have to fiat but I don't know how that would work.

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

thedeadlymoose 23 Dec 2023 20:32

Or it'd be nice if we had an allowance in place specifically for changing stuff like that on the charter to be accurate so we wouldn't even have to fiat but I don't know how that would work.

Well, part of the reason we require Fiat is that some of these changes can be less simple than they look (I highlighted one below).

In this case, I would additionally suggest specifying "or the equivalent forum."

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

psychicprogrammer 20 Dec 2023 12:03

Yeah, I am fine with this

Re: [DISCUSSION] Admin Fiat Revamp and Minor Charter Edits

thedeadlymoose 23 Dec 2023 20:30

• I see the Discussion Timer is expired, but I think we need more time to discuss this, especially during holidays. (This may be an irrelevant comment since I observe we usually blow past discussion timers anyway, but stating this just in case.)

-Any member of Staff may make a thread in the Minor User Issues or Major User Issues subforums to document possible disciplinary violations.

We should […] change the wording "document possible disciplinary violations" to "document user behavior".

• The reason the wording says "disciplinary violations" is specifically to prevent staff from documenting user behavior that isn't a possible disciplinary violation, so this would be a major change.

• I agree with aismallard's point about "Administration" being different from "Administrators" in some cases. (You mention agreement with this, but the proposal hasn't been edited to reflect it.)

Will read & respond to the Fiat proposal either here or in chat when I'm able.