I thought this might be worth a little bit of discussion at the moment.

We’ve had a few communities started by existing subs on the other site, some making it clear that it’s staking a claim to the same name on here in case they ever decide to move, but that they have no plans to at the moment, and will not be doing any moderating.

I have to be honest, this kinda rubs me the wrong way. It feels like hedging your bets, running one community, not running the other one, but still intending to be in charge if it takes off despite that.

If you’d like to start a community here in the same style as an existing one, that’s great, go for it!
Moderate, post great content, grow!

But if you’re aiming to put your name on undeveloped land, in the hope that when you come back someone will have built a farm, I’m not sure it’s very helpful.

Discussion encouraged!

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝AEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    The big advantage we do have here, is that we’re small enough that the admin/user ratio is better.

    This means that in situations, there can be an easy escalation/resolution, rather than a drawn out (and often ignored) messaging to the admins like can happen elsewhere.

    I think this is key. If there are teething troubles it should be easy enough to resolve and doing that will help set precedents that will make future decisions easier. So what gets decided now will help structure things going forward.

    I remember the early days of wikis when people were just messing around with them, figuring out what worked. Then it became obvious Wikipedia was going to be the big beast and the structure and systems we helped thrash out back then (I did a small part in an obscure corner but got to observe the wider work too) helped make it easier for people to create new pages and slot them into the existing way of doing things. Now people don’t even really have to worry about such things - they just need the motivation to start a new page, check it meets the requirements and use any available tools and off they go.

    So the coverage here is patchy and most of us are making it up as we go along (well I am) but that’s OK, what we thrash out now will help people in the future just jump onboard without having to spare a thought for any birthing pangs we are experiencing.

    So topics like this are vital, not because we are pointing at anyone specific because they’ve done something wrong but because we don’t really know what the right way to do things is and these kinds of discussions will help us figure that out. The topics may need to be gone over again in the future but coming up with some kind of fix now will really help everything run smoothly for the time-being.