Forum:Improve the current wiki adoption process and/or its discoverability

Forums: Index → General discussion

For some reason, there's no formal process or page for requesting to adopt a wiki (even though other wikifarms seem to have one). That just seems silly. So, I'm proposing to create a process for it!

• The wiki:
  • The wiki must have had no activity (including both edits and log actions) in 2 months.
  • The local wiki staff (including admins and bureaucrats) must not be active for 2 months.
• You must:
  • have persistently edited the wiki.
  • not be blocked currently on any ShoutWiki.
  • not have adopted another wiki in the last month.

Thoughts, comments?

SamanthaNguyen (talk) 18:59, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Sure there is — ShoutWiki Hub:Wiki Adoptions has existed since August 2013 and is linked from the navigation menu (MediaWiki:Sidebar) of many skins: Aurora, our default skin, as well as Cologne Blue, Modern, MonoBook, Nimbus and Truglass. :-)

A lot of the existing criteria are similar or the same as what you're proposing, although I'd like to note that we currently have an exception for staff deleting spam pages: page deletion is obviously a logged action, and it'd be a shame if staff deleting spam would prevent an eager, active user from adopting a wiki. --Jack Phoenix _(Contact) 20:19, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Not sure how I didn't manage to see it - I see it now :) Thanks for pointing that out! I'll rename this forum to "Modify the current rules for the wiki adoption process" (or something like that).

I think "You must not be blocked on any ShoutWiki wiki" is probably a good idea, as we don't want an untrustworthy user to have these user rights on a wiki (although it should probably be reworded). Sometimes outside blocks are unreasonable though, and I'm not sure of how this could be checked. Looking at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Block just shows how to block and unblock a user via the API modules.

As for the current "Note: Spambots and staff deleting spambot edits are exempt from these rules.", it could be modified to say "Note: Spambots and staff deleting vandalism and/or spambot edits are exempt from these rules." As for wiki-staff, I was referring to local wiki staff instead of global, so I'll reword that now. :) SamanthaNguyen (talk) 20:30, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Scratch what I said earlier - running a query on thousands of wikis just to check if they're blocked (which can sometimes be an unreasonable block) isn't exactly the right way to go about it. The current rules are probably already good enough for determining whether or not the user is trustworthy/sane enough for adopting a wiki. The only standing rule really left that could be applied is "You must not have adopted another wiki in the last month." Is that a fair rule? SamanthaNguyen (talk) 20:43, 12 January 2017 (UTC)