User blog:Fujihita/The admins of KanColle English Wikia

Forewords
This blog pays tribute to the past, gives a brief history of KanColle English Wikia and to provides more information on the admins: their specialties, their responsibilities and their current status.

The aim is to
 * 1) Guide editors whom they should seek help from (albeit when in doubt, go ahead and drop a message on Crazy teitoku's wall. Don't tell him I said that)
 * 2) Provide new staff members a general guideline on what they're expected to do. For starters, here's an excellent article on best practices for admins which also describes the attitude all staff members should have.

In future blogs, I'll dwell deeper into advance editing techniques: how to manage updates and how to work with some of the most useful yet difficult templates/layouts/modules in this wiki.

Generations
There are five generations of admins in this wiki.


 * The first generation
 * Started in the dawn of time, in August 2013.
 * It was an era of stagnation and it saw the transition of power from the founder to our current wiki adopter, CDRW.


 * The second generation
 * Started in November 2013 with the promotion of five new admins and a guest admin.
 * The foundation of this wiki: ship pages, equipment pages, event pages, suggestion pages, etc. are created by this generation. Much of the game resources we have nowadays were also uploaded in this era.


 * The third generation
 * Started in December 2014 with the promotion of six new admins (and Lunarian Ace).
 * The most significant achievements of the third generation was API response reading and automatic game data extraction. Many major redesigns also took place in this era; these include: main page, expedition, furniture, recent updates and event page.


 * The fourth generation
 * Started in April 2015 with the promotion of four new admins
 * The fourth generation brought Lua automation to this wiki. All ship data and equipment data are now stored in dedicated Lua modules, eliminating inconsistencies across multiple pages and advance manipulation of data templates. Ship voices, quest page and file naming conventions are the other highlights of the fourth generation.


 * The fifth generation
 * Started in July 2016 with the promotion of two new admins, four content moderators and six discussion moderators. Starting from this generation, there will be fewer admin promotions due to the introduction of content and discussion moderators

Fujihita wrote:

Due to the impact of content moderator role, only Bureaucrats can change content moderator's permission level.

Roles of a staff member
They manage everything pertaining the human aspect
 * Discussion moderator
 * Patrol the wiki daily and revert vandalism.
 * Engage in community discussions, answer user questions.
 * Promote friendly and welcoming environment.
 * Remove inappropriate comments.
 * Punish troublemakers.

They take responsibilities for the quality of articles and the correctness of information
 * Content contributor
 * Post patch notes, update Recent Updates page.
 * Extract and upload new game resources, making use of multi-upload feature.
 * Provide translations.
 * Format and proofread draft content for ease of reading.
 * Perform verification on game mechanics, either by frontlining or statistical testing.

They research and develop the methods, tools and designs content contributors use.
 * Developer
 * Interpret API response, automatic data collection and game resources extraction methods.
 * Work on wiki automation and UX projects:
 * Design templates and layouts in HTML and wikitext.
 * Implement data forms in Lua.
 * Document templates, modules and layouts.
 * Create editing aids and automatic tools (Javascript, Lua, PHP, Python and Ruby are common choices).