I believe that the below statement falls under valid use of https://community.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:Mira_Laime/How_to_Deal_With_a_Bad_Bureaucrat. Indeed, I can provide evidence that one of our bureaucrats has engaged in every single form of the behavior listed under “Common reasons why a bureaucrat needs to go:”. Unfortunately, I have found that our FANDOM representative has similarly disregarded editor concerns. If this statement is deleted - which would only serve to emphasize the severity of these issues and validate these concerns - please feel free to reach out to me via socials linked on my user page for more details. Should the administrators and FANDOM fail to take these concerns seriously, I have developed other options we have as a community, and welcome any interested editors to contact me.
As those of you in the discord may have seen, I and several other editors have over the past year raised a number of concerns about the governance of this wiki. In short, we feel that editors are entirely shut out of decisions and future modes of governance; that the bureaucrats regularly violate their own policies to the detriment of article quality; and that they have failed to foster a community that encourages change, editorial autonomy, canonicity, and mutual respect, while often being non-communicative, unresponsive, and unreceptive to editor concerns.
The issues we have encountered include an administrator who repeatedly blocked users, protected pages, and reverted edits without explanation to support a presumptive narrative surrounding particular ships; permanently turning off anonymous editing with no advance warning and little explanation; and an incoherent blocking policy in which a first-time vandal was given a block period of an entire year but a user who repeatedly wrote abusive comments was largely ignored before being given a block of one month. A previous attempt to bring up this behavior on the wiki was deleted within minutes.
The new wiki administration promotion track was created with no feedback from editors (despite editors expressing interest in providing feedback); only existing administrators and fandom staff. It keeps the promotion of any future administrators solely in the hands of existing admins, without defining what counts as administrator abuse or providing accountability to the community. Our policies are not reflective of our community’s values, where “rudeness” is considered a more grievous offense than “rule breaking.” Given that our concerns center around administrators’ questionable judgment, behavior as if they are above the rules, dismissal of editor feedback, and general lack of transparency, this is unacceptable.
Our hard-working editors are dedicated to building an encyclopedia of all things Critical Role-related and are brimming with ideas for improving the site. But some of them have described feeling wary of raising these ideas, or even making what would otherwise be fairly uncontroversial edits lest they run afoul of the admins, and carry a sense of defeat about anything ever changing. The administrators’ attitude hampers our ability to be the contributors we want to be, and we are less productive as a result. It feels like they own the wiki and we are merely serving at their pleasure when this is entirely backwards; administrators should be accountable to us. We are saying this leadership does not reflect our values and we are tired of trying to be heard and being repeatedly ignored or rebuffed.
What we are asking for is: the immediate development of a consensus policy granting a significant voice to the editorship in wiki policy decisions, and immediate elections for all administrative roles. If you share these concerns or have other suggestions, this is an opportunity to weigh in.