A wiki is only as good as its contributors, and a reliable wiki benefits from a group of editors who are well-practiced in its history. The administration of a wiki is typically run by its founders and a select team of individuals who work together in the interest of maintaining certain aspects of the wiki. These duties include cleaning up areas of the wiki that regular editors don't have access to, disciplinary actions, mediating contested discussions, and a general interest in the overall quality and reputation of the wiki.
Admins[]
Muppet Wiki was founded by Danny Horn and Scott Hanson after collaborating on a series of articles about Grover's Mom for ToughPigs.com. Over the years, several editors have been recruited to assist in the wiki's goings-on:
- Danny Horn — December 5, 2005
- Scott Hanson — December 5, 2005
- Peter Papazoglou — December 7, 2005
- Andrew Leal — February 6, 2006
- Guillermo Gomez — September 8, 2006
- Wendy Peters — January 17, 2007
- Henrik Rytter — February 16, 2009
- Shane Keating — December 28, 2009
- Julian Kleibeler — December 4, 2010
- Jonathan Brangwynne — July 2, 2011
- Nate Downs — September 19, 2011
- Gavin Kline — July 1, 2021
- Tony Whitaker — June 15, 2022
- Maddox Potter — May 15, 2023
A list of admins and their credentials can also be found at Special:Listadmins, or by navigating to Special:Community and clicking the View All link in the "Meet the Admins" module in the right-hand column.
Best practices[]
This information only applies to admins on the wiki who have different rights and responsibilities from editors.
- Admins should always use Special:RecentChanges as their landing page. Fandom used to offer a feature called WikiActivity, but it was limited and insufficient in monitoring for vandalism, edits made in good faith that may need help, Special:Logs, and other changes to the wiki we should be aware of. Dev Wiki has created a custom version of this old tool, but it's not advised to use over Special:RecentChanges.
- Recommended preferences for RecentChanges...
- Days to show in recent changes: 14
- Number of edits to show by default: 200 (too many will slow the page down)
- Use advanced recent changes: checked (this will group multiple changes for the same page which can otherwise make the page difficult to visually assess)
- Hide minor edits in recent changes: unchecked (you want to see everything)
- The red exclamation marks ❗ next to edits in RecentChanges indicates that the change has not yet been patrolled by an admin. Edits can be patrolled by viewing the change that was made in the "diff" link in RecentChanges or the article's history. Patrolling edits helps other admins to review what changes have been made to the wiki that may need to be reviewed by an experienced editor. Admins and those with Rollback rights already have their edits marked as patrolled automatically.
- Experience has proven that the attempts by Wikia/Fandom to build a visual editor are extremely buggy. Since we can't disable it, and some editors are bound to use it despite our best attempts to discourage it, use this link to check for changes made by the visualeditor. It's very likely that these edits broke the page layout and/or the wikicode.
- It's easy to use the rollback button when checking RecentChanges for questionable edits. More often than not, it's use is warranted since the edits we're rolling back are made by drive-by editors. When reverting good faith edits for new and established users alike, we should make an effort to leave an edit summary and leave a message on their message wall if it's a user we suspect won't know to look at an article's edit summaries.
- Some years ago, Wikia changed the way file description pages work. They used to show a significantly larger number of articles on which a particular file was being used, but now it only shows three at a time with the option to scroll through the rest. To restore the more functional version, you can install w:c:dev:OldFilePages (instructions for this Forum:File description page behavior and linking to non-embedded images).
- New contributors should be welcomed to the wiki with our standard greeting so that they know how to reach out and are made aware of the wiki's rules and policies. Leaving {{subst:welcome}} on their talk page will insert the welcome and sign the post for you.
Deleting[]
- When deleting a forum or message wall thread (especially in cases of spam or vandalism), there are two steps. 1) From the "more" dropdown on the first message, choose remove. 2) Refresh the page and choose delete. Wikia staff and VSTF members have an ability to "hard delete" these; it's possible for local admins to use this feature by enabling w:c:dev:nuke, but this should be used with discretion.
- When deleting a page, check Special:WhatLinksHere to ensure that it won't be creating any redlinks. Change those links to a better match. In the case of redirects, check to see if the page deletion has created any BrokenRedirects.
Moving/Renaming[]
- When moving a page, check to see if it created any DoubleRedirects.
- When changing the name of a file, the Wikia software allows you to "Leave a redirect behind". Uncheck this box. Leaving a redirect on file names sometimes (but not always) interferes with certain tools like Special:WhatLinksHere, Special:WantedFiles, and Category:Pages with broken file links. Instead, check to see WhatLinksHere first, move the file to the new name, and change any pages that have been using the file to the new name.
- When moving an article title to accommodate similar names, or when creating a new article that already has a similar name, consider what the "top tier" disambiguation page will be. For example, before Imogene (Anything Muppet) had that name, Imogene (monster) was titled "Imogene". Because neither of those characters are more prominent than the other, it's appropriate to moved "Imogene" to Imogene (monster) so that anyone looking for characters named Imogene would be able to find both of them on the Imogene disambiguation page. Exceptions include characters with a much more obvious higher prominence. For example, "Kermit" should always redirect to Kermit the Frog; we wouldn't expect most readers to be looking for Kermit the Grof on a "Kermit" disambiguation page. Other examples may be more contentious, such as Mimi which features a disambiguation link at the top for anyone who may have been looking for other characters with the same name (as discussed at Talk:Mimi).
- When moving a page back after it's been renamed with vandalism, don't forget to uncheck the "Leave a redirect behind" box. We don't want names like "poop stain" or whatever sticking around as redirects. This should be less of a problem since we had Fandom Staff restrict page moves to admins only in February 2020.
User rights[]
Here's a list of the user rights groups that are relevant on Muppet Wiki, what each role is capable of, and which users have them:
- Sysop/Admin
- Content Moderator
- description / members
- rename/move pages
- quickly roll back vandalism
- edits are not patrolled in Recent Changes
- Rollback
- description / members
- quickly roll back vandalism
- edits are not patrolled in Recent Changes
- Bot
- description / members
- Bots not shown:
Path to Adminship[]
Contributing to Muppet Wiki does not require any special set of user rights. Any logged-in editor has the ability to strengthen the quality of articles on the same level as anyone else.
Unlike some wikis, Muppet Wiki does not have a vote/nominate/request process for editors to become an admin. New admins are selected at the discretion of the existing administrators where candidates are discussed off-wiki for privacy reasons.
New admins are considered by several criteria that include (but are not limited to) users whose edits do not need to be regularly checked or fixed, editors who excel at wiki formatting, and strong communication with fellow editors on talk pages and forum threads.
All admins (new and existing) are expected to follow the "Best Practices" outlined on this page, regularly monitor Special:RecentChanges to clean up erroneous additions, welcome and help good-faith editors, be open to off-wiki conference, help craft wiki policy, and maintain the general upkeep of the wiki.