Hi all! I wanted to open a discussion about the possibility of a few active users acquiring administrator rights to this wiki through a process called "Wiki Adoption."

As you may (or may not) know, there's a small community of very active editors to the Dappervolk wiki. None of us are officially affiliated with Dappervolk. There are only two (as far as I can find) affiliated users, who also happen to be administrators: User:Dappervolk and User:Jakalloops .

The Dappervolk administrator account hadn't made any edits for ~3 years before I managed to get in contact with Quis (Dappervolk's main site artist) through a Twitch stream. The Discord server that was created for communication with wiki and site staff is regularly ignored by said moderators and administrators, even after multiple direct pings, and calls for changes usually go unaswered for up to years at a time. (For full transparency, I have also discussed this topic of administrator rights in the Discord, and there was no response from staff.)

Fandom wikis allow the "adoption" of wikis, which doesn't remove the current administrators, but allows dedicated users to go through a process to acquire administrator positions. You can read about the adoption process here.

We all know that Dappervolk is an active site with regular content! I believe that our community of users - who aren't affiliated with the site, and yet still keep this database of information up-to-date and looking nice, for free - need a few more permissions in order to keep things running smoothly. These permissions include things like adding custom mobile CSS, adding custom Javascript, and deleting unused pages, all of which are currently locked behind administrator rights. Adding trusted administrators over time is actually a process that Fandom.com itself encourages.

As you can see from the adoption requirements, since we don't have active administrators, I am required to bring the discussion to the community. I am prepared to apply to adopt the Dappervolk wiki on November 7th, which will have been 60 days since User:Dappervolk, the currently listed site administrator, made their last edit. Currently, my plans if my adoption request is approved are to:

1) Delete unused/unnecessary pages (linked via the {{Delete}} template),

2) Add custom mobile CSS to make thumbnail images not appear massive on mobile, and

3) Add custom Javascript to allow us to continue deeplinking to infobox tabs.

Past that, my priorities would include site upkeep, dedicated templates/template pages, and accessibility.

However! I don't want to assume that I'm the best person for the first iteration of the administrator adoption, since I know that we do have many users who've been active and editing for far longer than I have. The adoption process isn't limited to one user, so other active editors could also apply. (There's a "Bureaucrat" role that could allow appointed administrators to designate other users as administrators, as well, and can be requested as part of the adoption process. That might be the way to go about it.)

I do not know if applying to adopt the Dappervolk wiki will open us up to onsite consequences in any way. I would not imagine it would, as this process is essentially asking for the ability to do more free work; however, it's possible that they would like Administrator permissions to remain locked down.

If either administrator sees this post, please feel free to weigh in: we are reaching a point where we need more permissions in order to do our (not officially sanctioned) jobs, and if we can't do it, then the existing administrator needs to.

Please feel free to discuss this topic below, whether it regards the adoption process as a whole, suitable candidates, different fix priorities, etc.

Thank you in advance! <3