FamilySearch Wiki:Moderator

Moderation
Moderators are volunteer administrators of the FamilySearch Wiki who help monitor wiki content. If you are interested in being a moderator for a specific locality or research subject,.

Responsibilities
The Moderator Job Description includes the following four items:


 * Be familiar with the Guiding Principles and Policies of the Wiki.
 * Be familiar with the content in your area of expertise.
 * Be familiar with how to contact administrators when needed.
 * Be familiar with and regularly visit the moderator forum.

Who are the Moderators?
If you are interested in being a moderator for a specific locality,. Our current moderators include:

Get Advice

 * See "The purpose of site moderation" to understand the how moderation will help the community of volunteers who are using and contributing to FamilySearch Wiki.

All moderators in the Wiki are invited to help write the following articles. Each article is specifically related to being a moderator. Sharing your experiences in the Discussion tab would be a great place to start. The thoughts and ideas you add to the Discussion tab will assist anyone who wishes to write the article. The articles listed below were started as stub articles. Your participation in this effort will help all moderators.

Being the Moderator of a Community


 * How can a moderator expand and grow the community?
 * The best practices for communicating with domain community
 * Ideas for recruiting writers to fill in content holes
 * Policies and procedures for moderating non-English language Wiki pages
 * How to recognize moderator candidates and, or nominate someone to be a moderator?
 * What is the escalation path when issues arise?
 * What is the best way to resolve content-centered community conflict?

Being the Moderator of Content


 * To what extent should facts in articles be verified?
 * To what extent should grammar, style, and spelling be reviewed by a moderator?
 * Reverting Content to Previous Version When should content be reverted back to a prior version? What is proper etiquette when it is necessary to revert content to a prior version? (use "Undo" from the History tab)
 * When should a page in the Wiki be protected from additional edits? How is this done? (this has to do with the "three-revert" rule)
 * Archiving Pages and Restoring Archived Pages What is the process for archiving pages? When should pages be restored from the Archive?
 * Moderating the deletion of pages How does the moderator discover that pages have been incorrectly deleted? "Watch" all the pages in your area of expertise. When you are watching the pages, you will automatically be notified when a page is deleted.
 * What should be done when a page needs to be deleted?
 * How to Patrol a Wiki Article

Things you can do
The following items are things that a moderator can do to help improve the content in their area of expertise and also grow the community of volunteers authors and editors:


 * How moderators upload images
 * Review and edit content as needed
 * Showcase content from your area of expertise
 * Encourage the creation of new content types
 * Encourage users to clarify ambiguous content titles
 * Discuss, approve, interpret, and clarify policies
 * Communicate with domain community on important issues
 * Identify and invite knowledgeable people to help with the wiki
 * Disambiguate content in your area of expertise

Moderator/Adopter issues coming to a vote
As you probably already know, FamilySearch launched an Adopt-a-Page program at the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference over the summer. Many groups are signing up to adopt a page. We need your help in order to resolve some important questions about the relative roles that Moderators and Adopters ought to play and how they can work together. These questions and discussions are on the new FamilySearch Wiki Contributors' Corner forum. We are going to hold a vote on these issues by year's end, and the resolutions will change the roles Moderators and Adopters play, so please visit the forum and add your thoughts. Thanks! RitcheyMT 17:42, 19 December 2010 (UTC)