A.

Not gonna lie. I'm not active on this site and don't know how it's run nor do I have experience with running these larger communities, so my opinion won't really matter much.

But seriously, as far as I'm concerned an admin site is kind of...well...extra. As far as I know, no other wikis have had this kind of site implemented.

Besides, this wiki has a history of trolls that still manage to regain entrance to this wiki. Nigma has been on this site's chat and mainspace for so long. Having an admin site can do little to prevent them from coming back here.

And the fact that the admin site has to be "secret" is even more ludicrous. More realistically, it should be used like a VSTF site, so users can report trolls and admins can act effectively (still, even in this way, it's kind of useless).

The only benefit of having the admin site is really to deal with issues that occur IN the wiki OUTSIDE the wiki. This doesn't really seem too practical. Comments, edits and forum posts made by trolls can be reverted almost instantaneously on this site (seeing as there are more than enough mods that are usually around the clock).

Even more evidently is the fact that the trolls start trolling HERE. What does this mean? It means that the damage has already been done. People have seen whatever they may have posted or commented. Referring these trolls to the admin site does little to prevent the root cause of the problem itself. Sure it may filter comments and cause less damage than already has been done, but this advantage is really undermined by the overall uselessness of the site itself.

As an alternative to the admin site, administrators should be willing to discuss these issues to the entire community.

Now I fully understand there are things the community should not be exposed to, but fully and utterly shutting the community away from an "admin site" is a poor solution.

We should aim to take decisions together. The community needs to be aware of the problems that exist within the wiki itself. The admins have to be accepting of that and address the issues accordingly to the community as well.

I leave off with this: The equivalent of having an admin site, is the equivalent of a country hiding military and political secrets to its citizens (including its military).

I'd argue the level of democracy we have already has failed. Look at all the recent votes. I wouldn't trust some users here with permission to bold text.

It's not the equivalent of hiding a military...this isn't a country...admins having a private area to discuss issues is not the same as the US covertly conducting trade deals without sharing those deals' terms with the public.

While I'll concede with some points made by previous posters that an offsite admin place is probably not the best solution, forcing admins to openly discuss every decision made will just add to unnecessary whining, votes and quote chains we already have enough of.

While personally, I have no experience as an admin on a wiki, my time as an admin on a site that had about 500 active users means I understand why the admins need a private place to discuss things. The thing is on that site we were actually even more secretive with discussions so to say the admins here don't share enough is just ridiculous, there's already too much democracy. While we didn't run an offsite place we did have several private forums for discussions with mods and a separate forum to discuss any user the community and staff felt were causing too much trouble.

Finally, I don't think the offsite admin discussions somehow mean they can't run here properly, I don't think it affects their performance at all. What does affect it is the activity of admins as a whole which is irrelevant to this vote and would be better dealt with another time.

This 100%

As I stated before as a disclaimer, I don't have experience in this wiki...like at all. I'm only expressing my opinion based on what I've seen in communities that I regularly contribute to (which are, in fact, much smaller than this wiki).

But to address your points, I do agree this wiki's level of democracy is disgusting. And in fact I take back what I said after viewing some of the community votes that have taken place in the past few days.

It's one thing to have a system like I outlined before for a community with relatively responsible members, but it just doesn't work here as most of this community is immature. I'd argue many of the users here are under 13, by the way some people here behave.

Also, my analogy was kind of crude, comparing this community with a country is a bit large-scale. But what I mean to say is that a country should be open (at least to some extent) just as admins should be open to their community.

But this community....is a lost cause, although maybe not totally.

I fail to understand the perceived shady nature of the admin site here, it's really just a convenient place for the admins to discuss things more than anything (I suppose PM and email would also work, but frankly a board is much more convenient due to the ability to look back at old posts, keep track of everyone's votes on things, etc). Additionally, many of the admins have little time to be on chat, but are able to use the admin site in order to keep track of what's going on and still participate in the community.

B, per Ale.