Dev Wiki:Sandbox/Maintainership

This is a sandbox page for a future policy proposal. It does not describe a currently active policy.

Maintainership of content on Fandom Developers Wiki refers to the rights and responsibilities that come with keeping that content functional and up-to-date. It is preferable for every piece of user content placed on Fandom Developers Wiki - scripts, stylesheets, Lua modules and applications - to have one or more maintainers that keep it up to date and error-free, as well as answer feature requests of users (by either marking them out-of-scope or too niche for the script, allowing more advanced configuration or implementing the requested feature). Unmaintained content should ideally be archived/deleted, in case it is no longer needed or has been superseded, or assigned a new maintainer under the maintainership rules outlined below.

This policy is being enforced for several reasons:

• Every piece of content on the wiki should either be someone's responsibility, or marked as unmaintained.
  • An exception to this is community-maintained content, which does not require a high degree of understanding that content, but does require a community consensus, to change.
• Users should know who to contact in case a piece of content on the wiki breaks.
• Maintainers are users who understand the content they are maintaining, and introducing unwanted changes hinders their ability to further maintain it.

Rules

Obtaining

In order for a user to be a maintainer, there are a few rules that apply:

1. If the user is the author of the piece of content, they can take a position of a maintainer (they don't have to, but in that case their content is marked as unmaintained).
2. A maintainer may appoint other maintainers if all other maintainers, as well as the user being appointed, agree to it.
3. In case the content has no maintainer assigned, other users who contributed to it may apply for maintainership to be granted by Fandom Developers Wiki administrators. Due to many factors, such as how trustworthy the user is, how much they contributed to the piece of content and others, this must be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
4. If a former maintainer of a piece of content continues contributing to it, they can re-add themselves as the maintainer.

Unmaintained content

A piece of content may be marked as unmaintained in the following cases:

1. All maintainers do not respond to talkpage messages regarding script review or bug reports for over three months.
2. All maintainers have been globally blocked for over three months or their accounts have been disabled.
3. The piece of content has been dysfunctional for over six months.

Changing maintained content

1. Unlike unmaintained content, content with a maintainer assigned may be changed under one of these conditions:
   1. The user changing the content is a maintainer of it.
   2. All maintainers have not responded to proposed changes in over a week.
   3. The change is fixing a bug introduced due to a recent change on Fandom; such changes must be documented under interventions or the authors of changed content must be notified about these changes individually.
   4. A maintainer has given prior approval for the change.
2. Changes to maintained scripts are always allowed for the purpose of proposing changes, but the content must not be submitted for review without maintainer approval (or a lack of maintainer response, in the time period specified above). This only applies to scripts, because script changes do not immediately go live.
3. Changes to content that introduce no functional or stylistic changes are allowed regardless of the above rules.
4. If a user changes maintained content while meeting none of the above requirements, their change may be reverted or the maintainers will be notified of the change. If the maintainers do not find the irregular change acceptable, a Dev Wiki administrator or content moderator will warn the user and after three of such warnings they will be blocked for not following the maintainership policy.

Additional rules

1. Community-maintained content is content with no specific maintainer - it has been historically updated by many users with varying knowledge and it does not need to be assigned a maintainer. However, major changes to community-maintained content require community consensus, best obtained by leaving a message on its talkpage.
2. Maintainer position abuse occurs when a maintainer of highly-used content submits changes to it that the vast majority of users disagree to and refuses to revert these changes; such cases may result in the user being unmarked as the maintainer and prevented from regaining their position.
3. Cases in which maintainers don't have a final say over the content are cases in which the content violates Fandom Developers Wiki's policy, Fandom Terms of Use or the customization policy.

Applications

Users who contributed to a piece of content that is currently unmaintained may apply to be a maintainer of such content by filling out the form below. If a piece of content is maintained, you need to ask its maintainers about being a maintainer.

Interventions

Under this section are documented reasons for changes to maintained content made as a result of a recent change on Fandom, for the purpose of fixing a bug in that content.