Metacanon and Democracy

Okay, so I had some thoughts about this whole metacanon thing with respect to deletions policy and site democracy.

I'm beginning to become more convinced by Nusquam's arguments regarding member participation, namely that if we completely isolate site control to the current system of Senior Staff, wherein we just pick people we like to be Senior Staff and place all control in their hands, we're going to get a little circlejerky and cliquish. Moreover, we might start to lose some perspective from having only the points of view around that we hand-select, possibly forever eliminating a potential source of valuable input from people we haven't picked for the job. Likewise with putting an excessive or controlling amount of power in the hands of Contributors only; I agree in trusting the writerbase's thoughts regarding what they want to use in their writing, but if we're going to start excluding members-but-non-writers from having any power over site content, we're looking at a larger-scale version of that same nepotistic cycle. Outside perspective can be helpful to avoid us just recycling the same assumptions about what SCP is or has to be.

Okay, so my two specific proposals:

* 1) Have some Senior Staff-level positions, not fewer than 1 and not more than 3, be open to regular users, democratically elected from among the userbase on a rotating scale. Maybe have SS controls for nominations or confirmations, to prevent "Ecks for Staff". Hold either informal elections in 19 or more structured elections on the main wiki. Staff in this instance will be able to vote or discuss issues on 05 and in the admin chat for the duration of their tenure, which I would set at two months, but that can be hammered out later. This gives the non-staff userbase a voice in the halls of power without completely ceding all control to a potentially harmfully mobocracy.

 Downsides to this: downvote brigades, idiots in general.

To the second: our system of moderation really does a good job of keeping the dumbest of dumbshits out. Also, by giving more power to the general userbase, we're giving them more incentive to police themselves go a greater extent. Not backseat modding, just a greater sense of responsibility among general users. I'll get to the first in a minute.

* 2) With regards to the fear of downvote brigades of regular users deleting articles like Able and thus acting counter to the interest of the writerbase: -ARC all legendary-type articles like Able if they drop to deletion level. Establish within the canon that -ARC'd SCPs are ones that once existed but were destroyed or neutralized in some fashion, and allow for their use in-canon. This is essentially what -D's are, except that -D's are articles that someone killed off in a canonical manner for shits and giggles. Give writers the option of using -ARC'd SCPs in the same way: they'll be on the site but off the main list, satisfying the haters,  but authors will still have them as an option. This provides an in-universe explanation for the existence of -ARCs.

To avoid forcing someone to make a decomm report for every -ARC in existence, authors wishing to use an -ARC will just have to explain or justify it themselves. So, for instance, if I want to use Kain's Egg Walker, I have to either explain that my use of it was either before it was destroyed, or that it was destroyed at some point in the future. If somebody doesn't like it, they downvote. Same as always.

With ourselves protected from downvote brigades in this manner, we keep our deletions policy otherwise the way it is now; userbase downvotes brings pages up for deletion, which is confirmed or -ARC'd by staff. (Give elected staff voting privileges in deletion votes? I dunno.)