Advanced User proposal and promotion

Dear Wikimapians!

We are happy to present you a new procedure of Advanced User proposal and promotion. We hope that the new system will clear a lot of misunderstanding and vagueness in Advanced User promotion issue.

From now on anyone with 5+ user level can make a request for Advanced User Status (it will be offered automatically) and his/her candidacy will be put to vote. If current Advanced Users decide that a person has approved him/herself as a competent editor and can help Wikimapia by taking additional responsibilities and powers he/she will be invited in Advanced Users group.

Thereby an Advanced User status becomes something that anyone experienced enough can request for, though the voting will proceed on the ground of all user contributions to Wikimapia, in other words not only experience points will be counted, but also your social status, your behavior and communication with other members of Wikimapia community, etc.

We’ve also invented a method of demotion voting on the ground of complaining reports, so that any regular user could influence Advanced User's work. This means that you can leave an anonymous complaining report with your comment and a prooflink about an Advanced User in his profile. But please remember: before leaving a complaint you need to contact the exact Advanced User first and express your displeasure in an open conversation. You can apply a complaint only in case an Advanced User did not solve the issue. Complaining criteria:

• Low quality of contribution
• Aggressive behavior/Harassment
• Failure to resolve a conflict in a civilized way
• Unrighteous ban

If an Advanced User gets more than 10 complains in a month his candidacy will be put to vote, so other Advanced Users could consider all the complains and make a decision.
Depending on voting results an Advanced User will either get a warning and continue his work or will be released from Advanced User duties. In case of draw voting his/her candidacy will stay in Demotion list until a new voting will determine his/her further status.

Everyone who currently has the status should sign the codex to retain it. There will be no promotion voting for them and their status will be confirmed immediately.

We hope that new procedure of Advanced User status receiving will be more fair and transparent, so that only worthy users will become and stay Advanced Users.

Please note that releasing the new Advanced User promotion system will cause a queue of candidates. For this reason we ask you to be patient. As it was said everyone who has 5th user level will get an opportunity to make a request for Advanced User status, but first of all to be fair we will give this chance to those, who has 7th and 6th levels. Thereby, users who just received the 5th user level will be at the end of the queue and need to wait couple of weeks. They will get the invitation as soon as the requests will be processed.