In the event an author leaves the community they may choose a person or persons to leave their articles to. This must be posted either on their author page or the dedicated thread. These wills define a designated user or users who will manage their articles without them.
These wills also define a period of inactivity, this will be measured from the last activity on wikidot or any staff controlled space (official discord or IRC), a good faith attempt to reach out to them must be first attempted. Alternatively if the user has been permanently banned from the wiki that date can be used.
Firstly custodianship of an article means the designated user is the point of contact for staff related questions and edits for a work, see image replacement, wikiwalk edits and technical issues.
Secondly passing control or ownership over means that the designated user in addition to being the custodian is allowed to make major edits to a work. A major edit here is defined as a significant change to the work that does not change the themes or core narrative of a work. All major edits must be approved by rewrite before being applied to ensure that the changes do not rise to being a full rewrite of an article. They are also allowed to make minor edits without consulting rewrite. Minor edits must be constrained to small portions of the text and cannot change the narrative of a work.
An author can state that the designated user with ownership/control cannot make major changes, this will limit them to making minor changes. Alternatively the author can specify that the designated user has full rewrite permissions, this will allow them to totally rewrite the articles transferred.
An author can choose different users for different works. However all co authored works will not be transferred to non coauthored users unless none of the coauthors can be contacted. Transferring ownership, control or custodianship to a coauthor does nothing.
Some users has stated that they want to transfer ownership or control to the community then this means nothing for most of the articles with the following exceptions: Firstly all articles by the author below +10 can be rewritten if they are gone.
A) Hubs which staff inherit due to the inactivity of the original author(s) may receive minor edits from staff (Navigational edits, fixing themes, fixing broken images) with oversight and approval from Rewrite. Addition of links to new relevant works would be considered a minor edit.
B) Rewrite may review requests to assign a guarantor/maintainer to hubs inherited due to author inactivity. (This includes but is not limited to Canon and GoI hubs inherited in this manner).
B1) These guarantors/maintainers will be allowed to update/rework a hub to respect the original intent/content of the hub while implementing modern standards, with Rewrite's oversight.
C) Hubs given to the community are subject to staff modification/updating/maintenance with review/oversight from the Rewrite team. Rewrite team may assign a guarantor/maintainer, but anyone may request to make major edits to these hubs.
