User blog comment:Harrypotterexpert101/Potential Adoption: Community Discussion!/@comment-26339491-20190617183601/@comment-26339491-20190618174946

How much influence an admin has over Discussions depends a lot on that admin. Some admins choose to completely ignore Discussions, because they care about building encyclopedic content and don't want to run a social site, and that's fine. If there are local mods, they can be given block rights by staff, and that enables them to largely run Discussions completely on their own.

If the admin wants to, they can have a huge influence over Discussions, though. They can determine the guidelines and categories in there, actively moderate, block Discussions users, mass-delete posts, and post a lot themselves. An admin who is a tyrannt can completely destroy a wiki's Discussions community, while an admin who is actively welcoming and encouraging people in there, who sets and enforces sensible rules, can have a big influence over how healthy, friendly and active the Discussions community is - with or without the help of local mods.

What we want to avoid is an admin who uses his powers in Discussions in a way that's detrimental to the community there. A lot of people really love posting there, even though they're not wiki editors, and since Fandom is meant to be an inclusive platform, those people should be allowed a voice. It doesn't hurt the wiki to have an active Discussions community, even if most of them don't edit the articles. If anything, it's good for the wiki, because it brings in more pageviews and fresh ideas.

So the hope is that whoever gets chosen as the next admin here will at least not stand in the way of a thriving Discussions community, and ideally work with the new local mods to make it the best community it can be.