 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: The current Wikipedia:Requests for adminship process has been regarded to in the past as broken by many editors and reform is always a suggestion with a revolving door of input. Requests for adminship should remain as it is regarded, a discussion about an editors ability to use administrative tools. Requests for adminship should not be a mock what Wikipedia frowns upon, a vote. Through a couple of changes which effects no editors in good standing, except bureaucrats and the way the discussion closes, this is achievable. |
Wikipedia:Requests for adminship is a process for which Wikipedians can be nominated to receive administrator rights on the English Wikipedia. The general idea that was established long ago by Jimbo Wales in 2003, was that adminship was not a big deal:
- I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*.
- I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of people who have been around for awhile sysops. I want to dispel the aura of "authority" around the position. It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone.
- I don't like that there's the apparent feeling here that being granted sysop status is a really special thing.
However, a number of years after that, the process of electing someone that was no big deal became a big deal. It has become a process of jumping through hoops set up by every Wikipedian who holds a personal criteria for a potential nominee, which is something that should have never happened. This page is dedicated to showing that there is a common sense solution to requesting adminship without having to change the process entirely by creating a new system. It isn't adminship on request, trial periods, apprenticeships, or anything new that can solve this. The answer to reforming requests for adminship is deprecating the old methods of voting, and replacing it with consensus-based and rational discussion amongst ourselves with an unbiased party closing the discussion. I invite you to consider the following changes:
Why the current process has been considered bad edit
There have been many essays and conversations on Wikipedia on why the current request for adminship process is broken. Among some of the reasons are:
Anyone is free to expand on the list of reasons why historically the process has been considered bad
- Requests for adminship is not a vote, and we explicitly use a process which counts up "support", "oppose" and "neutral" comments, and tally them up throughout the discussion, which makes RFA a vote.
- There are some participants in the current process which regularly disrupt the process because of an axe they have to grind with the nominee, no matter how old the conflict is or how it was resolved.
- Wikipedia:Not now and Wikipedia:Snowball clause are too frequently applied to editors which they do not apply.
- 'Pile-on' voters come on to an RFA seeing an illegitimate reason to oppose a candidate based on someone who is not good faith, and discredits the candidate entirely.
- There is absolutely no bare minimum criteria for an adminiship request which editors can assess themselves.
- Personal criteria of editors are biased and varying in such a wide degree that any RFA has become too stringent in its criteria, and is based on who comes to the RFA.
- Editors hesitate to promote administrators out of only fear that they may be loose with their administrative tools.
- There are editors who have come to RFA before in previous nominations who were NOTNOWed or opposed so heavily that they have decided never again to accept or re-nominate themselves for adminship, resulting in a collection of editors who can't go through the current process and come out successful.
- Long-standing contributors will undoubtedly gather editors who disagree with them for a variety of reasons and "vote" oppose on the basis of an edit war, conflict of interest, or simply because the editors do not get along with one another, making any relevant and non-disruptive interactions impossible.
- Not withstanding the difficult job closing a current request for adminship takes, but bureaucrats can easily be misguided in this system into closing a request for adminship controversially since it is a single editor making this choice, with the choice coming down to neutral votes at times.
- There is a trend over the past year or so that indicates that we are not giving as many editors administrator tools as we used to do, for a variety of reasons including some of which is included above.
What can be done edit
What can be done to make this process not a big deal anymore, is to have a simpler, non-voting discussion about whether the editor has what it takes and what their thought process is in decision-making areas administrators are going to be working. "Support", "oppose" and "neutral" are too vague and start to give weight to the discussion in areas it shouldn't be focused on like bad-faith axe grinding, edits to Wikipedia that are several years old, etc. The discussion we are having is determining whether the administrative tools are useful to that editor and whether they can handle them.
Nominating edit
Currently the Requests for adminship page reads:
- There are no official prerequisites for adminship, other than having an account and being trusted by other editors. The community looks for a variety of factors in candidates; discussion can be intense. For examples of what the community is looking for, one could review some successful and some unsuccessful RfAs.
- If you are unsure about nominating yourself or another user for adminship, you may first wish to consult a few editors you respect, so as to get an idea of what the community might think of your request. There is also a list of editors willing to consider nominating you. Editors interested in becoming administrators might explore adoption or coaching by a more experienced user to gain experience. They may also add themselves to Category:Wikipedia administrator hopefuls; a list of names and some additional information are automatically maintained at Wikipedia:List of administrator hopefuls. The RFA guide and the miniguide might be helpful, while Advice for RfA candidates will let you evaluate whether or not you are ready to be an admin.
Editors would still be able to self-nominate and accept nominations from any editor on Wikipedia. The only change to the nomination process is:
- The editor must have a minimum number of edits and longevity on the account for which which editors can assess their behavior and editing quality, a minimum of 2,500 edits and 3 months on Wikipedia.[1]
If you are an editor who has made positive contributions for the allotted amount of time and made the minimum number of edits, then you should be allowed to at least create a request for adminship. This is done to avoid or discourage editors who are too new who are only going to be vehemently opposed and have no hope of ever passing a request for adminship from ever starting one to begin with. To tempt new editors with this false hope of passing by saying that there is no criteria, is misleading and untrue. It has never or rarely ever been successful for someone with less than that minimum requirement. This also eliminates the need to prematurely close requests for adminship since every nominee is capable of being assessed independently and able to converse with editors on their RFA on why they edit the way they do. Someone incapable of communicating with editors on their request for adminship will more than likely result in them failing their RFA anyways for obvious reasons.
Discussion edit
The discussion portion of requests for adminship is where the process really needs to have the most changes by you, the casual editor, because previously, whether you thought it was or not, it was a vote.
- Requests for adminship will no longer have "Support", "Oppose" and "Neutral" sections
Requests for adminship should no longer have these casual "support"s of a nominee with no reasoning and no "oppose" votes for which an axe to grind can be thoroughly sharpened by adding just their signature. Requests for adminship is a discussion about whether the nominee can handle the administrator tools or not. The nominee replying to your reason for opposing them on their own RFA is not a legitimate concern as to why they should not be an administrator, unless that reply demonstrates what they might do wrong. These support, oppose and neutral sections only supply editors with unintentional (maybe not) reasons to give input only with their signature and no discussion on the basis of other editors seemingly doing the research about them without going and seeing what their edits are actually like, good or bad.
- The past formatting of the support/oppose/neutral sections would be replaced by one non-breaking discussion (except for arbitrary section breaks for convenience)
We need to have discussion about the editor themselves, whether the administrator tools support the kinds of edits they do, whether the edits would be uncontroversial, whether they can handle areas of Wikipedia through giving them hypothetical questions and be able to have civil discussions about their editing habits. Rehashing old edits dating back over the course of a couple years to issues that are now resolved, should not be a reasons of discussion. Matters of relevant concern are, for example: recent blocks they have received, recent edits to the Wikipedia and article space and recent discussions on talk pages. User:Example making an edit back in 2007 that you don't like, is not of relevance and you are beating a dead and decayed horse. Wikipedia should not maintain a mentality of never forgiving, never forgetting and expecting us back at their RFA to oppose no matter how that editor has changed. If there are legitimate concerns with an editor, their recent edits will also reflect the same problems of the past of which you can use as an example, and discuss it rationally.
Closing edit
The most revamped part of requests for adminship proposed, is the closing of requests for adminship. Presently, the closing of a request for adminship is done by a bureaucrat at their discretion whether to promote or not promote. Here are the following changes:
- After the initial seven days of discussion has concluded, the nomination would be closed to new comments.
After the seven days of discussion has concluded on the request for adminship, the request would be given a procedural close in time with when the request for adminship started a week earlier. Any additional comments could be made on the talk page.
- For the next seven days, bureaucrats would hold a formal vote whether they would promote or not (with 80% of bureaucrat approval for a promotion).[2]
For the next seven days afterwards, any bureaucrat can give their opinion in a formal vote on whether they would promote or not promote based on the discussion (or abstain from deciding on the matter if they are involved). This decision was based on the endings of controversial RFAs where editors had some level of support and oppose and were borderline either way. With this method implemented, more consensus can be reached from editors who have the power to promote, rather than one editor who has to make a hard choice. As it stands, we currently have a system were we have one bureaucrat making a choice, one that can be very controversial if it goes one way when the community thought it would go the other way. These decisions are usually final in whether the administrator is promoted or not. With many bureaucrats holding a vote whether they would promote or not, we don't have to make a hasty decision and have further discussion about the outcome which usually does not change.
We have a total of 34 bureaucrats as of this writing which would be able to make their comment known over the course of the week following. The decision to make it a week is due to the level of inactivity some bureaucrats have. A week should be plenty of time for a few bureaucrats to comment. It is also worth noting that having a week-long period where bureaucrats would vote would not make the process unnecessarily slow. We have 859 administrators on Wikipedia, the additional week won't harm the encyclopedia by not having one administrator.
For closures of requests for adminships before the seven day period, it would follow the current status quo:
- The nominee themselves would like to have the RFA closed, can have it closed before the seven day period.
- Anyone who sees that a request was made in malice or made a deformed RFA can speedy close it.
- If a nomination was made without the nominee realizing there is a prerequisite number of edits and time on Wikipedia can be speedy closed and a notice sent to the editor to let them know.
Non-problematic changes that should be implemented edit
Statistics for editors need to be displayed for better comprehension of whether the editor deserves the administrative tools and whether there are areas of concern on Wikipedia. All of these statistics can be obtained with a variety of bot scripts. It could include the following statistics site-wide on wide variety of things:
Feel free to expand on this section
- The number of edits an editor has made (edits broken down by edits per namespace)
- The date the user registered
- The number of blocks they have received (reasons for blocking, last block, etc.)
- The number of non-admin closures to Xfds
- The number of files uploaded
- Number of deleted edits (possibly broken down as to why)
- Number of Xfds participated in
- Number of sockpuppet investigations against them/participated in
- Any confirmed alternate accounts (legitimate or otherwise)
- Number of WP:AN/I and related page threads they have participated in (and the number of edits to said pages)
- All previous adminship requests
Example RFA under this method edit
Bureaucrat's discussion edit
after a week of discussion:
- I would promote Example -- User:Crat29381
- I would promote Example as well -- User:Crat391842
- I would as well. -- User:Crat2947291
Done -- User:Crat29381
