Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship

7 years ago at this venue, the community saw fit to grant the administrative toolset to a bumbling video game addict who had been editing for a mere 5 months with about 7000 edits. He had no GAs, no FAs, no DYKs, no solid history of content creation. Even though there were some concerns about interpretation of CSD criteria, the community (after asking but 3 additional questions) saw that the guy genuinely wanted to help and probably wouldn't accidentally delete the entire project.

Even still, he made some stupid mistakes as an administrator; but he was always willing to accept community input and learn from those mistakes. No lasting damage to the project was caused while he found his footing.

Now this is a much different place. Users who have been here toiling away for years have trouble getting some extra buttons to help.

We really need to go back to giving folks the benefit of the doubt, otherwise we will find ourselves (even more) hopelessly backlogged and the quality of the product will continue to suffer.

So we should take more chances. An administrator who makes mistakes in good faith will cause little damage, any missteps can be easily remedied. Learning on the job is a big part of adminship. An administrator behaving badly can be addressed by existing mechanisms; the committee of today is far quicker to respond to legitimate concerns about administrative conduct.

We need to stop demanding perfection in every aspect of a candidates' background. Are they trustworthy? Do they learn from mistakes? Are they willing to accept constructive criticism about their editing and actions? Will they proceed cautiously into the role of administrator? If the answers to these questions are yes, please consider supporting the candidate even if they don't necessarily fulfill every prerequisite you're looking for in the perfect candidate. –xeno^talk 02:17, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I can agree with much of what you have said. Where at one time an editor's RfA would have just been a case of "It's not a big deal" with some imperfections allowable has now changed. RfA candidates are often overanalyzed and all sorts of editors will nitpick at every last one of this candidate's flaws for oppose votes. This puts off competent users from even trying for adminship at all. Dustin (talk) 02:23, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Precisely. In January 2008 we promoted three dozen admins! We haven't even promoted that many in each of the last three years. What has changed except our expectations? –xeno^talk 02:28, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I think that one contributing factor to this decline is also the overall decline in activity on the English Wikipedia. It's been discussed here and other places, but I recall seeing a chart that indicated we're heading towards a plateau. 2007-2011 were Wikipedia's most prolific years and therefore it's understandable that there were more editors applying for the tools to deal with the rapid growth. Mkdw^talk 03:40, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Well said xeno. Mkdw^talk 03:37, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Raw edit count has declined significantly, but I'm not sure whether it has declined by as much as you would expect we lost when the edit filters took out most of the vandalism, and also lost us the goodfaith edits that were reverting that vandalism, warning the vandals etc. If we could adjust for that we might well find editor numbers were still above 2007 levels, though now on a downward trend due mainly to the rise of difficult to edit on devices such as smartphones and tablets. Raw edit count is an over simplistic measure that made people more worried about community health the more efficient the edit filters became at keeping out vandalism. However if our RFA problems were simply a symptom of a maturing community we would now be a community where most regulars were admins and we were lamenting how few newbies started in 2013/early 2014 and were now becoming admins. Our problem is more complex than that, yes we are recruiting fewer active editors in recent years, but adminship is actually becoming rarer in the community of highly active editors - those who are currently contributing over a thousand edits a year. ϢereSpielChequers 09:13, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• I wonder if it could be as simple as encouraging long established users (especially other administrators) to participate more regularly in the process. Their participation in RfA may have declined due to the routine becoming mundane or the environment becoming more toxic. What's more, I would think administrator participants are generally more willing to "take a chance" on a candidate, giving the benefit of the doubt (because they are in a better position to moderate any new administrator's actions). –xeno^talk 03:11, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I can say that back in 2006 RfA was no picnic. But not the gauntlet it has become today. Perhaps we should require that people run for RfA before they are allowed to participate in one, that way they will know what it feels like. (kidding) Chillum 03:39, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Yes, 7 years ago it was a very different place. 5 years ago it was different again.

2007 was more or less the watershed year where we stopped giving mops to people who had created a stub or two, made 2,000 edits, and been around for 3 months. Necessity forced us to become a lot more critical in the way we elect our admins, and it's probably true to say that most of the rogue admins were 'promoted' pre 2007.

For a while, notably in the years from 2007 to around 2012, the voters at RfA went a bit berserk and turned the place into a venue where they could be as humiliating and hurtful as possible not only to the candidates, but also to each other with impunity, so the interest in becoming an admin (at least from mature, serious contenders) literally nosedived along with the participation on this discussion page at the same cadence. Some of them were doing it deliberately in the hope that it would bring down adminship completly, and be replaced with a system where everyone over a certain edit count would be given a pick and shovel mop and bucket. They got T-banned or completely banned while some continue to edit content while maintining catalogues of anti-admin slogans on their user pages or driving by on other debates (or occasionally on this page) with totally immature interjections.

If we're going to stop demanding perfection in every aspect of a candidate's background, making it easier for them to get the bit, then we need to start making it easier to desysop them when they misbeave.

Editors like me and Dennis Brown got the mop when RfA was at its apogee of cruelty, lies, and deceit, and it was getting through that snake pit and coming out alive that made it a big deal and kept us working in the trenches right up to the present day. That's one of the reasons I started WP:RFA2011. The other reason was that I wanted to find out how it was possible that so many totally unsuitable individuals ended up being given the mop. They don't now. And also RfA is a much saner environment than it was then. Without a doubt. Just check it out. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:53, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Kudpung, I think that we can all agree that you had a really unpleasant RFA; I hope you will concede that none of them are fun. Please, please listen to this feedback: from the perspective of a lot of other people, including people who actually went through RFA during the timeframe you mention above, it is worse today than it has ever been. And more importantly, there is no indication in any way that it is actually all that difficult to get bad admins desysopped via Arbcom. That has been a fallacy since at least 2009, and you should stop saying that unless you can name me 5 bad admins who've been taken to Arbcom with a view to having them desysopped and haven't been sanctioned. (You can send it by email if you prefer.) If there is evidence of inappropriate admin behaviour, Arbcom will sanction, and half the time it doesn't even need a full case. I say this based on my experience as both an arbitrator and as someone who has initiated a case with the purpose of having an administrator/CU/OS desysopped and other tools removed - and succeeded because the evidence was there. Risker (talk) 08:28, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Actually, counting only flat out desysops (is there a list of "cloudy" resignations), the 2005 generation appears to be the most prone to being desysoped, both in absolute and relative numbers. I did write up a breakdown here. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:34, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Some of the change makes sense, some doesn't. In early 2008 Rollback was unbundled and subsequently "good vandalfighter" ceased to be enough to pass RFA, candidates since then have to show they have helped build the pedia as well as defend it, and now at the least you now need to be able to cite content to a reliable source. However our vandalfighters need to be able to block vandals and we haven't yet unbundled blocking of IPs and new accounts. There has been arbitrary inflation re the standards, it used to be that if you did something that earned you a block in the last 12 months you needed to wait, now we'll get opposes for blocks that are two and a half years old and goodfaith mistakes from more than 6 months ago. ϢereSpielChequers 08:36, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Risker, I get the feedback - I get it in my email almost every day, from the team I'm working with to find candidates, from raw newbies wanting me to nominate them, and from older, mature, truly potential candidates whom I have solicited, politely declining because they believe the myth some people are propogating that RfA is still a terrible ordeal. If people would just stop telling the community it is, we might get those editors to run. My latest nominations passed with totally flying colours (138/3/3, 171/5/1), but both of them did have to be dragged kicking and screaming to their transclusions. There's a big difference between objectively voting 'oppose' (which is always risky however nicely worded and I note you've never once ventured an oppose vote) and being downright nasty and disengenuous, and anyone reviewing the last 300 RfA that went their full 7 days will clearly appreciate the positive evolution. And BTW, thank you Jo-Jo for your very keen observation. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:51, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

On thinking about it, I think my view is similar to Kudpung's. we used to see some real cage-matches develop here. OTOH there were never so many questions....like running for arbcom now....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 10:38, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

When I think of the nastiest most incivil opposes I find myself thinking back at least a couple of years. But the tendency to judge simplistically by tenure, editcountitis and at best the Q&A section is still with us and getting worse as the arbitrary but easy to measure standards get inflated. My fear is that the risk of a bad candidate getting through increases as the scrutiny of their actual editing declines. ϢereSpielChequers 10:59, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Judging by superficial criteria is common in business (cf. Dilbert), notorious in bureaucracy, exploited in politics/advertising. Academics tend to get judged by paper count. Your fear seems warranted. How does one combat the trend? --Pi zero (talk) 11:15, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

WereSpielChequers, yes, those are the elements we need to watch over these days. The downright nastiness is practically a thing of the past. Most other Wikipedias already insist on minumum edit count and tenure to be able to vote at their RfAs, we don't, so a couple of years ago I wrote WP:RFAV. It's aimed really at the younger newbies who just think it's cool to vote on RfA without really understanding what it's all about, but it can be used effectively on editors who have been around a bit longer. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:40, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Uhm, I am reluctant to comment, because I have no interest in being an Admin. I do note, however, that as it's in part a "trust" issue there will be subjectivity no matter what (for example, on just one issue, I want a candidate who wants to do adminning, but I don't want a candidate into the power or status of adminning - thread that needle Ms. Candidate!).

Has anyone, however, tried to get a community guideline (not an essay) on voting criteria - I note that many people often refer to their own personal criteria - so why not communal? As I see it, it would have sections on 1) These are what Admins do; 2)These are statistical measurements relevant to any editor related to what admins do, explained. 3) These are considerations that we have guiding agreement on (although exceptions always apply - and yes some are subjective). That way, we at least have a start to a communal way of discussing the voting issues - which would be helpful to candidates and helpful to !voters - let me finally say, if there is already anything like the guideline I am outlining then it has failed, because no one refers to it while i-voting and perhaps we can figure out what to do about that. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:06, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

The big problem nowadays is that you're require to be an article writer, first and foremost, to be an administrator. Writing a few articles and knowing the process hasn't been enough for a long time. In reality, it's backward from what it should be. I've nominated slews of maintenance users, article writers, and those in between, and the maintenance ones are the ones that actually use the admin tools; the article writers just stick with article writing and don't do much admin work when promoting. This means that the ones that are being promoted aren't doing much in the way of admin work, which makes the gap of potentially needing more admins even wider than it appears. That combined with Xeno's point above has been a gradual process that has taken over RfA. No quick fix for that, unfortunately, outside of people being more sensible with how they vote. It should be about whether you trust the candidate with the tools, not whether they've written a bunch of featured articles. Besides, they say to come back in a few months, which has never worked; we all know those that fail and try again in a few months would just fail again for being "too eager". Wizardman 14:55, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I wouldn't say that too loudly Wizardman, WereSpielChequers might hear you. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:53, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

@Wizardman We've just had one candidate get as far as a crat chat despite never having done an inline citation, and another recently who had well over 90% despite not having a single GA and a nomination that included the phrase "relative lack of content contributions". There are a handful of individuals who will oppose candidates who are not primarily content contributors, even if you have GAs you can get some opposes for relative lack of content contributions, but the current de facto RFA standards definitely do not require candidates to be "first and foremost an article writer". ϢereSpielChequers 21:37, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

(E/c but this comment dovetails with Wizardman) On the issue of 'we need more admins', I would suggest by the standard of consensus-is-in-the-doing, we don't need more admins - admins are apparently of the collective view that any actions for large swaths of them are not in the least needed to improve the project, as shown by their lack of doing. We are already redundant in admins, no need to add to redundancy. Go to the bother, the sturm-und-drang to pick an admin, why? Chances are good, they will do nothing. [I think again, contra to Wizardman, you are more likely to get an educated votership by having a communal guideline] Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:01, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• I couldn't agree more, xeno. To be quite honest, although incivility might very well be less rampant than it was a few years ago, there are still serious problems with the process. Really, the primary issue with it is !voters' desire for complete balance and perfection. Although, as of now, I'll cautiously say that Ceradon's RfA will probably pass, it was "interesting" to see the editcount-based opposes. They spoke as if a little over 7,000 edits was nothing and required no effort. Finally, I have a serious challenge for anyone interested: Is there solid evidence which shows that candidates elected before 2007 (e.g., Kudpung's "watershed year") performed worse and caused more lasting, serious damage to the project than admins elected through our current system? After all, now that I think about it, we need to ask ourselves: what is the worst thing that can happen? Electing a wild, incompetent or abusive admin, of course. But then, we could always ask the stewards to quickly desysop a wild admin, and incompetent or abusive admins can be dealt with via ArbCom. Sure, it might take some time, but I have also arrived at the conclusion that ArbCom is a sufficient procedure for dealing with problematic admins. If you bring a case and present evidence which shows a long-term pattern of tool misuse, then they'll most likely try to take appropriate action. Ultimately, the main question we need to be asking ourselves is: Do we feel that the benefits of electing this candidate will be an overall positive to Wikipedia? We really need to be more tolerant of the fact that newer admins will make mistakes; the way we're going, we'll simply get ourselves deeper into an admin crisis. The simple statistical number of admins means nothing, since in reality very few of them are active in administrative duties. (For instance, I only see a small group of admins around CSD.) As I mentioned above, if no one can seriously show that admins elected in the lenient days are somehow substantially worse than today's admins, then we must conclude that it would probably do us no harm to simply go back to our old ways. --Biblioworm 15:13, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • As the community (and pool of potential admins) has changed significantly in the last eight years, however, I don't think it can be concluded that the standards from then are best followed now. isaacl (talk) 15:40, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
• New admins are desirable in order to free up the current active admins to pursue other tasks, alleviating a natural tendency to start treating any long-repeated activity with less sensitivity to those affected. isaacl (talk) 15:44, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
• That is the conclusion I coming to as well – for all the hand-wringing about "[mumble] backlogs! [mumble] we need more Admins!" from the way the community and the Admin corps is acting in these most recent RfA's, the only conclusion I can come to is that neither population currently views the "Admin shortage" issue as particularly "dire". If there truly were a shortage, RfA standards would naturally evolve to a more lenient standard in order to promote more Admins to alleviate the "crisis". But we aren't seeing that – ergo, currently, there isn't a "Admin shortage crisis". --IJBall (contribs • talk) 16:49, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Where did the cue for this statement come from?: Is there solid evidence which shows that candidates elected before 2007 (e.g., Kudpung's "watershed year") performed worse and caused more lasting, serious damage to the project than admins elected through our current system? - not from me, surely. The only suggestion I made was that a rather striking number of defrocked admins came from the pre 2007 era, which Jo-Jo kindly supported with some stats. Damage, if any, was what they did to the reputation of the corps of admins in general, lapped up gleefully of course by the anti-admin brigade. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:09, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• I was not referring to any particular comment you had made, Kudpung. I asked a question for anyone who wished to answer it, and since you seem to have determined that 2007 was the year when the process really changed, I simply decided to use it as a reference point. Addressing the desysopped admins, though, even if the standards of the "pre-2007 era" were too lenient, surely we don't need the unreasonable perfectionist attitude of today. --Biblioworm 16:52, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Today's standards are purely hypothetical because they are set anew for each RfA depending on who turns out to vote, and the turnouts today are very much higher than they used to be. Very few of the voters are actually RfA 'regulars' and that's possibly the problem; we know for a fact that a lot of them haven't a clue what RfA and adminship are all about and what they are voting for - we concluded that part of te research too, way back at WP:RFA2011 already. AFAICS, admins and the few regular voters have reasonable criteria and are ones they have been using for years. If kept within reasonable parameters, it's probably most desirable that candidates are held to a slightly higher standard tha those of pre 2007.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:21, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Jo-Jo's numbers, though interesting, aren't comparing apples to apples. The 2005 admins have had ten years in which to misbehave, while the 2013 cohort - the latest in his list - obviously has had only two. This also does not account for changes in decision-making about desysopping. Many of the old instances were carried out by Jimbo and only later reviewed by Arbcom; there is at least a general perception that Arbcom is currently more willing to desysop than it was in the past; and the type of behavior that triggers desysop attempts may have changed.

On the question of infrequent RfA participants "resetting the bar" every time, that may well have been true in 2011 - I didn't look - but I posted some numbers for the 2015 RfAs last month that suggest this problem seems to have abated. Opabinia regalis (talk) 23:04, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Opabinia regalis: ...a new collection of participants reset the standards every time, seems to have abated in recent experience.

Recent experience is drawn from so few recent RfA that it is impossible to draw an objective conclusion. The stats you should be looking at, and which you may wish to update by extending them to include all RfA since the table was made here (section: How they voted). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:30, 13 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Well, the question we're interested in is how consistent the standards are from one RfA to the next. A reasonable proxy measure (with some caveats) is how consistent the participants are from one RfA to the next - which can be reasonably represented by how many of the available RfAs each individual participates in - but that makes the assumption that individual preferences are fairly consistent over time. Given that this is taking place against a background of known long-term decline in a way that's not all that amenable to detrending, the assumption of consistent preferences degrades when applied over longer time periods. One can argue that the 2015 "electorate" has poorly thought-out, unreasonable, or capricious preferences, but I think it's fairly clear that a serious 2015 candidate can expect participation by engaged and experienced users, not an unpredictable assortment of drive-by complainers.

That old table is certainly interesting - imagine voting on 140 RfAs in one year! - but doesn't answer quite the same question. It appears to account for all nominations within a one-year period (205!), but about 30% of those are NOTNOW/SNOW cases closed very soon after transclusion. That means that people in all time zones didn't get a chance to comment, and the population commenting on obvious fails is likely different than the overall participant pool anyway. Another 30%ish are withdrawals after more than a day but less than a week, and the old data gives no obvious way to normalize for this. (I punted on this for the 2015 list and looked only at completed RfAs, but one could just weight by total open time.) Opabinia regalis (talk) 22:01, 13 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Agree with Xeno on this. Years ago it was a mostly completely different set of faces here on WT:RFA. And RFA expectations were vastly different than they are now. For example, see my own RFA standards page, from 2008, which just so happens to be the seven years ago Xeno mentioned. Not everybody was the same back then, of course, but I suggested about 2000 edits. Nowadays, people with 2000 edits get NOTNOW'd. Yes, for a period of time, RFA was exceptionally rough. That in no way means that it has to continue to be that rough, or that those who passed/failed the gauntlet during that time need to continue to keep it as such a gauntlet. It has been said that RFA became tougher out of necessity. With the number of active administrators ever dwindling, perhaps RFA will become easier out of necessity. Useight's Public Sock (talk) 15:06, 13 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Note: My thoughts stem from several lengthy discussions and proposals, including: this, this, this, and this; and many past discussions, including those found here.

"No big deal" worked back then because "Jimbo giveth and Jimbo taketh away" back then. Now, the community giveth, but the community cannot taketh away.

If we want adminship to return to "no big deal" or to "take more risks" (as noted), the community needs a better, more active, direct way to voice its concerns and to have at least a hand in "taketh away".

I've always found it odd that the community can "ban" (take away all user-rights but reading) through an RfC-like discussion, but cannot similarly merely remove the user-rights and responsibilities of adminship.

Maybe I should go "live" with an RfC on WP:RRA. I dunno.

But without a way for the community to be able to act, they will never trust the RfA process as we once did in the past. - jc37 17:41, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I agree, and this all deals with issues that Kudpung and Xeno are trying to tackle on their ends. But Adminship will continue to be substantially problematic as long as it continues to be, 1) a "lifetime" appointment, and 2) removable only through "ArbCom action" and removable almost exclusively for "abuse of the tools" reasons and without consideration of ADMINCOND issues. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 17:49, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Back then, the community would discuss, petition User:Jimbo Wales, and he would decide. At some point he started ceding (sharing) much of his on-wiki dispute process authority to arbcom. And then there were a few contentious situations where he ended up just giving up most tools. I don't think it's coincidental that the time frames noted in the thread above somewhat coincide with that.

So my RRA proposal essentially is a return to that idea, substituting arbcom for him, while addressing a LOT of stated concerns from many discussions with admins, arbcom members and the community-at-large. (see also WT:RRA - jc37 17:59, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• I find the argument that it's too hard to desysop pretty specious. Arbcom - elected by the community - has pretty consistently shown that it is quite willing to desysop problem admins that are brought to its attention; in fact, one of the few situations where they have applied sanctions without a direct community-based request for a case is with socking administrators and severely disruptive ones (mass deletions, unblocking oneself, insecure passwords/hijacking etc.) Arbcom is responsible to the community and selected by the community, and their responsibilities explicitly include review of administrator actions. It is, in fact, the only advanced-permission group whose members are subject to 2-year terms and who need to be re-evaluated and re-elected by the community if they wish to continue in the role. Community members can bring cases with evidence at any time, can participate in development of evidence, proposing terms of the decision, and discussion of the evidence, terms, and the proposed decision itself. "It's too hard to use Arbcom" doesn't cut it: I just took an admin to arbcom, presenting solid evidence in my initial statement and some off-wiki stuff (it was a privacy-related case) and the result was removal of all advanced privileges, and I invested probably no more than 3 hours. If the evidence is there (and it would need to be collected and presented regardless of how the desysop process is done), there's not a problem getting problem admins desysopped. I challenge you to show otherwise, Jc37, just as I have challenged Kudpung: show me five bad administrators who have been taken to Arbcom for administrator/behaviour problems in the last five years but did not receive a sanction. I get that you'd prefer it, but if you're withholding support for otherwise credible admin candidates essentially because there's no community desysop process in which you personally get a vote, you are being brutally unfair to those candidates. Risker (talk) 20:00, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

  I've supported candidates, I've even nominated candidates.

  My goal is to address a community-wide issue.

  I think you misunderstand my comments above. It's no reflection on arbcom, it's a reflection on the community. once upon a time in Rome, any citizen could have their direct audience with the emperor, who, incidentally called himself "first citizen". If there was an issue it was discussed and resolved then and there, arbcom's reputation is becoming that of a legal court, word counting, officious and to some, off-putting and even scary. And the issue isn't who makes it there, it's that most never do, and those who do, long after they've had large disruptive presence. Does anyone get to undo those deletions, moves, etc? no. it's rarely cleaned up after. You can not like it, but that's how it is. The main argument I kept getting about RRA was essentially: "Why do we need arbcom involved when we should be able to do this without them."

  It's the age-old argument of why does US need an electoral college? supposedly to save the populace from themselves. So there is, in my estimation, a need to a near-top-level authority figure, but there also needs to be a way that the village can feel comfortable to act at the village pump level as well.

  I oppose a simple "reverse RFA" for lots of reasons, many of which, as you've been in those discussions, probably know. But the idea of a reverse RfA needs to be implemented to the community-at-large. If you don't think so, let me ask: would you be comfortable with just doing away with RfA and merely having arbcom select all admins? - jc37 21:36, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

  Mmm. Such proposals here have never achieved consensus. There are a lot of practical concerns about any community driven deadminship process that have sunk them each time. I think such proposals need to focus on practical benefits and drawbacks and less on, may this be the appropriate word, principles. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:46, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

  Nah. Having started several discussions myself, it's mostly one of three things. 1.) fear - admins fear that the pitchforks and lynch mobs will be set free on those who make what may appear to be unpopular decisions. 2.) "I have something I'd like to see implemented - nevermind that it isn't currently and in the years since, never has been, if I support this proposal I don't think I'll get my version implemented." Or the variant: "I like that the system is broken, so I can abuse it" 3.) a myriad of voices means a myriad of opinions, and so those opposing a many-faceted process which came out of a series of compromises due to wanting something pulled a little more one way or other.

  It's part of why it's very difficult to get new processes started anymore. - jc37 22:22, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

  Or maybe, just maybe, people *don't* think the system is broken. Your thoughts about Roman citizenship are rather un-wiki, I think: only about 10% of the population of Rome actually were considered full citizens, and the majority were slaves, considered property. They had a class system that makes the Victorian English look like punters. And the US electoral colllege is not "to save voters from themselves", it is to give states pre-eminence over the federation. Risker (talk) 22:32, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

  the point about rome was that any citizen could (and we're ALL editors here). And while that was one stated goal of the electoral college, in general the compromise came out of the sense that the founders did not want the populi having direct vote. and I could further go off on this tangent about landowners, suffrage and the lik, but that's all beyond what point I was trying to make.

  The point is that wikipedia is a project of editors, all of who feel they want a say at eveyr step of the processes, and, I think it's fair to say most of whom feel they don't or can't. Not every editor is as versed in policy or process like you or I Risker. I'm merely suggesting that we try to take a look from their shoes. And what was your answer to my question above? would you be comfortable with just doing away with RfA and merely having arbcom select all admins? - jc37 22:59, 12 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Nah, Arbcom's got too much to do now. Risker (talk) 05:07, 14 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Risker, not rising to your challenge "show me five bad administrators who have been taken to Arbcom for administrator/behaviour problems in the last five years but did not receive a sanction", bcause you are of course quite right, but that detracts from what I have actually been inferring: I can easily show you five admins who have no business being vested with their powers but whom the community is reluctant to bring to Arbcom because the committee does not like entertaining complaints of long-term inappropriate behaviour that just manages to stay under the radar. IMO, that kind of admin behaviour is far worse than any one-off event. There is one former admin who voted on my RfA who would have been immediately blocked for his PA if it had taken place outside the immunity of the RfA playground and by a non admin. As it was, it took two more long years to wrest his mop from him. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:50, 13 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

You know, Kudpung, after being reminded of how badly you felt your RFA went, I went back and read it. Honestly, it took me three readings of the oppose section to work out which admin you were referring to. While I think the absence of diffs should have resulted in a discounting of the oppose (and probably a serious challenge from someone else, too), I didn't perceive it as being any worse than many of the votes I see today; in fact, I see quite a few today that are just plain mean. Not personal attacks, just mean. I do get how it stings, though. The first oppose on my RFA was from someone who was at the time amongst the more "respected" admins and was very strong, although the fact that he referred to me using the wrong gender diluted its effect. For the record, we wound up with about the same amount of support. This does not in any way discount your experience; there are very few administrators who thought their RFA was a pleasant experience, and they were the ones with support levels well up in the 90s, or were successful back in the day when 20 voters was a big turnout. Risker (talk) 05:07, 14 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

You know, Risker. your RfA was slightly before the time I started looking at what's wrong with RfA and adminship time, but reading it now it's clear that yours wasn't exactly a bed of roses either. What you are missing is that I don't care two hoots about my RfA - I never asked to be an admin or make a career in Wikipedia in the first place. I cite my RfA because it's a classic example of what I was already campaigning to get changed after hving been badly mishandled by a couple or rogue teenage admins (since desysoped) and bullied for good by another (since desysoped) off a topic area where I had a great deal to odffer. I therefore made it my business first and foremost to get RfA cleaned up to an extent that we would get beter candidates than what was allowed to be promoted in pre 2007 years.

I think I'll add your RfA to the list of examples how oppose sections used to be mega dramafests. We don't get that kind of thing now, or at least it's no longer the norm, and I believe you are not doing Wikipedia the best service by continually insisting that RfA is 7 days on the rack, it's most certainly not, most qualified candidates pass without much drama, and such claims are exactly the reason why we're not getting many new candidates. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:48, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Well, here's the problem, Kudpung. When I passed RFA, and when you passed RFA, nobody was being so insulting as to suggest that 7000 edits over three years was insufficient editing experience to qualify. NOTNOW is unacceptable for candidates like this. Frankly, my observation is that those kinds of opposes far more insulting and damaging to editor retention than the three-ring circus that my RFA was (complete with one respected user first opposing, then being neutral, then supporting). And that is exactly what I keep hearing from potential candidates ("I don't want to be insulted" or "I felt like my years of work were thought to be worthless" or "two years ago I made some incorrect CSD tags and I'm still paying for it even though I haven't tagged anything for 18 months"). I have even heard successful candidates say that they found the opposes insulting - not nasty, but insulting. They're not worried about stupid questions (although there are still plenty of them - why did we ever move the questions to the top of the page from the bottom?), they're just not willing to spend months ticking all the arbitrary boxes on the "must have" lists of a bunch of RFA regulars, and they don't have the on-wiki social network to get through the process without ticking those boxes. Just because I don't always get around to voting before candidates walk away from the process doesn't mean that I don't read them. Most current, active admins can't even meet some of the expectations that are being put forward. If you want to make RFA sound friendly, and I say this with genuine understanding of your feelings about it, please stop using your own RFA as an example of "the bad times". Start showing examples of successful RFAs from the last two years with candidates who had similar qualifications to the ones you are seeking to recruit. Risker (talk) 03:19, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

That's easy enough, Risker, two of the most successful cndidates we've had this year (indeed at all) were in fact nominated by me. As for my RfA, well, I only use it as an example in discussions on this page, and after all, this is the RfA talk page; most candidates don't even know of the existence of this page, let alone reviewed any other RfAs or advice before they ran. That's perhaps why they ended up folding their tents. Everywhere else I discuss RfA, as you are well aware, including at our international conferences, I'm preaching the fact that RfA is so much improved, and those whom I say it to are then ready to say "in that case I'll probably give it a go", when someone else comes bumbling along and says "Are you crazy?" More of my efforts thwarted... --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:20, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

If RFA's are gentler now, I'd say the current one (bomby) is a step back. —Soap— 18:23, 20 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Soap, this is because one user, ostensibly in support of the candidate, is determined to turn the RfA into a drama fest. He just doesn't realise how much actual damage he's doing and if he were wise, he would step back very quickly. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:18, 20 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Like Kudpung, I can think of five admins who I would personally describe using a word that got Eric Corbett in lots of bother last Autumn, but our no personal attacks policy (not to mention common sense, common courtesy and good manners) prevents me from naming them. I am not tempted to drag them to ANI and Arbcom because they would cause so much grief, and yell at how I was far more to blame than them, that it's not worth the bother. I believe Beyond My Ken mentioned this a while back, it's impossible to get a quick dispute with an admin settled as nobody can take charge; there's no equivalent of the "stop this or you run the risk of being blocked". This edit, for example, is not an abuse of admin tools, nor is it anything that could get relief at Arbcom, but I do not expect admins to talk like this. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 10:22, 13 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Erm. No. Admins who go over the top get blocked too. More importantly, your argument is self-defeating. If people are afraid of retribution for taking an admin to arbcom, then why would they not be afraid to take an admin to any other desysopping forum? Risker (talk) 05:07, 14 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

It's realistic. I think most admins are de-facto unblockable, certainly I don't think that "over the top" block of The Rambling Man has been particularly successful. Remember this is a voluntary community and I'm happy to believe most casual users think it's too much like hard work to challenge an administrator anywhere, just like it's too much like hard work and hassle for me to challenge a £30 parking ticket, even though the legal system theoretically exists for me to do so. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 08:29, 14 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

In one of the earlier threads the point was made that we don't need more admins because most of us haven't used the tools much. This is a common misconception, partly I suspect based on User:JamesR/AdminStats which seem to show that while the majority of admins have been active, and a small minority very active, a significant minority of admins have had few logged admin actions. Several things contribute to that:

1. The stats only include logged actions since December 2004, so some of the first generation of admins will appear to be much less active than they really were.
2. The stats don't include use of rollback, and up until early 2008 you needed to be an admin to get rollback and you needed Rollback to be a huggler (we now have more rollbackers than we have admins, and you no longer need rollback for some anti vandalism tools)
3. Some of the admin accounts with the fewest admin actions are (WMF) accounts, many of us think it a good thing that staff accounts have few logged admin actions, and it isn't relevant to RFA as those accounts were dished out without an RFA.
4. Many of the people with fewest logged admin actions are not actually EN wiki admins, but have one or more "admin" actions due to various anomalies such as moving a page that is protected from editing. having logged actions imported into this wiki. For example a history merge between two articles can make it appear that a non admin has edited a fully protected page.

In recent years we have not appointed sufficient admins to maintain admin numbers, unless our admins last an improbably long average of twenty years. Appointing more admins has several advantages, it dilutes the scarcity value of adminship, it shares the load so that admins can remain editors who have some extra buttons and spend a proportion of their time here doing a share of the chores. If we appointed lots of admins we might make a dent in some of the longstanding backlogs such as migrating files to commons and history merges, but more importantly we would be steering ourselves away from the currently likely scenario of having to suddenly appoint a large batch of poorly vetted candidates. ϢereSpielChequers 17:27, 13 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Also, there are other actions that are not logged that administrators conduct. Discussion closures, particularly in AFD (that don't end in delete; e.g. redirects, merges, keeps), where admins take on the controversial closes. I often respond to requests sent through {{admin-help}} which often does not result in admin tools being used. Anyone who monitors WP:AIV will know that a many of the vandalism reports do not end in a block result. There isn't really a large non-admin presence filtering the reports there either. Mkdw^talk 17:45, 13 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
• Looking at your (incredibly useful) chart at User:WereSpielChequers/RFA by month, it's blatantly apparent that Wikipedia is in decline. It would be nice to change RfA to do as you suggest, but it sadly is not going to happen. The decline will continue, and processes will not be adjusted to meet the challenges of the decline until the entire bus is already over the cliff and falling. We can document the decline, we can comment on the decline, we can analyze the decline, we can be vexed by the decline. What we can not do is stop the decline. The WMF seems to think they've can, but all of their best efforts since 2012 have failed to arrest the decline. They still think they can stop the decline. They're wrong of course. --Hammersoft (talk) 17:59, 13 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • Hi Hammersoft thanks for that. RFA has definitely declined, though part of that has been due to successive unbundlings, especially that of Rollback. If someone charted admins and Rollbackers combined it would be a very different picture.But Wikipedia in general is far more robust than some would think. Yes the WMF has done a lot of damage with poor choices on several IT investments and some eye watering mistakes in community engagement, but a big part of the "Wikipedia is in decline" meme is down to people looking at raw edit count over the years and thereby misunderstanding the edit filtering of vandalism as a negative rather than the positive it actually is. I've written up a few of the relevant arguments/theories at User:WereSpielChequers/Going off the boil?, I'd welcome your views on the talkpage there. ϢereSpielChequers 21:00, 13 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
• I would also venture to say that more admin means fewer actions per admin, less burn out, less opportunity for abuse due to burnout, and less "prestige" from the bit as it would be less exclusive. Those are all minor, but the sum total of them all is worthwhile. We want admin doing quality work, not quantity work. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 20:20, 13 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• It seems there's only one answer then: recruit! recruit! recruit! It sounds like you all need a headhunter. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 00:47, 14 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• And willing candidates. RfA has still that rep for being a "den of horrors" and in past discussions I've seen that users approached by "headhunters" frequently decline the offer. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 12:39, 14 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

@WereSpielChequers: Minor nitpick, re: point #4, here's the actual explanation for this discrepancy, as I noted some time back. Only edit histories, not logs, can be imported into Wikipedia. Graham87 15:40, 14 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Thanks Graham, I've made that change, but I'm sure I've also seen some logged actions that don't fit your explanation. ϢereSpielChequers 20:08, 14 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Jo-Jo, RfA has still that rep for being a "den of horrors" - only because some users who do not keep up with the discussions or who have not systematically followed every RfA since 2011 keep telling us it is. In actual fact RfA has made a vast improvement since 2011, and as soon as we can get that message across, we'll get more candidates. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:11, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I won't deny that it has improved relatively (such as in terms of civility issues), but as I have mentioned before I still observe some serious problems with the process, frivolous and arbitrary opposes being the main issue. (For example, RfAs of familiar and otherwise non-problematic users being arbitrarily opposed due to edit-count or experience expectations.) --Biblioworm 01:18, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Anyone who has not thoroughly read (and better still, participated on) the last 300 or so RfAs and been following this talk page every day for the last 6 years like I and users such as WereSpielChequers have, for example, cannot possible know. Wikipedia has an addiction to stats but stats cannot parse this kind of improvement over a priod of a few years, and that's also what Risker is forgetting. As for the trolls, frivolous, and arbitrary votes and comments, well, yes, we still get just a few of them but that's something that could be immediately nipped in the bud by anywhoe who cares and it doesn't need special tools to do. Something like indenting their posts and referring them to WP:Advice for RfA voters would do the trick. Of course there is always the problem of IPs commenting at the top of the page - we had a discussion here about that further up but such IPs are almost entirely blocked or banned users - and I even recogbise the style. At the fist hint of something like that happening on an RfA all we need to do is semi protect the page. Research on the last 1,000 RfA will show that IPs and users with less than 200 400 edits generally do not understand what RfA and adminship is all about. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:45, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Actually, I think there is at least as much value in people who *don't* watch every single RFA and *don't* read this page with their daily morning coffee pointing out that, no, things really haven't changed; call it the view from 10,000 feet. I think it is quite possible that there is an unconscious bias here. If things had really improved, then we'd have more candidates and more successful candidates, and I'd actually get to support decent candidates before they folded their tents after two days of being told they were unworthy. The fact that both continue in their decline points to there not being a change. There's still lots of negativity at RFA; it's just the type of negativity that's changed. Risker (talk) 03:53, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

That comment confirms what I have been saying all along: that people don't pay enough attention to what is disscused on this talk page. It's not a view from 10,000', it's a view down the wrong end of the telescope. Those who folded their tents probably actually did exactly the right thing, and if you would email me the list of them you feel should have passed, I'll gladly examine them and let you have my opinion. Things really have improved, so has the quality of the candidates (bar a couple of fairly recent promotions who were desysoped again shortly afterwards) and if people would just stop telling everyone that RfA is still an ordeal by fire, we'll get more candidtes. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:08, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

One thing, a very important thing, has improved, there is less trolling and nastiness. Even the stuff that looks nasty, longstanding editors with thousands of edits having opposes per NOTNOW as if they were total newbies, is probably unintentional nastiness from people who genuinely don't think they are making a personal attack. I haven't sen an oppose per people's views for a while. Other things have got worse, the focus on easily measured stats and the inflation of standards on them has put RFA out of reach of editors for whom this is a hobby they pick up for a couple of evenings a month. Such people are the backbone of most healthy volunteer organisations, we need more in the admin corps, but nowadays they first have to go through a phase of hyper activity. Someone with a couple of thousand thoughtful edits that on average represent half an hours work should be more than qualified to run an RFA; but we all know that they will be snowed, whilst a candidate who uses automation for some of their edits and more frequent saving of their manual edits to make 10,000 edits will be taken seriously and may pass, though in reality they have put in less time to the project and may not be as well qualified for adminship. I'm pretty sure there are dozens of editors out there who could easily pass RFA if they ran, in many cases that group are deterred by RFA's reputation. There are hundreds more who would IMHO make good admins, but who would hit significant numbers of opposes, and in many cases it isn't easy to predict whether they would narrowly pass or narrowly fail (many would pass on their second attempt but first need an unsuccessful run to let the community discharge old issues). ϢereSpielChequers 08:57, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Having gone through 10 1/2 years of Signpost articles, I can better understand why some voters have such stringent criteria for RfA candidates. Back around 2007, there were multiple admins desysoped because they were sock accounts and even an editor that passed an RfA and became an admin, got desysoped and blocked, came back as a sock and somehow passed an RfA again! And there were incidents of admins going off the deep end and committing death by ArbCom by going on vandalism sprees or exhibiting extremely erratic behavior. In fact, some of these troubled administrators who had the tools taken away and were blocked had received unanimous votes of Support at their RfAs. And there was a period of time where activity on IRC channels greatly influenced the outcome of RfAs and I don't think that happens today.

So, I can understand why longtime voters at RfAs now are overly cautious and why such scrutiny of editors occurs because some admins got the bit who proved to not be up to the job or were deceitful. I still think that some editors have impossibly high standards for candidates but I understand what brought on this demand for more intense examination of candidates. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:53, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I think it might be worth making an effort to renominate some of the candidates who failed previous RfAs lacking experience more than six months. I've compiled a list below about some possible candidates still active from their last RfA who didn't pass somewhat for experience reasons. Winner 42 Talk to me! 22:06, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Thomas.W
• GamerPro64
• Dodger67
• Cyphoidbomb
• Fourthords

In my case it's probably because I have too much experience of the "wrong" type. I've been an active editor since June 2007, but I've been an AFC regular for much of that time, thus the AFC-haters (there are many) will automatically oppose even though IMHO AFC reviewing and helping newbies there is possibly one of the best ways to acquire "clue" about what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable content. I am planning to run another RFA soon. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:39, 16 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Liz, although there have been extreme incidents such as the ones you mentioned, I still don't feel that it justifies perfectionism. We shouldn't punish all good-faith candidates due to the actions of a few "bad apples". If a candidate has generally shown (keeping in mind the limitations of an exclusively text-based medium like Wikipedia) that he is here to improve the project and has demonstrated that he has reasonable knowledge of our policies, we should give him the tools. Besides, if an admin were to suddenly launch a vandalism spree, it would likely be dealt with very quickly by a steward, and very clever sockpuppetry could probably not be detected in an RfA anyway. (Unless we start checkusering every candidate; that was actually proposed recently, and I seem to recall that it failed overwhelmingly.) Although I do of course likely have a bias which I can't notice (who can?), I think the perfectionism at RfA would be well illustrated if I were to transclude my RfA in the very near future. (Just a thought experiment.) I feel that I'm overall a well-balanced editor, since I find most areas interesting. However, although I probably would have passed easily had I an account around 2004-5, I would likely fail now due to various opposes stating that I had only about a year of experience and 8k edits, or that I had recently made a mistake or two at CSD, or that I had not !voted in enough AfDs. Some might even dredge up my overturned NAC closures from months ago (when I was still practically a newbie). --Biblioworm 23:27, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

The problem isn't really that the standards are higher, it is that the arbitrary easily measured part is harder. I can understand that after various poor choices the minimum tenure has increased. But I am not convinced that RFA has become more effective overall at keeping out bad apples. Doing that requires lengthy checking of a candidates edits, not just measuring their total but actually reading how they have interacted with others. We have several RFA voters who will trawl through and look at AFD votes and speedy deletion tags, obviously that is important, an admin who makes mistakes on deletion can do a lot of damage. But I'm not seeing signs of much checking of the other edits that the candidate has made. Perhaps some of the per noms have done this,but if so may I suggest a few more diffs would be reassuring. Remember diffs can be things you spotted that the candidate did well, not just examples of mistakes. My fear is that the focus on the raw edit count and the question section is distracting attention from the parts of the RFA that are more likely to screen out bad candidates, as well as deterring lots of good candidates. ϢereSpielChequers 12:23, 16 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

If you don't mind me making a comment, since I was pinged to this discussion, I have been recently thinking of trying another RfA here. So I'm game for a renomination. GamerPro64 22:22, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Cyphoidbomb and Thomas.W seem like good suggestions to me, based on what I've seen from them. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 22:35, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• WSC made the important observation:

...there is less trolling and nastiness. Even the stuff that looks nasty, longstanding editors with thousands of edits having opposes per NOTNOW as if they were total newbies, is probably unintentional nastiness from people who genuinely don't think they are making a personal attack.

That should help bring users who share Risker's opinion back up to date and start getting the message around te site that RfA is a much safer place. To understand more about why voters vote the way they do, I've asked for an update of a table I asked to be created in 2011.

People are complaining about the bar being too high and/or too much emphasis being placed on some aspects of adminship tasks or previous experience in article creation or meta areas. As some of the more experienced users occasionally point out however, trust is an important part of the equation, but it can't be measured by stats. Younger and/or new editors who try to edit at RfA are apparently unable to make these distictions, hence their one-off appearances and votes that are often pile-ons, or I like him/I don't like him votes. We would need to do some significant research before a realistic guideline could be drawn up for criteria for candidates. It would be a lot of work and while RfA continues to do what it says on the tin, I feel there are other priorities - such as for example, closer monitoring in real-time of possible invalid votes and their users. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:07, 16 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Ah, but you see, I believe that RFA *is* a dangerous place. I repeatedly hear it from people who are potential candidates, and I can't say they're wrong. When we regularly see people opposing candidates from enormous grocery lists of "reasons to oppose" that practically guarantee that any candidate will fail to meet all of their "qualificiations" (except, of course, when they choose not to use any of those reasons and support a favoured candidate) then the problem is RFA itself permitting such excesses. And now we have this new desysop proposal that even further reduces the impetus for anyone to go through RFA. I've been around here long enough to know how that's going, and who's going to be targeted by that. It won't be the admins at the bottom of the activity table, it will be the highly active admins who put their heads above the parapet. Any particular reason why you only notified a few people of that RFC? Risker (talk) 21:39, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Yes - you. 3,086 editors have contributed to this talk page. Most of them make valid comments, but very, very, few of them have actually spent more than a few minutes contemplating adminship or RfA issues before they comment. Most of the discussion is about how RfA could be improved. Very, very few of the newer contributors to this talk oage are even aware of the huge resource of data that was mined during WP:RFA2011. Can somebody please bring THIS TABLE right up to date? I believe all that is needed is a knowledge of regex. It just also needs one additional column: Last RfA vote (date). This new dataset will either confirm or disprove some of the conjecture (an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information}. Many thanks. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:11, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

For current lack of time to read it myself, can you quickly explain what it is and what needs to be done, aka what needs to be updated.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 14:56, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

The table does have a list of users and statistics on how they vote in RfAs, whether they do and their status. It is not regularly updated for more recent votes/right changes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:07, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I could probably fashion up a bot to do that, but it would take some work to do it.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 15:12, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

This is a mix of probabilities, regex, and data mining here. I believe I can do all of it, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the graphs.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 15:20, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

You'd have to work with SVG files instead of JPG. The former can be edited for updating purposes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:43, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I know nothing about SVGs.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 20:17, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I know there is a tool where you can see how an editor has voted in RfAs (it's similar to the one that shows AfD votes). I should have a page with links because I can never find tools when I need them. Any way, once I locate it, perhaps you can use that tool to pull data that is put in the table. I don't know the technical language of what needs to be done though! Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:42, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Here. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:46, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

That's another of Scottywong's tools and it looks like it needs work: it says I voted "oppose" on Rich Farmborough's RfA, and I didn't – I voted "No opinion" (i.e. "Neutral"). --IJBall (contribs • talk) 21:14, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Or this one, which I'm sure cyberpower has access to :)

Surely just about any modern library anyone would use for graphs and charts can write scalable vector graphics or PDF, but I doubt that's a sticking point - it'd be much easier for the next person to have the original data than to have the graph in vector format. And every time you save a graph as a JPEG God kills a kitten. Please think of the kittens and use PNG if vector isn't an option! :)

I'd encourage those looking at this to consider my earlier post on making sure you're measuring the things you're interested in. Opabinia regalis (talk) 21:24, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Maybe one should make a table of all votes and their content, not just a mere statistic of which way where - it carries a lot more useful information. Would be large, though.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:48, 15 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Note: THIS TABLE is what is being asked for - that'a all. Graphic formats such as JPG., and SVG. are not required. Nor, AFAICS, is a bot. Scottywong, now most regrettably retired, was a datamining mainstay of the research project and also created an excellent set of tools that has been mentioned mant times and which is still very much in use today. All the tools and scripts he producd were done on the express requests of th task force in order to have data to illustrate, confirm, or disprove some of the impressions we had about RfA. Scottywong was a whizzkid with regex (or whatever he used), he was able to provide THIS TABLE over nighht. He wrote his scripts in record time but sometimes processors (at that time) needed several hours to do the work.

THIS TABLE is designed to show (and does it quite well):

• Who votes most regulary
• How long they remained as 'regular' voters
• How many are admins
• Their length of tenure
• Their Wikipedia experience
• How popular RfA is as a meta venue

a new table would enable a side-by-side comparison which might demonstrate some evolution in voter trendssince 2011, but I doubt hat very much has changed. A further colum could show the users who have nee indeff blocked - tis might possibly shed some light on the amount of trolling. PLease, guys, don't make this task too complex. We only need what is being asked for - there is absolutely no need to produce data tha no one needs or knows how realy usefull it might be. I would do it myself if only I knew how and had Scottywong's talents. Thanks in advance. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:30, 16 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Everybody can help RfA. Just go to WP:RFA, look at the candidates, and if there is nothing actually bad about them (abuse, newbie biting, obvious stupidity), click "edit" and support them. Probably more useful than posting to this talk page, which has been shown to be completely ineffective at getting more people promoted. —Kusma (t·c) 12:00, 16 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Hi. You are invited to comment at RfC for BARC - a community desysoping process. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:36, 24 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I'm probably missing something, but on the RfA page (in 'About RfB'), it appears to say that bureaucrats can change usernames for most users. Is this still correct? meta:Global renamers seems to say otherwise, "as a part of the SUL finalization, renaming rights were removed from bureaucrats.". Peridon (talk) 12:50, 24 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for pointing that out, Peridon There are probably still a few places on the project that need to be updated for the global renaming regime.   Done –xeno^talk 12:58, 24 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

How about making the candidate an admin for one day before RFA? Voters can analyze the actions of the candidate before voting. There will be a discussion for two or three days before the candidate gets the temporary bit. After one day the real RFA starts. If the candidate fails the pre-RFA discussion, then there will be no temporary bit given and no RFA. The temporary bit is given when there is at least 60% support for temporary bit in the pre-RFA discussion. The candidate can request temporary bit anytime after they pass the pre-RFA. But after one day, RFA must be started. The normal RFA will decide whether to give full Adminship to the candidate. Supdiop (Talk🔹Contribs) 15:51, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

What useful information would you expect to gain from a single day's actions? AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:54, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Candidate can show the skills in one day. Candidate will try to do the best to make good judgements because it's the best chance to show what they are. So, we can know the full potential of the candidate. Supdiop (Talk🔹Contribs) 16:02, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Extend the trial period to three months, and I'd support the idea. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:22, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

That is very long time. In my opinion, one or two weeks is enough. The time can be decided later by getting more opinions but the idea of giving the bit before RFA is more important. Supdiop (Talk🔹Contribs) 16:48, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

It would be trivially easy to just be on your best behavior for a couple of weeks and not do all that much. Way harder to game for months on end. I think 3 months would be a minimum. I think this gets back to the perennial idea of an admin probationary period being a good idea, and one that would decrease the drama at RfA, and give us more admins. Make it a year. It's a perennial idea that I used to oppose, but I'd support it now, because the communities needs and the nature of adminship have markedly shifted over the last half-decade.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:32, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Heh – great minds think alike! (See below...   ) --IJBall (contribs • talk) 01:35, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I can't see this working for a span of time this short. It would be so easy to carry out the most mundane and straightforward administration actions that it's impossible to gain anything useful from such a trial period. Sam Walton (talk) 16:54, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

In your opinion, how much time will be enough to get useful information? and would you support the idea if the trial period is extended? Supdiop (Talk🔹Contribs) 17:31, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

You won't get a good idea of how people will act as an unrestricted administrator by granting them temporary adminship for the community to supervise. How does the saying go, Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching? --kelapstick^(bainuu) 18:06, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Hierarchical_structures --Hammersoft (talk) 16:58, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

This idea is not in the list. You must have misunderstood the proposal. Supdiop (Talk🔹Contribs) 22:08, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I don't think this is a good idea at all - as Samwalton9 says, someone could just do a few page moves or block an obvious IP vandal, and that wouldn't demonstrate the skills required for a good admin. GiantSnowman 17:31, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• #DaftIdea. Leaky Caldron 17:34, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Why? Supdiop (Talk🔹Contribs) 17:54, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• I think any editor would edit differently than their normal routine if they knew those particular actions were being audited by the community. I doubt they would take any risks and perform not controversial or contentious actions that they might otherwise do if they had the tools permanently. RFA is also about judging an editor's overall knowledge, trustworthiness, and character. Anyone can dress up for a day and spend hours reading the policies before taking a single action. I think the idea of a probationary period isn't a bad idea, but I would very much doubt anything worthwhile would be accomplished in a review period over such a short period of time. Mkdw^talk 18:44, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
• A day is meaningless. The 1-month temp adminship before RfA, combined with x-month probationary adminship after, are better solutions (both proposed separately below).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:43, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

There will be a discussion for three or more days before the candidate gets the temporary bit. After one month the real RFA starts. If the candidate fails the pre-RFA discussion, then there will be no temporary bit given and no RFA is conducted. The temporary bit is given when there is at least 60% support for temporary bit in the pre-RFA discussion. The candidate can request temporary bit anytime after they pass the pre-RFA. But after one month, RFA must be started. The normal RFA will decide whether to give full Adminship to the candidate. Supdiop (Talk🔹Contribs) 19:37, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

So, candidates would be subject to both a pre-RfA discussion and then a later RfA? This sounds twice as complicated and as others say, you would not get a fair indication of an editor's future behavior from how they behave on a limited probation. Sometimes, with administrators, misconduct only becomes apparent after a year or two of active admining. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:47, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I can see a point for the really borderline candidacies, but otherwise I would say such a limited period is too unreliable a predictor for anything. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:52, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

How about giving temporary adminship only if candidate gets 60 to 80 percent support in pre-RFA? Those who get more than 80 percent, directly start RFA. Supdiop (Talk🔹Contribs) 21:07, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

But still, "temporary anything" only grows more cherries for voters to pick. Sure, RfA is a process of fire and brimstone, but extending RfA just prolongs the agony and the deterioration of a candidate's dignity. Esquivalience ^t 02:31, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

The main purpose of this temporary adminship is to look at the performance, skills and judgement of the candidate as an admin. If the candidate is bitey and attacks other editors, there will be evidence for that in their contributions, way before the temporary adminship. This is not useful for assessing behavior, but it is useful to get an idea of the skills (required for the admin) of the candidate before the candidate becomes admin. This change will also give the chance to the borderline candidates to prove the opposers wrong and increase the number of promoting admins. This may also attract more candidates for the adminship. Supdiop (Talk🔹Contribs) 22:08, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

One thing I actually do agree with is that it would be really useful if there was some kind of "pre-Admin training/demonstrating" available. Some of us don't like to take on things "sight unseen", and I'd personally like to take a look at "what the tools actually look like (and how they work)" before even thinking about whether it's worth it to sign on for an RfA. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 01:28, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Support, but the probationary adminship idea below would also be a massive improvement; the ideas are not mutually exclusive.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:37, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
• #DaftIdea2 Leaky Caldron 17:17, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

An alternative version of this is that all RfA candidates should be given temporary adminship as long as they get endorsement from n current admins or crats (say, n=3). Those n admins can be seen as additional "sponsors" for their RfA. The candidate will then have the admin bit throughout the RfA so others can judge them by their performance. Deryck C. 21:44, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

You can already have the endorsement of two or three admins (they're called nominators, right?), so I don't see how this changes anything. Being nominated by an admin or a 'crat doesn't guarantee anything. §FreeRangeFrog^croak 22:00, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

We've had quite a few RFAs with three or more admins in the oppose camp and even more among the supports, so it would be a safe bet that some candidates who don't currently pass would make this threshold. But not that they would pass RFA as few give much weight to actions done during the RFA other than answering questions, and for the candidate just answering questions can take their whole wiki time in that week. Plus there's the issue of accessing deleted contributions, this isn't logged so you can't judge the candidate but you have just made it much easier to get at least for a week. ϢereSpielChequers 20:37, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Agreed. The candidate will be too busy during the RfA week to do a meaningful amount of temp-admin work to evaluate.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:41, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• #DaftIdea3 Leaky Caldron 17:18, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Fiddling with giving candidates Admin powers during an RfA is a bad idea. But I've often wondered why candidates who pass the RfA aren't put on "probationary status" for somewhere between the first 3–12 months. After the period is over, either a committee of Admins or Bureaucrats could quickly make sure there aren't any 'red flags', and make the Admin status "permanent", or if the probie isn't considered "up to snuff" that can be swiftly desysopped during or at the end of the probationary period (no ArbCom needed)... This is what happens "in the real world" with "real jobs", and such. So why isn't it good enough for Wikipedia?... --IJBall (contribs • talk) 22:43, 25 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

That would be a good idea if our problem was new admins going bad, but that isn't the case. Yes we will get some new admins making minor mistakes as they get used to the tools, for example just look at the number of admins who have managed to accidentally block themselves. But they very rarely need to be desysoped, if we judge things by desysop for cause and resigning under a cloud the most risky time is for the third year an admin is active. ϢereSpielChequers 19:52, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Third year since RfA or third year since registration?

I count 61 involuntary desysoppings and a lower bound of ~50 cloudy resignations from these tables, which may be incomplete but probably not egregiously so. Total number of admins, ever, is probably 2000ish? And almost all of those people did hundreds of perfectly good admin actions in addition to whatever got them in trouble.

So if only 5% are ever going to do something desysoppable, who's going to spend their time doing all the reviewing of the ones on probation? Who's going to want to argue about that one borderline deletion from six months ago? One thing these proposals never seem to take into account is opportunity cost. What else are people not doing while they're busy solving these non-problems? Opabinia regalis (talk) 20:52, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Good point, Opabinia regalis. While admin mentors and RfA coaches used to be common 6 or 7 years ago, I don't believe current admins want to spend their time supervising newbie admins. This is probably already occurring on an informal basis. I just worry that if RfA is too daunting for most potential candidates, how will they feel about being on a subsequent year long probation and being further scrutinized?

And from what I've seen looking over desysoping, WereSpielChequers is correct, it's not new admins who are getting brought for possible desysoping, it's veteran admins who have become cowboys. This was not always the case, looking into the historical record, in 2006-2009, I see admins being desysoped after just being an admin for a few months but that is not the current situation. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:11, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

this is all a bit complicated as the number of new admins and the ratio of old v new has changed radically over time. It is some years ago that I reviewed a bunch of desysopings, and they weren't all three years after their RFA, but there did seem to be a tendency and by contrast new admins who quickly turn sour are rare (nowadays new admins are very rare so even if one a year turned sour it wouldn't be statistically meaningful). Whether it was admins who had drifted away from the standards of the pedia, or overconfidence and arrogance I'm not sure, but I was looking for a pattern that I could spot and avoid as a nominator, and instead I found that new and newish admins rarely get to Arbcom. There was a slight rise at the three year mark, and when you allow for the fact that many admins cease to be active before that it starts to look meaningful. ϢereSpielChequers 22:35, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

The idea of adding a "probationary" phase for new Admins is to reduce the reticence that some RfA voters have for voting for candidates – generally, the idea is that it would be designed to somewhat neutralize the "trust" issue, because even if someone passes an RfA there would be one more opportunity to "catch mistakes" before they become a permanent part of the Admin corps, which would hopefully lower the bar for some RfA voters to vote yes. And I don't agree with the idea that this is going to be some "time sink" for the current Admin or Bureaucrat corps – the current rate of new Admin promotion is about two per month: that's hardly a "massive workload" there to check on them after 3 months or so... Having said all that, I myself don't think this is the real solution – as I've said elsewhere, the real solution is to "unbundle" the current Admin toolset, mostly eliminate the current Admin position and its associated RfA circus, and start doling out smaller toolsets to editors who specialize in certain areas (Vandal fighter, article mover, AfD expert, etc.) at something that's more akin to WP:PERM. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 01:21, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

@Opabinia Regalis. it was admins who had been admins for at least three years who I found the risk group. Total admins is at least 2,100, not counting assorted bots and staffers. There were some admins appointed via jimbo in the early days and if they left pre 2005 we may not have them included in the stats. ϢereSpielChequers 22:46, 26 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

@WereSpielChequers and Liz: I agree that old admins are the risk group. Cowboy admin may be a way of summarising it, but I think the real reason is that Wikipedia practices change as quickly as the crop of admin changes. I had a few years of low activity (<100 edits a year) after gaining adminship, and when I returned to pick up some admin actions, I found myself being trout-slapped at every corner because I was applying (what I perceived as) the same standards I used a few years ago. All in all, I don't think the data about past desysoppings hint at any particular way of improving RfA participation. Deryck C. 09:49, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Hi Deryck, you may be right that in some cases Wikipedia has changed rather than the old admins. However we don't desysop admins for one off errors where they agree to change once the revised rules or practices are pointed out to them. My memory of the large sample I looked at or am aware of is that most of the people we've correctly desysoped for cause have done things that would not have been OK over most if not all the life of the pedia, there are a couple where I don't agree with Arbcom's decision, at least one who I assume was an admin who baulked at the ban on paid editing when it came in and I think there is at least one who didn't agree with some aspect or implication of BLP when that came in, but in the most part it isn't that people were out of date on a policy, more that they made errors of judgement or ethics that cost them the community's trust. I won't claim my survey of desysoppings as recent, complete or fresh enough in my mind not to be worth someone revisiting, but if someone did a crosscheck I'd be surprised if they disagreed with me and said that a probation period for new admins would realistically work as a screen to prevent such people being appointed in the first place. ϢereSpielChequers 13:02, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• I strongly agree that we need probationary adminship, but it is not at all incompatible with a month of preliminary, pre-RfA adminship. Do both. We should have done this years ago. RFA would not be such canonization process that rejects most actually qualified applicants, and more importantly discourages most qualified applicants from ever applying, if the first year of adminship was probationary (or first 6 months, but it wouldn't be practical shorter than that probably; even three months or so is a short enough span to just lay low and not do much). There's only an opportunity cost if you want to invent some new bureaucratic process at the end of it. We don't need one. Just a post, "My probation is up, am I to be ratified as a permanent admin?" at WP:AN is sufficient. If people have evidence of Bad Deeds, they'll post it, and the community can review it. If they don't, the probationer is passed by default. Easy-peasy.

  Catching "admins who go bad quickly" isn't what we'd get out of this, it's mostly reducing the reality-tv-style drama festival that surrounds RFA and adminship by making adminship no big deal again, and secondarily weeding out incompetent admins, which are going to be much more numerous than bad faith ones. If you can't figure out the CSD criteria, or how to recuse yourself from WP:INVOLVED situations after a whole year, then you have no business with these tools. Because we'd be able to do that winnowing, instead of being stuck with every admin for life, we'd all be way more willing to let anyone who seems competent try to help out as an admin and prove they can do it, instead of looking for perfect sainthood at every RfA.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:54, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

  • RFA is already pretty good at identifying the people whose CSD tagging or AFD arguments show they shouldn't be given the deletion button yet. Blocking is slightly different as you can judge whether someone would have blocked from their AIV reports but not the block duration. I don't see that a probationary period would make a difference other than that we'd know if someone had a rogue view as to block lengths, and that rarely leads to more than a trouting. Content is more difficult because we have a divide as to how much content is required for adminship, but again I'm not seeing how a probationary period would make a difference, unless we have a bunch of oppose voters saying "I would oppose candidates who fail criteria x, but if there was a probationary period I would only be worried about candidates who failed x if they subsequently did y. ϢereSpielChequers 16:50, 3 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
• I would strongly oppose any form of temporary adminship for editors who have not yet passed an RfA (or some similar process). A probationary period after passing an RfA would be a different matter, I can see no obvious harm and possibly some good in that idea, provided we have willing and competent people to do the significant work of reviewing the admin's actions in detail, which would take significant time and effort. If we aren't going to do this, then there is little point in a probationary period, in my view. Probably at last some of the reviewers need to be admins, in order to see deleted pages and evaluate the quality of deletions performed, speedy deletions in particular. (AfD results can be evaluated largely by reviewing the archived debate.) DES ^(talk) 16:55, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I agree, but temporary adminship is only given after a discussion for more than three days, which is like a small RFA. If there is no consensus for temporary adminship, bureaucrat will not give the temporary adminship. Supdiop (Talk🔹Contribs) 17:28, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• #DaftIdea4 Leaky Caldron 17:19, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Thank you for participating. Unfortunately, you did not win today's raffle! Maybe next time!... --IJBall (contribs • talk) 17:52, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

On the tired subject of "RFA is broken", do we have any comparison to the brokenness of other languages' RFAs at the moment? An extremely cursory look seemed to indicate to me that the German and French Wikipedias haven't been promoting very many administrators recently either. This may be related to generally dropping participation in all Wikipedias. Has any other Wikipedia managed to overcome a problem of this type and can we learn anything from them? Or are all of them "broken"? Do other languages have other priorities when complaining about RFA (promoting the wrong people, promoting too many people, denying promotion to a certain subset of active users)? Does the presence or absence of a community-driven process to remove the admin bit make a difference or not? Finally, do we have any reliable data about any of these things? Just curious whether we can learn something from others, —Kusma (t·c) 14:29, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Germany had 22 RFA candidates and 13 were promoted to sysop in 2015. That against our 34 candidates of which 12 were promoted. According to this post in April 2015, they had 15 RFAs open. I did notice their participation at RFA is very high. In the hundreds whereas we celebrate WP:100. Mkdw^talk 15:58, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

German WP has a "recall" process to force a re-election. Also, German RfA is an (almost) plain vote unlike our !vote. It has a lower numerical bar though (more than 2/3, while here that is usually "fail"). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:04, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

I count only 10 new promotions and 3 voluntary reconfirmations in 2015, see de:Wikipedia:Adminkandidaturen/Statistik. No RFA seems to be currently open on de: although they stay open longer than here. —Kusma (t·c) 16:10, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

10 + 3 = 13. I didn't differentiate those seeking re-election/re-confirmation though I suppose they are "different" in type but we're looking at the number of RFAs, not the types of new admins aren't we? Loop back to RFA is broken question, not RFA doesn't promote enough new admins. Mkdw^talk 16:13, 27 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Could we henceforth hat the interminable page of Edit Stats on the talk page of any given RfA? That way, anyone who wants to view them merely needs to make one click (the thread header clearly states what it is, as will as the title of the hat), and anyone who wants to participate in discussions does not have to scroll endlessly past it just to get to the first thread. Alternatively, force a TOC that allows instant access to a discussion thread. Or both, but I think the first is most imperative. Thanks. Softlavender (talk) 03:06, 31 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Agreed. Could not this section, collapsed, be moved to "General comments" on the project page? Already there is a link there under "Links for ... /count", but that doesn't always work: Noyster (talk), 09:18, 31 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

^This. Collapse it and stick it on the project page. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 17:25, 31 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Support Noyster's version. There's no point to collapsing it on the talk page, which not much used for anything else, but it would make more sense to have it, unobtrusively, on the RfA page. A lot of people probably don't even know it's on the RfA's talk page at all.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:27, 31 July 2015 (UTC)Reply

Agree that a lot of people (indeed anyone who has never visited the Talk page of an RfA) don't know it's on the talk page. Softlavender (talk) 00:14, 1 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Be bold!

• AFAIK there's nothing that currently says that edit counts should be copied to a candidate's RfA at all. It's not a dictated procedure in any way, just a longstanding routine to post them on the talk page. Literally nothing whatsoever prevents any editor from collapsing the edit stats, nor posting them in the general comments section. There's really nothing controversial about either action and it's more of something you can go ahead and just do, and maybe suggest to people who do things differently follow your lead, if you're so inclined. There's no need to "propose" something trivial like this, we're not a bureaucracy. Swarm ♠ 00:56, 1 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Ah, but I didn't want to break *sings in Tevye's voice* Tradition. There are so many hallowed traditions and principles on WP, especially things like RfA, that one can't move sideways without stepping on one. ;-) -- Softlavender (talk) 01:05, 1 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

FTR, I've just been following TParis' lead. I personally have no objection to adding a forced-TOC above the stats, or 'hatting' them. OTOH, I think moving these from the Talk page to the 'Discussion' section of the RfA-page proper is a more substantial change that should probably have wider consensus before implementing... --IJBall (contribs • talk) 05:13, 1 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

FWIW, I once added a forced TOC on a very long FAR+FARC page, and someone got very bent out of shape about it and removed it. :-) Softlavender (talk) 05:30, 1 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I don't see any suggestion is a "substantial change" that requires a formal pre-consensus. A collapsed box in the discussion section would barely be noticeable and literally would not effect anyone and I would say anyone in theory is free to post the stats there if they so choose. That being said, I completely think that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and simply forcing a TOC above the stats in the rare event of a talk page discussion would probably be the simplest solution to the problem you raise. In fact, I would say that's a totally common sense solution that allows you to jump the stats with one click, and if that offends someone they're unequivocally in the wrong and I would love to argue the issue with them. Swarm ♠ 05:37, 1 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I would not have thought this needed saying, but I've recently seen editors suggesting that RfAs are an exception to AGF. They are not. I don't think participation in RfAs is hampered by the rule. By way of reminder:

1. Unless there is clear evidence to the contrary, assume that people who work on the project are trying to help it, not hurt it.
2. If criticism is needed, discuss editors' actions, but avoid accusing others of harmful motives without clear evidence.

"Clear evidence" is a high bar and will rarely be met in the case of user has not been banned/sanctioned by ArbCom. Criticism at RfA (including supporters criticising the comments of opposers, which can often create as much, if not greater, heat than the oppose comments themselves) can be directed at the comments/actions of others without impuning their motivation. AGF does not mean say only nice things about people, but I do think we should do fellow volunteers the courtesy of assuming they mean well. WJBscribe (talk) 15:50, 3 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

If people have developed some notion that AGF is not needed at RfA, what ever happened to the promises that "RfA is a better place than it was a few years ago"? I might very well be wrong, but to me any improvements which have supposedly been made are quite minor in the grand scheme of the process. For the non-perfect candidate, Jimbo's words here are really just as true now as they were four years ago. --Biblioworm 16:26, 3 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

We clearly need to assume good faith, but it is obviously not the same as assuming by default that an RFA candidate will make a good administrator if they think so.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:52, 3 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Agree with Ymblanter, however, there is a difference between saying "this candidate will not make a good admin because they seem to have difficulty creating content/gauging consensus/whatever" or "this candidate seems to have lapses in judgement when they are tired" and saying "this candidate is the new Essjay and totally wants to destroy Wikipedia" or "All of this candidate's good actions, from the moment they corrected their first typo, can be discounted because it was all evilly calculated to get them to pass RfA". Not to say anyone actually writes like the last two examples, but all manage to convey an oppose and reasons for it and the first two do it while assuming good faith. Happy Squirrel (talk) 18:59, 3 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Tone is a thing here. There are ways of saying things and there are ways of saying things ... badly. Consider "Sorry, but your CSD record has too many bluelinks for me to think you understand speedy deletion criteria well enough" vs. "Your CSD record shows you have no clue about speedy deletion". Same concern, different tone. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:03, 3 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Are there any specific examples of an RFA where someone made an edit that indicated they were violating AGF? Everymorning talk 23:52, 3 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I can think of plenty off the top of my head just from Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Liz. From what I've seen on this talk page, naming names is discouraged, but there is plenty of bad faith being assumed all over that RfA; take a quick look and you'll find something mean. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 00:09, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

What Bilrov said. There were people saying she was lying about her qualifications. Number one, qualifications are rather irrelevant. Number two, that's a serious charge of bad faith to make without a shred of proof. Comments like these are destructive, not constructive. Happy Squirrel (talk) 00:14, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Diff please, I cant find anything accusing her of *lying*. Almost all the bad faith accusations are directed to the opposers who dont think she has enough (read: any) content work. Which is a perfectly fine rationale to oppose. Only in death does duty end (talk) 07:50, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I believe Happysquirrel refers to this statement (which was actually made on the talkpage, not the project page, so you would naturally have had trouble finding it). Yunshui ^雲_水 07:55, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Ah, I did a search for qualifications, career, etc but maybe I should have tried 'field'. I can see his point however. The advantage of being an SME (Subject Matter Expert) is having knowledge to share that is not available to the general population. I would also be suspicious if someone who had a field of expertise did *not* want to share their knowledge. Quite apart from coming across as intellectual snobbery, it is flag-raising. Of course I am not as honest and open as Cas Liber, I would have just sneakily waited until the opportune moment and asked a couple of technical questions that are not (easily) googleable to probe the depth of their knowledge. Even so, wikipedia is a horrible place to edit in your field, which is why I stay the hell away from financial topics. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:21, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I'm confused - you are happy to assume that Liz is lying about her qualifications because she doesn't edit in that area, yet you yourself claim that you deliberately stay away from your own area of expertise? Sorry, but that looks to me like a huge double standard; would you mind clarifying? Yunshui ^雲_水 11:27, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Ah, I meant I can see why some people would think that (not editing in their area) would imply lying about their expertise, since I dont care about Liz's content work (I did vote suport after all) its a non-issue for me although it would raise my eyebrows. I dont ever edit in areas related to my job because it is such a drain dealing with people who think they know more than they actually do. I dont however ever think that other people are required to take my word at it, I dont care what they think. Which would be my advice to Liz - dont care what others think. I was more pointing out while there are legitimate reasons to not AGF (wikipedia does have a history of over-inflated expertise, Essjay was just the most famous example), there are plenty of reasons to not want to edit in a subject area too. The well-known wikipedia hostility towards people who claim expertise being the prime one. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:45, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Oh, I see what you mean now - my bad; I misunderstood what you were saying. Sorry if I was a bit snappy; I think Liz is dealing with the stress of this RFA better than I am! Yunshui ^雲_水 11:48, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I edit very little in my professional topic area. Once I tried, and a number of users who understand very little in the subject did not like the material I added from an undergraduate book I am using. They started reverting it and discussing whether the material was actually correct. The discussion was at a pretty low level, and they did not want to listen to anybody, so that I just unwatched the page and never came back. I had a couple of other similar instances, and I try to avoid my areas of expertise.--Ymblanter (talk) 13:40, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

In the field I'm most familiar with I just normally don't have the drive for reading in-depth scientific papers on a subject when I'm editing given that I do enough of that outside my free time! I think this is a pretty silly reason to be skeptical of someone. Sam Walton (talk) 15:11, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Gamergate-related articles are at present subject to a 30/500 rule (registered for 30 days, minimum 500 edits before being allowed to contribute to the topic). I think anons are prevented from !voting at RfA but that is the limit of our restrictions.

I have to be careful here otherwise people are going to accuse me of ABF but I'm wondering whether it might be preferable to introduce some sort of Gamergate-style rule to RfA, given some of the events that have gone on in the last week. Doing so might go some way to nullifying some aspects of canvassing and it would also exclude those who, for want of a better word, are most likely to be naive in their judgement due to lack of experience (although I am aware that recently registered accounts may be for people who have edited anonymously previously). In addition, I'm wondering whether some sort of activity stricture might be useful: we have had people !voting who have otherwise done nothing, or virtually nothing, in the preceding months.

I am not particularly familiar with Gamergate stuff but I understand that the 30/500 is working quite well. I've no idea how it is enforced but have a vague memory of someone mentioning an edit filter. - Sitush (talk) 10:29, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

My opinion would be that 'crats should be able to handle this stuff on a case-by-case basis; it's not like it's a straw poll anyway, and obvious SPAs are usually struck out by somebody. However, in Liz's case, there are ~340K bytes of information the 'crats have to read through, and ~280 !voters to suspect (and both figures could keep on rising unless a 'crat puts it on hold soon), so I understand what you mean. This could be a one-off, though. I would certainly oppose any activity structure; it's worth investigating any accounts which look like sleepers, or perhaps suggest there's been off-wiki canvassing, but I think a fixed activity rule would do more bad than good, preventing too many good faith users from contributing to the discussion.

As for the original 30/500 rule you refer to, I think it only applies to Gamergate controversy and Talk:Gamergate controversy, based on a notice on the latter. The edit window in Gamergate controversy looks bloody terrifying. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 11:21, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

A clear rule might seem better than the current commenting out / striking of "obvious SPA" votes. However, the problem with 30/500 is that it excludes some people who are mostly active on other projects. dewiki has a general "right to vote" threshold at 2 months / 200 article edits / 50 of those in the last year. Personally, I do not edit dewiki enough, and that rule actually makes me feel unwelcome. Anyway, at RfA, people who know the candidate from other projects should be allowed to comment. Whether they should be able to vote could be discussed separately, but usually, comments (which mean campaigning for others to vote as you did) are much more powerful than votes at RfA anyway. —Kusma (t·c) 13:33, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I was actually thinking more of strictures on the !voting than on the commenting. A fairly new contributor, or one who is pretty inactive, is little better than an anon. I wasn't aware of the de-WP system but it sounds like something similar to what I am saying.

Thanks for clarifying the Gamergate thing, Bilorv. - Sitush (talk) 13:42, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

• No no no no no no no! Over and over again we see this idea come up that we should somehow restrict voting to a certain level of editor here. I'm sick to death of seeing these proposals. The more Wikipedia places these sorts of stratifying criteria on people, the less free it becomes. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that ...ANYONE...ANYONE... can edit. Except, not anymore. This project was built with the power of the anonymous contributor, and nowadays we do little but demonize them as would-be disruptors of everything good. --Hammersoft (talk) 13:53, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

In that case let the anons !vote, let the obviously canvassed !vote, etc. After all, anyone can edit. It is a fine line between order and anarchy. - Sitush (talk) 14:44, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

• To continue the reductio ad absurdum argument, but in reverse, "In that case, let us set the standards at 3000/50000". Afterall, as Bilbioworm notes below, experienced users disrupt RfAs too. Either you trust the very principle on which Wikipedia was founded, or you don't. If you side with the latter, you're in the wrong place. --Hammersoft (talk) 14:54, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

• After considering it for a while, I've quite honestly arrived at the conclusion that experienced users can sometimes disrupt RfAs in a manner far worse than IPs and new users. At least, with non or newly-registered users, they're not usually taken seriously and there's no hesitation to block; with disruptive experienced users, it can be totally different. (For anyone who thinks I'm specifically referencing them, I'm not; I'm simply speaking in generalities based upon what I have seen at RfAs.) --Biblioworm 14:42, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • I have to agree. From reading recent and older RfAs my impression is that ideological debates about what is or is not a prerequisite for adminship, as well as unrelated contentious topics turning up in a RfX, tend to generate far more problems than new or low activity editors do. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:44, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
    • As I always say, it is not the voting that is problematic in RfAs, it is the comments. Back before people started asking for rationales for opposes, RfA was nicer place. —Kusma (t·c) 14:49, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Did they ever? Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Neutrality 2. That's from August 2004. A cursory review of RfAs from the time period seems to show oppose rationales were very, very common if not virtually ubiquitous. --Hammersoft (talk) 14:58, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Exactly where is this "obviously canvassed" supposed to have occurred, Sitush? I'm not on IRC, I responded to editors who emailed me about the RfA but I didn't initiate any email correspondence about the RfA, I didn't mention it on social media, I just posted a notice on my talk page using a template given in the RfA instructions. I heard that there was a thread on Wikipediocracy about this RfA, which I haven't seen, but it was actually arguing against me.

So, where are all of these canvassed voters supposed to come from? It seems like all you have are suspicions and I'm tired of you implying support votes are less legitimate than oppose votes. You have posted more often to talk pages involved with this RfA more than I have and I was the candidate!

Your 30/500 proposal seems to come directly from your perception of what occurred during this RfA. If proposals wanting to prevent IP editors from discussing candidates or posting questions got shot down on this talk page, why do you think imposing additional editing restrictions on voters would get wide support? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:53, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I should have refrained from commenting about this. It's very difficult to be a subject of other people's discussions. Besides, I was just alerted to this reddit thread so I see where some of the oppose canvassing was happening

Wikipedia:Requests for adminship isn't about me and new rules shouldn't be introduced based on perceptions about one instance. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:22, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

• I strongly endorse both Hammersoft and Biblioworm above. In the current system, canvassing, in the rare event that it happens, is obviously identifiable and whether or not it's removed or stricken or indented, the crats are capable of recognizing it and not factoring it into the discussion. Disruption from established editors is far more of a problem than any purported disruption caused by new users. Swarm ♠ 20:13, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
• Agree with Hammersoft, Biblioworm and Swarm. IE opposed 30/500 rule. Just punishing newbies doesn't do anything productive. AliveFreeHappy (talk) 20:20, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I would like to codify a minimum edit count, though at a lower level than 500 edits, and not just because it would keep out some people who are bringing off wiki issues to RFA. I support a minimum threshold for the same reason that Hammersoft opposes it. I think that the current unwritten threshold excludes new members of the community who aren't sure if they would be accepted when they vote here. If we were to adopt a clear criteria, either based on meta:Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Board_elections/2015#Requirements or either the DE wiki or RU wiki schemes then I doubt we would lose many voters, but I think we would gain a bunch of community members who currently aren't sure if they would be welcome in these discussions. ϢereSpielChequers 20:21, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Ok, I"m intrigued by what Chequers is saying - perhaps the unwritten rule is more scary than an actual rule. Maybe I'd support strict guidelines if they were small and strictly followed. AliveFreeHappy (talk) 20:43, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

• We do have a written rule about whether they are welcome. It's right on the main page. It says "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." To suggest we encourage newcomers by limiting which newcomers can be here is counter-intuitive. --Hammersoft (talk) 21:03, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

• Everyone is free to edit, but if you start in certain places you will quickly find yourself unwelcome. RFA being a prime example of where not to make one of your first edits. I remember when I first came here I tried to work out the unwritten rule to see if I would be welcome to vote, couldn't be sure if I was "entitled" to !vote and left it, probably for months. If there was a simple low bar and it was easy for newish editors to see then I think the German example is pertinent - it seems intuitive to me that replacing a vague, intimidating rule with a clear and transparent one would be more welcoming to those who barely qualify, and I suspect even those who learn that another twenty edits and they will be entitled to !vote. Of course if we want German levels of participation there are other ways to achieve it, we could for example do an established editor survey of all active editors who have done 500 edits, and ask them which of the following areas of wikipedia they have participated in - my guess is that one of the most common results would be for those editors to try out one or more of the areas they haven't yet been involved in. ϢereSpielChequers 21:40, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I can see the idea of setting a bar to encourage participation by users above the bar - there is a sort of psychological effect involved. That said, maybe having a ridiculously low bar would be appropriate so that it doesn't turn into newbie discrimination. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:44, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Looking at my own early contributions, I see that I'd participated in an RfA within my first 50 edits, and before I even had a talk page. Clearly a sockpuppet! Since "everyone else should be more like me" is a thing just about everyone on Wikipedia seems to think, I'm against minimum requirements ;) But really, I think there's something to be said for the self-selection factor here. People who have confidence that their opinion is a useful contribution will post it, and there's no evidence that the community is consistently misled by overconfident but useless newbie opinions. On the other hand, we should be encouraging people of all experience levels to not post when they have reasonable doubt that their contributions are useful. Opabinia regalis (talk) 21:55, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Ah, a genuine example of a n00b having something useful to say! I never thought I'd see the day. I regularly hear people being suspicious of newbies who suddenly know their way around the site (and the suspicions are unfortunately likely to be well-founded), but there are exceptions. People contributing to RfA in early edits. I'd read everything from WP:NOT to WP:OSE before I even signed up, although I'm afraid that in hindsight my early contribs are somewhat embarrassing and my recent ones are just as bad. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 23:11, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Well, I didn't say it was useful, only that I thought it was ;) Apparently it was an objection to civility complaints. I also wanted to delete a smiley template and a civility noticeboard. I'm such a meanie. Also, I'm trying the capital U template as a better small ping test. Bilorv :) Opabinia regalis (talk) 00:04, 5 August 2015 (UTC) Reply

Opabinia regalis – yep, I got a notification from that. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 08:21, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

The bot seems to be taking the wrong datestamp on Liz's RfA for User:Cyberpower678/RfX Report. I've tried a manual fix but the bot reverted it immediately [1]. @Cyberpower678: - any ideas? Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:53, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Fixed. Bureaucrats, when placing an RfA on hold for 'crat chat be sure to leave the "Scheduled to end" text in place or the bot will look for the next instance of the letters "end" to figure out the time to closure. (FYI WJBscribe) –xeno^talk 12:06, 4 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

After a minor kerfuffle, I've finally worked up an essay for "NOTQUTEYET" (as opposed to "NOTNOW") RfA situations: User:IJBall/NOTQUITEYET. Anyone who is so inclined, please feel free to rip me some suggestions (or edit it as you see fit to improve it). Criticism such as "I think the essay is totally useless, and does not need to exist..." will be logged (and probably ignored). Thanks in advance! --IJBall (contribs • talk) 03:35, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I don't think it's "totally useless", but although you might very well ignore my comment, with all due respect I don't feel that we should be giving !voters more excuses to oppose sufficiently experienced candidates. (A few years ago it would have been nonsense to suggest that one year was insufficient for candidates, and it should be that way now.) Despite the warnings given in the essay, I can already foresee a million ways in which it would be misused to insult candidates even further than they already are. Sorry if this was too blunt, but you requested it. ;) --Biblioworm 03:54, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Nah, that's a totally fair viewpoint. It's just that we have a philosophical disagreement over this – I genuinely feel that one year (or 5,000–7,000 edits) on the project is not enough time anymore to qualify an editor for Admin rights (hence, the essay). While I think one year was enough time c.2005, now in 2015 one year is not enough time for any but the most exceptional editors to "soak" up all the nuances (esp. re: policy) around here. I've been heavily editing for a little over two years now, and even that is either not enough time, or is barely enough time, to soak up enough of this place to be qualified to be an Admin. All IMHO, of course. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 04:17, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

RfA participants ought to be pragmatic and evaluate each candidate individually, and despite the convenience of it (at the expense of the candidate) they should not blanket oppose because of failure to meet some arbitrary criteria. For varying reasons, some editors pick up the expectations of this place faster than others, and in any case (with the exception of absolutely fundamental policies which every serious editor should know) I strongly maintain that it is far more important to have a willingness to learn and know where to reference the policies rather than knowing all the details themselves. Biblioworm 04:47, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Yes, and that was built in to my reply (e.g. "...any but the most exceptional editors..."). But the fact is, someone with 5,000 edits and only 9 months under their belt is very unlikely to have a broad enough experience around the project to qualify for Adminship. Incidentally, I consider that an indictment of the current structure of Adminship, as much as it is an indictment of RfA "standards inflation" – it is almost undeniably true that a 5,000-edit contributor would likely be qualified for a meaningful subset of the tools (e.g. "Vandal fighter) if not for the "whole bundle". --IJBall (contribs • talk) 05:00, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Without getting into a point much-discussed here, using edit count or even time editing relies on the notion that the editors of the now do less work because they are using semi-automated tools and that they are being exposed to less learning experience through conflict as a result. I would expect the opposite notion to be the case i.e. these editors are the most likely to face concerns over where and how and why they've edited, because their changes are so prevalent. Someone who is around for a year now touches a thousand articles, with that much opportunity to find themselves (dis)agreeing with someone (which is also a feedback into an RFA as e.g. with Liz in project-space apparently). --Izno (talk) 06:20, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

True. It will be my first editing anniversary in a day or so, and according to xTools I've edited almost 4.4k unique pages. --Biblioworm 14:57, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I don't think the essay is providing any reasons for opposing a request for administrative privileges that aren't already used. Its value is that it tells commenters to explicitly list the areas they're concerned about, rather than just link to an essay without further explanation. isaacl (talk) 08:24, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

With the exception of a minority, I know of very few average !voters who actually demand more than two years in their written criteria. One year is usually listed as their minimum, although a bit more is usually the de facto standard. --Biblioworm 14:57, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I never said that I "demand" two years of experience on the project to qualify for Adminship (my loose personal standard is closer to "over a year") – what I said was that my own personal experience after two years of heavy editing is that I probably have (barely) enough experience now where I could theoretically qualify for Adminship (though I'd bet that there's be many more that'd say I'm not quite there yet). Note also that NOTQUITENOW is not in any way intended to "establish" (new) Admin qualification standards – it is simply there to be potentially linked to by voters who intend to "oppose" (or !vote "neutral") on the basis that, in their opinion, an RfA candidate doesn't have quite enough experience yet. Really, it was created simply so people don't make the mistake of linking to WP:NOTNOW in inappropriate (e.g. non-"newbie") RfA situations. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 15:57, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I see nothing in this essay that doesn't already exist elsewhere, except for your personal opinions on thresholds. If you want to have your own personal essay in your userspace, fine; however, it really doesn't belong in mainspace. There's a longstanding and useful rule of thumb: essays stay in the user's space until and unless someone else moves it to the Wikipedia space, mostly because so many people abuse essays and treat them as policy or community guidance. As for the opinions expressed, you're entitled to them. However, I note that the more of these personal essays and expectations, the fewer candidates are able or willing to meet them, and even many people who *do* meet a lot of these qualifications have no interest in putting themselves before RFA regulars for inspection. Risker (talk) 17:01, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Two points: Again, this essay (and note that it's "tagged" as such...) is not meant to "establish standards" (but rather, reflect standards I've seen others use in RfA votes). Secondly, I have no intention of moving this into "mainspace" myself – as you say, I figured I'd leave that to others to do if they feel it is in any way worthwhile (and I figure that probably won't happen...). The point here, again, was to give voters something to point to besides erroneously pointing to NOTNOW when it was inappropriate to do so, as has happened multiple times over the last dozen or so RfA's. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 17:10, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Well then, I'd suggest that instead of putting up another essay with another shortcut, you start questioning those voters to clarify why they're saying "WP:NOTNOW" when it is clearly inappropriate. Ask them precisely what it is that they feel is not suitable about the candidate. In fact, I'd suggest you consider campaigning to have "WP:NOTNOW" deprecated, so that people have to explain themselves properly instead of relying on an inappropriate essay as shorthand for their actual opinions. That would be far more useful to candidates; they will actually get feedback that is relevant. Risker (talk) 17:19, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I have to agree with Risker here; we should be promoting less jargon and encouraging users to be specific in their reasons for opposition. While NOTNOW is good for very new editors because the reason is almost always the same for opposing and/or quickly declining an RfA, I can see NOTYET being a lazy way for users to oppose while not actually explaining why they're opposing, thus making the whole process much less useful for the candidate. Sam Walton (talk) 17:26, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

"We should be promoting less jargon and encouraging users to be specific in their reasons for opposition." – which my essay specifically encourages voters to do. Look, I don't expect to convince Risker here, but it would be useful if someone like you, Sam, would take a look and see if you think it can be improved any way. It's not like I'm not asking for feedback and suggestions for improvement here... --IJBall (contribs • talk) 17:38, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

And for that reason I think the essay would be redundant. This page is either going to be written with or without a specific reason. If it's cited without a reason then as I said above it's not particularly useful. If it's cited with a reason then I don't see the usefulness of also citing the essay; it doesn't say anything that the voters aren't likely to say anyway, things like "examine all of the constructive criticism that you received" and "come back after gaining further experience" are exactly what voters tend to say when opposing an experienced editor anyway. Sam Walton (talk) 17:49, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Just wondering if anyone has noticed this: we oppose candidates who don't write articles, yet we also oppose them because they do a lot of the same! What in the world does it take to become an admin around here? --Biblioworm 03:54, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I noticed it. I was grimly amused. --Izno (talk) 04:11, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I think that's something of a false dichotomy, people just want well rounded candidates. I oppose Cyclonebiskit's current RfA, and I would have opposed both had I been on at the time of Liz's and noticed it, but, I have to say, I'll be pretty appalled if Liz gets the nod and CB doesn't. One is clearly here to build an encyclopedia while the other leaves plenty of room for doubt and seems to propel their candidacy mainly through the gift of gab. GraniteSand (talk) 04:13, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

My goodness this process. No wonder its been getting more difficult to get newer admins here lately. GamerPro64 04:20, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Considering the excess of shitty legacy admins I'm not all that inclined to say a narrower pipeline is such a disaster. Besdies, let's be honest, candidates don't submit themselves to process, they submit themselves to an election. Our ridiculous little corner of the internet has evolved into an actual system of values and politics. GraniteSand (talk) 04:26, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Yeah that does sound like reasons for me to not do another RfA here. Though I am hoping the de-adminship process idea works out smoothly. Or at least be decent. GamerPro64 04:29, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Recall would go a long way to getting sphincters to unclench around here. GraniteSand (talk) 05:04, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I'll bear that in mind the next time I get a swarm of people referring to a white supremacist chodha boy because I won't let them have their way with declaring their caste warriors and kings for the past 10000 years, and then think about the possibility that they could start gunning for me through some process. Also, given the demonstration of your ability to read Liz's mind I'd like to request those mind-reading powers. Once given to me, I'll tweak them so they actually work. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 05:41, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Relax, weeaboo. It's just, like, my opinion, man. GraniteSand (talk) 05:47, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

This conversation took a turn I did not expect. GamerPro64 05:49, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

It's serious business I guess. GraniteSand (talk) 05:50, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

In general, participants in the Request for Adminship process are trying to understand the characteristics of the candidate, which is revealed through their editing in different areas. Thus a shortfall in an area of scrutiny creates a blind spot that participants have difficulty evaluating. isaacl (talk) 07:45, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

On my RFA, I was very clear that I had no GA/FA and I was not planning to essentially contribute to GAs/FAs, because I believe my strongest sides as an editor are elsewhere. This was accepted, and I did not get a single oppose vote based on my insufficient content contribution. (To be fair, I had around 80% edits in the articles, and I still have around 70%).--Ymblanter (talk) 07:59, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I agree that there is irony. The basic problem is that RFA is a broken hostile process, and only a few candidates are able to get through it. I do not expect that the community will ever be able to fix it. My own unpopular opinion is that there are a few processes where the community, being as large and fractious as it is, cannot govern itself, and needs the intervention of the WMF. I don't think that the WMF is likely to intervene unless they see too many admins going away and not enough being approved, and maybe not even then. That opinion is worth what you paid for it. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:36, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

There does seem to be some wild inconsistencies in how Wikipedia promotes its editors. I just looked through the list of the ones that got elected the last 6 months (which isn't all that many really) and noticed several who got promoted to admin with no, or very little, content experience including this one that seemed to pass due to their technical skills, and likewise many others failing for to much focus on technical areas. One is left with the notion that passing is more about pure luck than on what one actually does to help the project or where. RingofSauron (talk) 18:24, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I can appreciate the irony but I think people are overstating the problem here. I had no significant content-work to my name apart from one start-class article that someone completely rewrote right before my RfA. Essentially, I had contributed nothing of value beyond gnome edits and anti-vandalism. However simply keeping one foot in the mainspace was enough. And while I was regularly active in other areas, I maintained a low-profile on the drama boards. This was the gist of my approach to editing with an RfA in my sights, and it worked. I hit WP100 with only one opposer. This was at the height of controversy surrounding RfA and while I was a coordinator of the biggest RfA reform project ever undertaken. If you can demonstrate a bit of clue and competence in a variety of areas, it's really not that hard to pass an RfA. But if you disproportionately focus on one specific area to the neglect of others, it's going to be a lot more difficult. While adminship is 'no big deal', it is very big in its scope. The community wants to see not only good candidates but candidates who can demonstrate competence across the spectrum. Swarm ♠ 18:26, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I can understand that as someone who passed RFA you feel the process works but many others including Liz probably don't feel that way at all and frankly the process really doesn't work well at all. Sometimes good folks do get promoted and sometimes bad ones do as well but that doesn't mean that all the people who fail RFA would be bad admins and worse many don't even try. It also means they didn't get lucky enough to pass. Sadly, I kind of hope that the RFA process gets to a point where its not promoting anyone, or at least very few, which its already to that point really, because then the reform you speak of would be needed and sought. Currently however a few people continue to hold onto the belief that the process works so no reform is going to work until that mindset is changed. RingofSauron (talk) 19:28, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply