There is wide agreement among English Wikipedians that the administrator system is in some ways broken—but no consensus on how to fix it. Most suggestions have been relatively small in scope, and could at best produce small improvements. I would like to make a proposal to fundamentally restructure the administrator system, in a way that I believe would make it more effective and responsive. The proposal is to create an elected Administration Committee ("AdminCom") which would select, oversee, and deselect administrators.
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26 September 2021
Administrator cadre continues to contract
31 July 2019
The Collective Consciousness of Admin Userpages
31 January 2019
The last leg of the Admin Ship's current cruise
31 July 2018
What do admins actually do?
29 June 2018
Has the wind gone out of the AdminShip's sails?
24 May 2018
Recent retirements typify problem of admin attrition
18 February 2015
Another admin reform attempt flops
15 April 2013
Requests for adminship reform moves forward
21 January 2013
Adminship from the German perspective
22 October 2012
AdminCom: A proposal for changing the way we select admins
15 October 2012
Is the requests for adminship process 'broken'?
18 June 2012
RFAs and active admins—concerns expressed over the continuing drought
14 February 2011
RfA drought worsens in 2010—wikigeneration gulf emerging
9 August 2010
Experimental request for adminship ends in failure
13 October 2008
Efforts to reform Requests for Adminship spark animated discussion
23 April 2007
News and notes: Arbitrators granted CheckUser rights, milestones
6 February 2006
Featured picture process tweaked, changes to adminship debated
27 June 2005
As I see it, there are two fundamental problems with the current system. The first is that it makes each admin into a sort of Lone Ranger. Each admin independently decides what to work on and how to handle it. Good admins seek advice and consent from the community, but nothing forces them to. Admins are selected using a chaotic process, and can only be removed for egregiously bad behavior—but even then the removal process is very arduous. There is no coordination or effective oversight. On television, the Lone Ranger is a hero; in real life, where people do not always share a common understanding of right and wrong, lone-rangering is an endless source of trouble.
The second problem is that the current system forces each admin to be a politician. The requests for adminship process (RfA), regardless of any propaganda to the contrary, is an election, and it is impossible to win an election without behaving like a politician. Furthermore, winning an election serves as a validation of the views that the candidate expresses, and therefore adminship, like political office, becomes a power base and a status symbol, rather than merely a way of serving the community. What we want are admins who behave like civil servants, such as a dogcatcher or police officer; what we get are admins who behave like politicians. We talk about our admins being merely editors with some extra buttons, but that is not what the RfA process gives us.
These problems amplify each other. Because bad admins are so difficult to remove, the community has become very strict in its examination of RfAs—but the more difficult it is to succeed with an RfA, the more candidates are forced to behave like politicians, carefully avoiding any action that might offend a significant group of voters and carefully hiding any views that might be controversial. And the more difficult it is to succeed with an RfA, the more status comes from success, making adminship a goal in its own right.
What we need is a system that accomplishes three goals: (1) the community is in charge; (2) adminship is easy to give and easy to take away; (3) admins do not need to be politicians.
Having an AdminCom would accomplish all of these goals. The community would ultimately be in charge, because the community would elect the members of AdminCom. We would simply replace direct democracy with a representative democracy. Handing out the buttons and taking them away would be as easy as AdminCom decides to make it. Admins would be directly answerable to AdminCom rather than to the editing public at large, and so would get clearer guidance than they currently do.
The primary power of AdminCom would be to give and remove adminship. Other powers, such as overseeing and advising admins, would naturally follow from this. I do not believe it would be a good idea to formalize internal procedures for AdminCom: the members should be able to decide for themselves how to make things work. Naturally they would express their beliefs about proper procedure when they run for office, and the Wikipedia community could make its choices accordingly.
If having admins be politicians is bad, why is it good to have politicians choosing and overseeing them? The answer is that any effective organization requires politicians at the top. Consider, for example, a city government. The people who carry out primary duties are civil servants, and answer to their bosses. In order to have a responsive system, though, the bosses have to be answerable to the public. That way the very difficult task of making the public happy is left to people who are experts at it (the politicians), and is not directly imposed on people who would only be impeded by it. The advantage of an AdminCom is that it separates the political functions from the administrative functions. Doing away with the political functions entirely would only be possible in a dictatorship.
Another potential objection relates to bureaucrats: do they not already fulfill the AdminCom role? No. Bureaucrats, as they currently function, have far less decision-making power than admins. All they really do is count votes, with a strictly limited power to decide how votes should be weighted. Thus, turning our current bureaucrats into an AdminCom would give them powers and responsibilities that nobody had in mind when they were chosen.
I have been thinking about these issues for a long time, and this is meant as a serious proposal. Of course I am aware that many editors will react to the AdminCom idea with dismay, for a variety of reasons. What is not so clear is whether there is a substantial community who would be favorably disposed. If a large number of editors endorse the idea, it will encourage an effort to put the proposal into a specific form and then submit it to the community as a referendum.
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This isn't the first time The Beatles (or is it "the" Beatles?) has shown up in the press: a 2009 Telegraph story named it as the number-two read article on Wikipedia, behind the eponymous (and often accidentally reached) wiki.
As of this writing, there were 45 comments on the Wall Street Journal story, many of them debating the capitalization point itself, while others raised the question of whether consensus on Wikipedia was a viable decision-making model. The most recommended comment opined "They argue so loud because the stakes are so low...."
The results of the RfC will be announced next week.
Since the last installment of In the media, a few stories reported on the controversy surrounding GibraltarpediA (see the Signpost's 24 September detailed report and the followup on 1 October). The Telegraph ran a story on 2 October, following the publication of two more CNET stories by Violet Blue, who first wrote about the story.
Five featured articles were promoted this week:
Ten featured lists were promoted this week:
Four featured pictures were promoted this week:
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The volunteer-led Wikimedia Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) and interested community members are looking at Wikimedia organization applications worth about US$10.4 million out of the committee's first full year's operation, in just the inaugural round one of two that have been planned for the year with a planned budget of $11.4M.
The WMF introduced the new finance structure earlier this year, with the FDC at its core, to promote transparent and accountable spending among Wikimedia entities. Fifteen organizations of 19, including the foundation itself, have met the transparency criteria in general, although several chapters encountered problems in satisfying the new requirements for reporting on their past finances and activities—some documentation having been overdue since 2010. Eleven chapters plus the WMF submitted funding proposals.
The largest chapter, Wikimedia Germany, which employs more than 44 people and has some 500 active volunteers and more than 2500 members according to its submission, is requesting the largest amount of funds among the chapters. WMDE is requesting $1.82M (24.3%) to fund parts of its planned $7.475M expenditure over the next fiscal year—a considerable increase on the chapter's current spend of $4.316M. The chapter's funding and expenditure are more complicated than for most: for example, funding for the Toolserver in Amsterdam, which is increasingly important to the running of Wikimedia sites, has been the subject of intense debate. Other projects, such as Wikidata ($2.75M), have been funded by the chapter from third-party donors. Among WMDE's initiatives will be new efforts to make state-owned cultural works freely accessible on movement sites, a greater presence at EU level, and the testing and evaluation of two innovative support tools to help readers and editors to improve balance on Wikipedia articles.
Wikimedia UK has five permanent staff and one intern, 87 active volunteers and at least a further 100 who occasionally participate, and 330 registered members. WMUK is asking the FDC for $919K (67.4%) of its annual budget of $1.365M. The entity's activity plan for the upcoming year provides considerably more detail than most other chapter plans. Among the chapter's initiatives will be support for Europeana uploads, a "train the trainers" program, the development of modular online training, outreach to editors working in the Welsh language, and moves to increase female participation in the movement. The chapter will continue its support of Wikipedian-in-residence positions with partnered GLAM institutions, including digitization efforts and a focus on Scottish museums.
Wikimedia France, with four staff members (soon to be five) and 303 members (20–30 of them "very active"), is requesting $961K (68.8%) of a total budget of $1.397M. Its plans include reaching out to new editors in universities—including PhD students, other students, and academic researchers—with about 15 training workshops, particularly on ecological topics, and a new partnership with the Société Française d’Écologie. The chapter will spearhead the promotion of scientific knowledge about Wikimedia, including the running of a research project on the geolocalisation of Wikipedia articles, involving engineering students from the major engineering college École Centrale de Lille. There will be a number of new GLAM projects, and new French-language outreach efforts, particularly in Africa and in support of minority languages in France. Language projects will include the launch of a francophone newsletter about Wikimedia projects, inspired by the Signpost and the French Regards sur l'Actualité de Wikipédia.
The WMF's own application, for $4.46M (10.6% of its $42.070M budget), involves the organization's non-core spending. For the first time, then, this part of the foundation's spending will be subject to community comment and review. Affected are programs such as the global Education Program ($718K)—of which the US and Canadian components are currently the subject of an RfC—and editor engagement experiments (E3; $1.2M).
Other chapters applying are Wikimedia Argentina, Australia, Switzerland, Israel, Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, and Hungary. All applications can be reviewed by the community until 22 October. The FDC will consider both submissions and comments, and will submit its spending recommendations to the WMF board of trustees by 15 November 2012.
A trial of the first phase of Wikimedia Deutschland's "Wikidata" project—implementing the first ever interwiki repository—may soon get underway following the successful passage of much of its code through MediaWiki's review processes this week.
At the heart of those developments of its "ContentHandler" branch, which comprised some 10,000 lines of code targeted at introducing alternative page formats to the vanilla "wikitext" variety (wikitech-l mailing list). This is required by Wikidata to allow it to serve editable pages that use its own structured data format rather than wikitext, but has potential applications for a number of projects such as that to introduce Lua code to MediaWiki. The merger of the branch was marked by a small number of (fortunately resolvable) bugs, although users are asked to be vigilant for more as the code hits larger wikis.
Also merged was the Wikidata-developed "Sites" facility. Initially running in parallel to existing processes, the "Sites" code takes the form of a not inconsiderable upgrade to MediaWiki's existing support for interwiki links. Pertinently for readers looking forward to the rollout of Phase I, review of both of these headline features (as well as a number of smaller patches also merged this week) had been the main items on the pre-trial to-do list for several weeks. That trial—scheduled for the Hungarian Wikipedia—is now expected to get underway early next month should no major bugs be found in the meantime.
"We're thrilled that this huge amount of work we've done over the last 6 months has finally made its way into MediaWiki core." Lydia Pintscher, Wikidata's communications chief, told the Signpost. "It's a huge step towards getting the first deployment done and at the same time allows a lot of great stuff unrelated to Wikidata to happen in the future."
The Wikidata project is currently looking for suggestions about how its main page should look and technical comment on its proposed update system. Discussions about how ContentHandler-aware extensions ought to be are also ongoing.
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This week, we experimented with WikiProject Chemicals. Started in August 2004, WikiProject Chemicals has grown to include over 10,000 articles about chemical compounds. The project has a unique assessment system that omits C-class, Good, and Featured Articles. As a result, the project's 11 GAs and 9 FAs are treated as A-class articles. WikiProject Chemicals is a child of WikiProject Chemistry (interviewed in 2009) and a parent of WikiProject Polymers. We interviewed Wim van Dorst (Wimvandorst) and Smokefoot.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Chemicals? Do you have some academic or professional experience in chemistry?
The project maintains a unique assessment scale which divides articles into just four designations: A-class, B-class, starts, and stubs. Why was this system chosen over the typical Version 1.0 assessments? How does the project treat articles that have been recognized as Featured or Good Articles independently of the WikiProject? What have been the benefits and drawbacks of the system used at WikiProject Chemicals?
A member of WikiProject Chemistry noted in a 2009 interview that WikiProject Chemicals is a more cohesive group than its parent project. Do you agree? What brings the editors of WikiProject Chemicals together? How much overlap exists in the scope, membership, and effort of WikiProject Chemicals and WikiProject Chemistry?
Are there any significant holes in Wikipedia's coverage of chemicals? How successful has the project been in building articles for the red links included the project's lengthy lists of organic compounds, inorganic compounds, and biomolecules? What are some challenges projects face when cataloging vast collections of information like chemicals?
WikiProject Chemicals ranks among the top ten most active WikiProjects by changes. What is the project's secret to remaining active? What are some areas in which the project could still use improvement? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll take a break from our usual routine to shine a light on neglected parts of the world. Until then, explore the archive.
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