The English Wikipedia's requests for adminship (RfA) process has entered another cycle of proposed reforms. Over the last three weeks, various proposals, ranging from as large as a transition to a representative democracy to as small as a required edit count and service length, have been debated on the RfA talk page.
RfA has had a complicated history, as even though the process has remained virtually unchanged since it was created in 2003, there have been unending attempts to change it. In June 2012, the Signpost reported in "Is the requests for adminship process 'broken'?" that:
Will the new RfA reform come to the rescue of administrators?
16 May 2024
Jimbo's NFT, new arbs, fixing RfA, and financial statements
28 December 2021
Editors discuss Wikipedia's vetting process for administrators
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
| “ | With the demonstrable issues with RfA's process and culture—its central two tenets—many strategies ... for addressing them have been raised. Perennial proposals may sum it up best: "While RfA is our most debated process and nearly everybody seems to think there's something wrong with it, literally years of discussion have yielded no consensus on what exactly is wrong with it, nor on what should be done about that." Reformist editors are therefore swimming against a strong current to even stay afloat, much less find concrete proposals that may garner support. ... Still, even if [the community is] ensuring that only qualified candidates are applying, then there is clear evidence that the number of qualified candidates is falling. The administrator corps is currently in decline through attrition and a lack of new blood. Whether RfA is 'broken' or functional, it seems to not be fulfilling its intended purpose of at least maintaining the number of administrators. | ” |
This assessment has not changed. Although six editors passed RfA in the month after the Signpost's story—which was more than half of the number promoted in the six preceding months—the total number of new administrators for 2012 was just 28, barely more than half of 2011's total and less than a quarter of 2009's total. The total number of unsuccessful RfAs has fallen as well. These declining numbers, which were described in what would now be considered a successful year (2010) as an emerging "wikigeneration gulf", have been coupled with a sharp decline in the number of active administrators since February 2008 (1,021), reaching a low of 653 in November 2012.
As a counterpoint to the English Wikipedia's situation vis-à-vis RfA, the Signpost examined the German Wikipedia's adminship promotion process in October. Community members there made major changes in 2009, introducing measures like an obligatory recall system and a settling-in period for new administrators. These "are credited with bringing about a relatively low RfA barrier and better admin–community relations. ... Administrators generally appear to be regarded as accountable for their actions."
While the English RfA has also gone through several periods of high-intensity attempts at reform, they have not had the same success at reforming the process. RfA reform 2011 was the largest such attempt, seeing thousands of kilobytes of text added through discussions and possible proposals. Another surge in June 2012 after the Signpost's report also sparked much discussion, but ended much faster.
The latest period of interest in RfA reform has been underway since late December, after comments by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales that he plans to use his reserve powers "to help put into place a community process for constitutional change in cases where we have tried and failed in getting somewhere in our traditional ways", and he specifically mentioned the adminship promotion process as a problem he wanted to help with. These "reserve powers" do not appear to be listed anywhere on-wiki aside from his nominal authority over the Arbitration Committee, which allows him to modify decisions in cases that do not involve him. In August 2009 (and far earlier), he described his role as constitutional monarch, which "mostly means I [Wales] wave at crowds and comport myself with dignity and set an example, and serve as a symbol."
Interest in a new RfC to tackle a range of RfA questions has been building since "RfC; The can stops here". Many such RfCs have failed in the past, and one, Clerks, has only 16 supports to 28 opposes at publishing time. Interestingly, opposing rationales in such RfCs are very diverse. As Worm That Turned, a coordinator of RfA2011, told the Signpost in June 2012, "Different people thought [RfA] was too hard, too easy, got the wrong candidates through, was too uncivil, had too many questions, could give votes without reasons, with [poor] reasons... there was a long list."
The current RfC on RfA reform was launched after a new, somewhat complicated proposal met with some support on the RfA talk page. It sees the RfC process itself as part of the reason that previous RfCs have failed, and attempts to address the problem by splitting it into a three-step process.
Dank, the originator of the proposal, said "... people have many different ideas about what 'the problem at RfA' is, and vote against any proposal which doesn't address 'the problem', so that any single-issue RfC gets heavy opposition right from the start. Also, RfCs tend to produce short, to-the-point responses, leaving us without enough information to figure out what a majority would be willing to vote in favor of." The current RfC starts with a week-long first round that asks voters to identify what they think the general problem with RfA is, and the second round will encourage Wikipedians who share the same view of the problem to work together on solutions. Assuming that no one view of the problem and no one solution dominates, the closers will attempt to craft a compromise position that offers something to everyone in the third round. If the compromise also fails, then Wales will be asked to offer his suggestions for a way forward.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Linguistics. Started in January 2004, the project has grown to include 7 Featured Articles, 4 Featured Lists, 2 A-class Articles, and 15 Good Articles maintained by 43 members. The project's members keep an eye on several watchlists, maintain the linguistics category, and continue to build a collection of Did You Know? entries. The project is home to six task forces and works with WikiProject Languages and WikiProject Writing Systems. We interviewed Aeusoes1.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Linguistics? Do you have any special experience or training in linguistics? Have you contributed to any of the project's Featured or Good Articles?
How well are linguistics topics covered by Wikipedia? Are there any significant gaps in coverage?
Is it difficult to describe the linguistic elements of languages other than English without turning the article into a how-to guide? How does the project prevent this?
What steps does the project take to ensure articles about complex linguistic concepts are easily accessible to the average reader? Where does the project draw the line between too simplified and too complicated?
Have you worked with any of the project's six task forces? What role do the task forces play in supporting the goals of WikiProject Linguistics?
Does WikiProject Linguistics collaborate with any other projects?
What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Next week, we'll play the greatest strategy game of all time. Until then, be a good pawn and read our old articles in the archive.
Reader comments
This week, the Signpost's featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured topics. We interviewed Grapple X and GamerPro64, who are delegates at the featured topic candidates.
Grapple X
Although 2012 regrettably saw several periods with little progress, with the welcome return of GamerPro64 we have seen several interesting topics promoted—in addition to the usual Wikipedia strong points of numismatics, military history and meteorology, the year has also been a strong one for music with topics promoted featuring a mezzo-soprano wunderkind and an Indonesian legend. Sport saw a strong showing, too, with both baseball and motorcycle racing seeing hugely comprehensive topics put through, which reflect the ability of FT to showcase vast spans of knowledge in surprisingly deep chunks. My personal favourite of our 2012 topics was also the year's least—a topic on the Armero tragedy reminded me that there's still room to encapsulate subjects that are entirely new to the process, and to use the idea of a topic to explore an event rather than something that obviously lends itself to the process like a series of lists or a serried history.
GamerPro64
2012 was admittedly a slow year for both myself and Featured Topics. From my near-four-month vacation from the site to having delegates come and go, it was unfortunate that only twelve were promoted. But the ones that were promoted have shown hard work accomplished by the editors. Examples like Nickels of the United States and the Nebula Award topic had their respective articles and lists promoted by a single editor, which itself is a feat worth a congratulations. But the one topic I've been fascinated with since I came back is Chrisye, since its main article is in itself an interesting read. So for this year I hope that there will be an increase in Featured Topics and increased interest in the content.
Seven featured articles were promoted this week:
Five featured lists were promoted this week:
Seventeen featured pictures were promoted this week:
The opening of the Doncram case marks the end of almost 6 months without any open cases, the longest in the history of the Committee.
SarekOfVulcan filed the case last week in an attempt to remedy what he perceived as Doncram's continued unconstructive editing after the failure of previous community discussions and long-term bans. In his statement, he states that it was a combination of mass creation of unchecked content transferred from foreign databases, edit warring, refusal to work with editors due to personal grudges (in particular Orlady), mischaracterisation of other editors and their editing history and personal attacks which led to his filing the case. He also notes that while Doncram is a long-standing editor, he has had disputes with other editors over the content he produces and how he reacts to being challenged.
In his response, Doncram indicated his reluctance to come forward to the committee; however, he believes it is necessary in order to settle what he perceived as the uncivil behaviour Orlady and other editors have exhibited toward him. He goes on to criticise SarekOfVulcan for filing ANI reports with "inflammatory titles" which target him and requested that the case's title be altered to reflect the source of the contention: "long-term bullying and harassment."
He states that past ANI and AFD submissions, "other unpleasantness" and "attack pages" maintained by Orlady (presumably User:Orlady/List) contributed to the "battleground atmosphere." In particular, he named both Orlady and SarekOfVulcan as the "primary instigators of bullying." He believes that it is because he is a "prolific editor" not "unduly concerned" about criticism that he is targeted. Towards the latter part of his response, he called for an interaction ban for Orlady and the deletion of her "attack pages" and a similar remedy for SarekOfVulcan.
In response to Doncram's concerns, arbitrator AGK reassured him that the naming of the case has no bearing on the process of arbitration and because Doncram is linked to all the issues that it bears the eponym. Doncram responded by citing this comment made by Hammersoft as being evidence to the contrary. And despite assurances from AGK that the case would be dealt with in an unbiased fashion, he believes that those trained to overcome potential bias, and by extension, the drafting arbitrators are influenced by "anchoring and related psychological biases."
Evidence submissions close on the 24th. The workshop will be closed and proposed decisions posted on the 28th.
Reader comments
On 22 January, WMF staff and contractors switched incoming, non-cached requests (including edits) to the Foundation's newer data centre in Ashburn, Virginia, making it responsible for handling almost all regular traffic. For the first time since 2004, virtually no traffic will be handled by the WMF's other facility in Tampa, Florida.
"Located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Ashburn offers faster and more reliable connectivity than Tampa, and usually fewer hurricanes", wrote Guillaume Paumier, the Foundation's Technical Communications Manager in a comprehensive blog post published before the switchover.
As of time of writing, the migration has been declared a success, with the two "backup" maintenance windows previously scheduled for later this week scrapped. Total editing downtime so far has been estimated at 30 minutes, with other smaller problems extending further. Overall, however, the migration seems to have been characterised by its praise-worthily minimal impact.
The data centre in Tampa will continue to be maintained as a "hot failover", with "servers ... in standby mode[, ready] to take over, should the primary site experience an outage. Server configuration and data will be synchronized between the two locations to ensure a transition as smooth as possible in case of technical difficulties in Ashburn", writes Paumier. Additionally, the Signpost understands that the Tampa data centre will continue to be used for image scaling in the short term, before that too is migrated to Ashburn. Across the two data centres, the Wikimedia Foundation currently operates a total of approximately 885 servers, serving around 20 billion page views a month.
On 19 December, WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller committed the Foundation to holding quarterly reviews of all its major engineering projects, including the Visual Editor, Mobile, Echo and Flow projects. First up, however, was the Editor Engagement Experiments (E3) team, who held their review last week. That meeting included both the E3 team itself, as well as senior managers at the Foundation (Executive Director Sue Gardner, Director of Features Engineering Terry Chay, and Erik himself), with the draft transcript giving an interesting insight into a world that can often appear to community members as inherently homogeneous.
The report phase of the meeting makes for mixed reading. Although all of the E3 team's projects – post-edit feedback, improving the account creation process, "Onboarding" (giving new users more information on possible editing tasks), and a campaign targeted at donors – appeared in some sense successful, none has yet been able to make a sizeable dent into the English Wikipedia's editor decline. Onboarding showed the most promise, with an unconfirmed 30% increase in users making an edit to mainspace within 24 hours of registering (21.7% vs. 16.5%); a newer project, looking at the provision of "guided tours" (walkthroughs) of the site, was also discussed. The analysis phase focussed on the balance between foundational and user-facing work, the lack of integration between the E3 and E2 teams (i.e. Echo and Flow), and the extent to which gains in terms of "1+ edit" users translated into increases in the numbering of returning editors. There was also disagreement about whether the E3 team was focussed tightly enough on the active editors brief.
The Visual Editor and Mobile projects (including mobile editing and Wikipedia Zero subprojects) are both scheduled to be reviewed in February, although the exact format of the review may be tweaked between then and now.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
.jpg){kind=link}
