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Wikipedia:Administrator elections

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Administrator elections are a proposed process for selecting administrators – users with access to additional technical features that aid in maintenance. It is an alternative to requests for adminship (RfA), which has been the only way to become administrator on the English Wikipedia since 2003.[1] The first trial election will be held in October 2024. After this trial, the community will discuss whether and how to proceed with administrator elections.

The elections do not replace requests for adminship. Prospective administrators may freely choose which process to use.

Schedule

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Further information: Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Detailed schedule

Eligible candidates

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The only formal prerequisite for adminship is having an extended confirmed account on Wikipedia (500 edits and 30 days of experience).[2] To gain insight on community expectations, please review past successful and unsuccessful RfAs. You can also review past RfA candidate polls, or initiate one if you are interested.

Who can vote

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Administrator elections use the Arbitration Committee Election suffrage requirements. To vote, an editor must meet the following criteria:

  • created their account over 2 months before the election
  • have 150 mainspace edits by 1 month before the election
  • have 10 live edits in the year running up to 1 month before the election
  • not be sitewide blocked during the election
  • not be vanished
  • not be a bot
  • not have already voted with this or another account

You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.

Procedure

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The overall process lasts 10 days: an initial 3-day period for discussion and questions, and a 7-day period for a secret ballot vote. Election cycles are advertised in advance, including watchlist notices. The process is supervised by the bureaucrats.

Period 1: Candidates sign up

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Candidates sign up by a specified date prior to the discussion and questions period. Just like RFA, candidates can be nominated by other editors; please only do so with the candidate's consent. Only candidates who accept their nomination will proceed to the next period. During this phase and the SecurePoll setup phase, candidates and nominators may adjust their candidate subpage as they see fit.

Period 2: Discussion and questions

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During this 3-day period, the community can ask questions and raise issues, as well as provide positive feedback. Candidates are encouraged to participate in the discussion period, answering questions and responding to feedback.

During this discussion-only time, participants are discouraged from posting messages of support/opposition that lack points for discussion. This phase is for sharing thoughts on the candidate or any other topic that may relate to the candidate's applicability – not for indicating personal voting intentions.

The monitors for this phase will be Theleekycauldron and Pickersgill-Cunliffe. Administrators that are not nominating candidates or planning to heavily participate in the discussion phase may feel free to add themselves to this list.

Period 3: Voting

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Once the discussion period is complete, a secret ballot is held for 7 days, using SecurePoll. During this period, discussion is closed, and the page will be marked with a template indicating that discussion is closed. Candidates may be asked direct questions on their user talk pages, but they are not expected to watch their discussion page, nor the election page for the full period, to allow them a respite from community vetting. The ballot may contain multiple candidates; however this is not a competitive election. Voters are asked to evaluate each candidate individually, and all candidates who meet the pass threshold are selected to become administrators. Thus all, some, or even no candidates may be selected.

Tallying

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After voting has ended, the election will be scrutinised by three stewards whose home wiki is not the English Wikipedia. They will check for any duplicate, ineligible, or sockpuppeteer votes, and strike them as necessary. Once scrutineering is complete, votes are tallied, results are announced, and new admins are granted administrative privileges. The pass threshold is 70% or greater. The vote tally is calculated by Support / (Support + Oppose) for each candidate. The scrutineers for the October 2024 election are Johannnes89, EPIC, and Yahya. Historically for other elections, scrutineering has taken a few days or weeks — an exact end date is not available.

The results of the October 2024 Administrator Elections are as follows:

[Results will be posted here by the scrutineers]

Please watchlist the page Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Results to see when the results are posted.

Withdrawing

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If a candidate wants to withdraw during the call for candidates phase or the SecurePoll setup phase, they may simply remove themselves from the candidate list and nominate their candidate subpage for speedy deletion. They will not be listed as a candidate during the SecurePoll vote.

If a candidate wishes to withdraw during the discussion phase or voting phase, they should edit the list of candidates and move themselves to the withdrawn section. For transparency, the candidate subpage shall not be deleted, and their candidate subpage will remain transcluded on the discussion phase page. An attempt will be made to remove the candidate from the SecurePoll ballot, but this is not guaranteed. If the candidate ends up on the SecurePoll ballot, whatever result they achieve will be considered invalid, and election organizers will attempt to keep the result unpublished.

Rationale

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The number of requests for adminship (RFA) has declined from a peak of 920 in 2007 to just 36 in 2016, and has since averaged around 23 per year. This suggests problems with the RFA process, which might be mitigated with a different process, such as administrator elections. Ways that administrator elections might help include:

  • Reducing contention via secret voting - Reduces the opportunity for contentious discussion amongst participants. For example, voters do not have to disclose their vote, nor give an explanation for it. This avoids unnecessary direct confrontation of opposers, or of the candidate.
  • Shorter discussion period - The discussion period is limited to three days, instead of seven.
  • No possibility of a bureaucrat chat
  • Many candidates - So less pressure on individual candidates.

Are additional RFCs required before the trial?

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No. The result of the corresponding request for comment discussion is The community supports trying this proposal for 1 election, after which it will be reviewed in Phase II. While there are concerns regarding the implementation details of this proposal, given this is a trial run, there is sufficient support to run the election as written.

Accordingly, one election will be held, with implementation details (such as scrutineering) worked out based on discussions on this page's talk page. After the trial, request for comment discussions will be held to discuss how to proceed, thus allowing the community to alter the process if desired, or choose not to continue.

Comparison with requests for adminship

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Requests for adminship Administrator elections
Discussion period 7 days (overlapping) 3 days
Voting period 7 days
Ballot Open Secret (using SecurePoll)
Success criterion Consensus Supermajority
Success threshold 65–75%[3] 70%
Suffrage Extended confirmed account See § Who can vote
When it can happen Any time October 2024

Newsletter

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If you'd like to receive a user talk message when important administrator election milestones are reached, such as when a date is chosen and when the Call for Candidates phase opens, please add yourself to the mailing list.

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Before June 2003 it was possible to request adminship on a mailing list and some admins were appointed directly by Jimmy Wales.
  2. ^ Consensus agreement on this requirement was reached at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2024 review/Phase I § Proposal 25: Require nominees to be extended confirmed.
  3. ^ As RfA is a consensus-based process, there is no exact threshold for success, but in practice a candidate with below 65% support is almost always unsuccessful, and above 75% almost always successful. Candidates with between 65 and 75% support are typically subject to a bureaucrat discussion about the consensus for their request, and outcomes vary on a case-to-case basis.
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