Wikipedia administrators

While the first Wikipedia administrators were appointed by Jimmy Wales in October 2001,{{cite magazine |author=Schiff, Stacy |author-link=Stacy Schiff |date=31 July 2006 |title=Know It All |url=http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/31/060731fa_fact |magazine=The New Yorker |access-date=19 February 2014}} administrator privileges on Wikipedia are now granted through a process known as requests for adminship (RfA). Registered editors may nominate themselves, or may request another editor to do so. Andrew Lih, a scientist and professor who is himself an administrator on the English Wikipedia, has said the process is "akin to putting someone through the Supreme Court". Lih also said, "It's pretty much a hazing ritual at this point", in contrast to how the process worked early in Wikipedia's history, when all one had to do to become an admin was "prove you weren't a bozo".

Candidacy for the role is normally considered only after "extensive work on the wiki". Unlike most of Wikipedia, which uses consensus-based decision making, RFA is basically a vote, although some votes may be discounted if the result is close or contested. The vote is described as a "consensus building process", but in practical reality those above 75% support will pass, those below 65% will fail, and those in between are in the "discretionary zone" and subject to further discussion by Wikipedia's bureaucrats, another group of advanced permission holders whose role it is to determine and enact a consensus in certain situations.{{cite web|title=Wikipedia:Bureaucrats|url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bureaucrats|website=Wikipedia|publisher=Wikimedia Foundation|access-date=29 July 2015}} This may have been implemented as a result of RfAs attracting increasing levels of attention: Stvilia et al. quoted that "Prior to mid-2005, RfAs typically did not attract much attention. Since then, it has become quite common for RfAs to attract huge numbers of RfA groupies who all support one another".{{Cite journal |last1=Stvilia |first1=Besiki |last2=Twidale |first2=Michael B. |last3=Smith |first3=Linda C. |last4=Gasser |first4=Les |title=Information quality work organization in wikipedia |doi=10.1002/asi.20813 |journal=Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology |volume=59 |issue=6 |pages=983 |year=2008 |citeseerx=10.1.1.163.5109 |s2cid=10156153 }} The record number of votes in one RfA, as of May 2022, was 468: The RfA of the editor Tamzin was supported by 340 users and opposed by 116, amidst controversy over that candidate's criticism of supporters of Donald Trump.{{Cite web |last=Harrison |first=Stephen |date=June 16, 2022 |title=Inside Wikipedia's Historic, Fiercely Contested "Election" |url=https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/wikipedia-administrator-election-tamzin.html |access-date=October 17, 2022 |website=Slate}}

Once granted administrator privileges, a user has access to additional functions in order to perform certain duties.{{cite web | url=https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829/ | title=3 Charts That Show How Wikipedia Is Running Out of Admins | work=The Atlantic | date=16 July 2012 | access-date=23 January 2014 | author=Meyer, Robinson}} These include "messy cleanup work", deletion of articles deemed unsuitable, protecting pages (restricting editing privileges to that page),{{cite book|title=Wiki: Web Collaboration|last1=Ebersbach|first1=Anja|last2=Adelung|first2=Andrea|last3=Dueck|first3=Gunter|last4=Glaser|first4=Markus|last5=Heigl|first5=Richard|last6=Warta|first6=Alexander|publisher=Springer|year=2008|isbn=978-3-540-68173-1}}{{rp|66}} and blocking the accounts of disruptive users. Blocking a user must be done according to Wikipedia's policies and a reason must be stated for the block, which will be permanently logged by the software.{{rp|401}}{{rp|120}} Use of this privilege to "gain editing advantages" is considered inappropriate.

A 2013 scientific paper by researchers from Virginia Tech and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found that after editors are promoted to administrator status, they often focus more on articles about controversial topics than they did before. The researchers also proposed an alternative method for choosing administrators, in which more weight is given to the votes of experienced editors.{{cite book | url=http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~sanmay/papers/wiki-cikm.pdf | author=Das, Sanmay | title=Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Conference on information & knowledge management - CIKM '13 | chapter=Manipulation among the arbiters of collective intelligence | year=2013 | pages=1097–1106 | doi=10.1145/2505515.2505566 | isbn=978-1-4503-2263-8 | s2cid=52865675 | access-date=2014-01-24 | archive-date=2021-02-19 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210219132454/https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~sanmay/papers/wiki-cikm.pdf | url-status=dead }} This corresponds to a modality of plural voting. Another paper, presented at the 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, analyzed data from all 1,551 requests for adminship from January 2006 to October 2007, with the goal of determining which (if any) of the criteria recommended in Wikipedia's Guide to requests for adminshipSee {{srlink|Wikipedia:Guide to requests for adminship}}. were the best predictors of whether the user in question would actually become an admin. In December 2013, a similar study was published by researchers from the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology in Warsaw, which aimed to model the results of requests for adminship on the Polish Wikipedia using a model derived from Wikipedia's edit history. They found that they could "classify the votes in the RfA procedures using this model with an accuracy level that should be sufficient to recommend candidates."{{Cite journal |last1=Jankowski-Lorek |first1=Michal |last2=Ostrowski |first2=Lukasz |last3=Turek |first3=Piotr |last4=Wierzbicki |first4=Adam |title=Modeling Wikipedia admin elections using multidimensional behavioral social networks |doi=10.1007/s13278-012-0092-6 |journal=Social Network Analysis and Mining |volume=3 |issue=4 |pages=787 |year=2013 |doi-access=free }}

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Administrators