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See also: WP:Advice for RfA candidates

Words

Words of wisdom:

RfA is a horrible and broken process

— Jimbo Wales, User talk:My76Strat 18 March 2011

...if anything, fixing one problem would break the tradition that nothing changes at RFA and make it easier to fix other problems.

— WereSpielChequers, RfA discussions 29 January 2011

This may sound like a cliché, but maybe they're discouraged because RfA has become a bloodbath.

— The Utahraptor, RfA discussions 25 January 2011

And that is the exact problem with having the wide open venue for questions – they promote drive-by voting rather than actual examination of the candidate. A simple restriction that all questions must be about something in their editing history would go a long way towards improving the tone of RfAs.

— JimMillerJr, RfA discussions 25 January 2011

...it's the people that pick one error in an otherwise qualified candidate and oppose over it that discourage potential candidates. More often than not, those ridiculous oppose !votes create a pile-on that ultimately fails the RfA. .

— The Utahraptor, RfA discussions 25 January 2011

The thing that makes fixing RFA so challenging is, yes, the community... The thing stopping us from fixing RFA is us ourselves.

— Tofutwitch11, Trying to improve RfA 1 February 2011

People at RfA love to load up on one particular flaw. It's one of the reasons hardly anyone goes for the mop anymore: they just load up on one thing, and hold it to be worth as much as everything else.

— Resident Mario, 28 February 2011

People support on the basis of a good track record with no "bad" incidents. That is, they think someone is a good admin because of a lack of evidence that person is bad. So when asked why they think someone would be good admin, they have nothing specific to point at (merely a lack of bad behavior). On the other hand, when opposing someone, generally they oppose on the basis of one or a small number of incidents which exposed that nominees's judgment as questionable – that is, they have a small set of incidents which they can point at affirmatively and say "these are why I oppose". As a result, oppose votes are much easier to explain than support votes.

— -User:Raul654's 10th law of Wikipedia
Just words
There is 'badgering' (to harass or annoy persistently – Merriam Webster), and genuine expression of concern that a vote might not conform to our Wikisocial norms. Practicing questionably high criteria or posing trick or irrelevant questions are issues that could be perhaps better addressed on the voter's own talk page where the editor is made to look and feel a fool slightly less publicly. Purely disingenuous, disruptive, or false voting probably ought to be responded to directly on the RfA.
In any case, the number of mini threaded discussions being moved to the RfA's talk page is becoming very much more frequent. This is not due to more consistent clerking, but is a result of the steady degradation of the environment of the process, the doubling of participation since the December 2015 reforms, and the classical propensity at Internet forums for everyone to add their two pence. – Kudpung September 2019
What admins do

See also:

Unless you gnome away at deletion cats and avoid contentious areas such as ANI and RfC/U, someone has to do the dirty work, so if you think being an admin is a cool job, think again. I can't speak for other admins, but I can't say that I really enjoy being an admin. It keeps me involved with Wikipedia at a time where I have run out of ideas for content creation and where I get quickly bored with routine tasks such as copyediting, finishing articles for lazy editors, or translating articles from other languages. However, I suppose I do like the forensics that come with the admin tools and a good knowledge of policies, things like sniffing out socks and paid editors.

Whether candidates are likely to pass RfA or not is very much up to them. Those who are in a hurry to get the bit probably shouldn't be getting it, and usually they don't. Those who joined Wikipedia with the intention of being an admin somday joined for the wrong reason. Generally, for better or for worse, the vast majority of RfA conclude with an appropriate closure, so no serious candidate should be really afraid at all to run the gauntlet for 168 hours.

What others think

This recent 2021 statement is one of the most insightful comments ever made about adminship (any emphasis is mine)

I said years ago that we had too many admins. Now I'm not sure, but I don't think we're anywhere near having too few. For one thing, a lot of being an admin is the non-logged actions, as I've said before, including deciding not to speedy delete a page (or for that matter, closing an AfD as keep or no consensus), and (trying to) defuse conflict by explaining things. […] admins are editors and volunteers too, and sometimes they're more active and sometimes they're less active. However, we've lost some fine admins to resignation, several over things that I also deplore. (I think we've also lost some good admins to ArbCom trigger-happiness and to the inactivity rule: not everyone is going to ask for their bit back […])

I am very concerned that "We need more admins" turns easily into "We need this person" per "We need to do something — This is something — Therefore we need to do this". We don't need more abusive admins. We need fewer of those. (And I don't necessarily mean lop off their heads desysop them; a better way would be for their friends and fellow admins to work to reverse the transformation when the powah goes to their heads, or when they burn out from all the shite they see or from sheer overwhelm.

I spoke long ago about admins closing ranks at the noticeboard as being a problem, […] Of course, editors disagree heftily about which admins are abusive; one reason being that there's a bloc of editors for whom civility means not using "dirty words" or actually calling someone an idiot, and sarcasm and mockery of their stupidity are how you win an argument, and then there's a bloc of editors like me who regard prescribing "workplace language" as classism and lack of international experience, and snideness and other tactics of "forensic debate" as inherently battlegroundish. Probably some others, too :-) ...Those differences are probably related to how different candidates feel at RfA. For what it's worth, I know many candidates feel attacked. I didn't, but then I went in with the attitude "Oh shit, I got nominated for admin, well, this process might actually be fun"; it helped that the first neutral raised an interesting concern, so I responded and the person promptly supported. (My RfA should not be generalized from; I think most of us enjoyed ourselves, with me cracking wise and silly socking happening and all.)

People have different personalities; and some candidates have never encountered much opposition to what they do on-wiki, or never taken the criticism seriously, so they probably perceive a sudden eruption from out of the woodwork. I think nominators need to work hard at uncovering such issues and getting the candidate to realize they will probably arise in the RfA, rather than trying to protect the candidate after the missiles start flying; people do change, and I want to see the candidate demonstrate an appropriate response (including defending their choices, which was what I did with that first neutral !vote).

[…] nothing can prepare you for how nasty it can be to be an admin (in my case it wasn't so much attacks because I was an admin as things I saw because I was an admin, but that will vary), and the RfA is the first taste of that for many candidates who may have been even more unprepared for that aspect than I was. […] I am sorry for candidates who find RfA a horrible experience, but I think that's at least partially a matter of personality, and it's more important to me that the community be able to suss out whether we trust a candidate. – Yngvadottir[1]

What I think

If you have come here from the advice page I wrote or from ORCP, then this is the natural extension to it. I've seen every aspect of RfA, adminship, and desysoping, first-hand.

I take an active interest in RfA because as a relatively new user, and fast learner and religiously sticking to the rules, I was taken to task by a couple of really mean, team-tagging teenage admins so I wanted to find out who and what sysops are and how on earth such miscreants (now long since departed and/or desysoped) could become admins, so I discovered the RfA talk page and made my first edit to it in early 2010. See the Activity on that talk page; once the busiest forum on Wikipedia, it has diminished in parallel proportions to the general interest in RfA since the watershed year of 2007.

I then started this page long before I ever dreamed of being an admin myself. I never wanted to be one, but I was asked so many times that I thought I would finally put it to the test so I allowed myself to be nominated. As it turned out, my own RfA was quite contentious, but with what was a high turnout for pre 2015 reforms, it passed with flying colours. I'm not convinced that the current system is in the best interest of the project as it is today. The best and most essentially encyclopaedic articles of social, scientific, geographical, and biographical content have possibly been submitted; a quick look at any current list at NPP (incidentally a system that I was largely instrumental in getting developed and improved) will clearly demonstrate that the majority of new submissions are sportspeople, spam, copyvio, sockpuppetry, vandalism, tabloid news, political candidates, bands, and companies, of doubtful notability.[1] Equally important, it also needs people who can have access to some parts of the software for carrying out non contentious office work. This all needs some editors who can be trusted with some special tools, and to use them intelligently, with reasonable accuracy, and in the best interest of the encyclopedia and not to their own ends. It is assumed also that such people would be a role model, and lead by example. Unfortunately, too many admins aren't, and they stir up as much ill feeling as others attempt to combat. That said, being an admin will make enemies, and for a busy admin this can happen to the extent that enough vindictive editors, and those with an entrenched antipathy, can sometimes twist things into 'evidence' that can lead to desysoping by a 'trigger-happy Arbcom'.

The results of RfA are sometimes a lottery: apart from a handful of regulars who generally (but not always) know what they are doing, the !voting is in the hands of a flux of one-time commentators, fans, detractors, and newcomers. In some cases a lot of canvassing clearly goes on behind the scenes, some base their comments ostensibly on how others have commented, and some voters clearly do not fully understand the process. Other participants will go to extraordinary lengths to support their votes, often retrieving old and no longer relevant diffs from the archives. I carefully follow every RfA and generally vote on all of them.

When I comment or vote, I do so after fully researching the candidate's history and I make my mind up before even reading any votes that have already been cast. If after doing so, my findings do happen to be similar to one already made, I will add an 'as per', for economy of words. Sometimes I find that I have nothing to say that will add weight to the discussion, in which case I might occasionally abstain completely, without even leaving a comment in the 'neutral' section. I never vote to cancel out a majority that I may not agree with. I have only ever asked user questions at RfA four times, and I generally ignore those 'optional' questions and the answers the candidates are forced to make when making my decision.

If I voted for you, be happy and do a good job if you passed and if you failed on a close call, I'm sure you will pass next time. If I voted for you and you passed, but you fail to meet the expectations you convinced me of for supporting you, I'm more disappointed in myself than I am in you, because I clearly made an error of judgement.
If I opposed your RfA, don't take it personally, chances are I was really opposing the system for allowing you to be subjected to something you weren't ready for. If you're still serious about genuinely needing the tools, and will work towards it, my talk page is just here, I'm also on email, and I'm a very good listener.

If you !voted only once or twice at RfA and if you are an experienced editor, consider why, and why you don't do it more often. If you are one of those people who waste our time by posing silly or unrelated questions, or questions you personally don't even know the answers to, or create drama by being uncivil, consider that your participation may be counter-productive. We need admins, and your efforts, however innocent and in good faith, are misplaced and may ultimately lead to the destruction of the chances of promotion of someone who would have rendered good service to the project. If you are new at Wikipedia, try to gain more experience in different areas, do some New Page Patrolling (carefully), edit some articles, and come back to !vote on RfA when you you understand more about what the role of admins is, and why so many good editors don't want to go through the RfA process.

I almost never adhere to my criteria below, because there are always exceptions to my rules. For example, an editor who has made 150,000 AIV reports via Huggle with only 2% false positives, and who only wants to work in that field, can clearly be trusted with the tools, but hasn't demonstrated any judgmental skills for closing AfD, adding content, or or understanding user behaviour patterns. Candidates who boast of having made hundreds of new pages, that turn out to be one-line stubs or WP:DAB, or candidates whose dozens of GA and FA are nothing more than 20 – 30 minor edits to pages that serious authors have spent hours contributing to, are lacking in basic honesty. Candidates who have rarely contributed to policy development, help pages, WP:RfC, WP:AfD, and other meta discussions and debates might not be well prepared for adminship – even if they have a lot of green blobs and bronze stars to their credit. Likewise, a candidate whose own creations are still peppered with maintenance tags can hardly be deemed responsible to police other editors' pages – we don't patrol the motorways with traffic cops whose licences are still endorsed for dangerous driving.

An occasional minor error needing a technical tweak is not a cause for disqualifying a candidate, neither is a 2% error rate in tagging new pages. Failing to correctly answer a trick question that has been deliberately formulated to faze the candidate is not a cause for disqualification either, nor are any other attempts to derail an RfA of a candidate who should obviously be passing. Biting new contributors is not a fair sport, but the use of occasional formal or blunt but socially acceptable language, or a rare and mild snide aside when called for and addressed at experienced editors, are not breaches of civility rules, are certainly not personal attacks, and are also not causes for disqualification – some editors, even admins, use much worse language on RfA discussions!

There is no justification for editors, whether admins or not, to subject candidates to a process that contains features that they themselves would not be, could not be, or were not subjected to. It's not infrequent for extreme cases of personal attacks to be made with impunity at RfA, of the kind that would not escape admonishment in other discussion spaces. Some admins who participate in today’s RfAs would not pass today's criteria. I don't believe that the interpellation style of RfA is conducive to a pleasant environment for the candidate.

On a lighter note, read this trilogy of articles in The Signpost from 2018 and find out what other admins have said about adminship:

How I vote

My !votes are always commented and are proceeded by a clear Support, Oppose, or Neutral. I very rarely use additional quantifiers at the semantic level such as strong, weak, etc., as they are subjective, and I don't really see how the closing 'crat can accurately parse them. I always take at least one hour or more to research before voting.

As of 16 October 2016, my !votes matched the result in 90.06% of the times. I have commented on well over 400 RFA's.

See how I voted at RfA by clicking here

I will no longer support a 4th (or more) attempt at adminship, nor will I support a disclosed WP:RTV that was the result of Arbcom sanctions or a community ban of any kind. I made a grave error of judgement by supporting this RfA, desyoped August 13, 2013 'For cause'.

My criteria

This is my 'laundry list' as some users call it who would never pass RfA anyway (or wouldn't if they ran under any post 2007 criteria). The list is long but taken as a whole it's nothing more than the bare minimum just spelled out. Note that I also take a dim view of frivolous requests at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Optional RfA candidate poll. Ideally a candidate should have or be:

  1. The maturity level of a responsible adult (18+) - evaluation of maturity is highly critical, but subjective, and I believe that minors who are admins should demonstrate an exceptional level of maturity that is beyond average for their real age. This also means that the candidate should have at least a basic user page but not one that looks like a 14-year-old's bedroom wall.
  2. The ability to communicate in proper standard English (non-native and/or creole users take note), understanding that WP is not built by teenagers for teenagers or for mobile phone SMS.
  3. 12 months autoconfirmed user or at least 6,000 non-automated edits in the preceding 6 months.
  4. Preferably >30% edits to Talk and Wikipedia space.
  5. Preferably at least 4 created articles of at least 500 words (about 3,500 bytes) not including sources, perfectly sourced and formatted - no outstanding maintenance tags on any creations where the candidate is still the major contributor. FA, GA, or DYK are not prerequisites, but a very minimum of article creation and/or an equivalent amount of new content should demonstrate that we are here first and foremost to build an encyclopedia and not a WP:MMORPG. See also Why admins should create content.
  6. No mass creation of very short stubs.
  7. Preferably >100 New Page Patrols.
  8. No warnings or comment about wrong NPP tagging in the preceding 6 months.
  9. <5% declined CSD at New Page Patrolling.
  10. >10 advice edits to a help desk that demonstrate knowledge of the policies/guidelines.
  11. >50 edits to AfD with adequate rationale that demonstrate knowledge of the policies (hit rate over 75% on Scottywong's tool)
  12. >5 edits to RfA (although this number might be difficult to achieve for newer users) with adequate rationale that demonstrate knowledge of the process.
  13. 95% edit summaries in the main space.
  14. No warnings for vandalism.
  15. No warnings for spam.
  16. No sockpuppetry (unauthorised use of multiple accounts).
  17. No L3, L4, or single issue warnings.
  18. A clean block log of at least 12 months, but this could be longer depending on the severity of the issue and the length of the block(s).
  19. No confirmed personal attacks reported to a notice board.
  20. Users have very different opinions as to what constitutes incivility - I judge this for myself and I'm not very tolerant. Note however that there is a big difference between being blatantly rude and just not mincing one's words.
  21. Only 1 3rr warning, and older than 6 months.
  22. No warnings of any kind 3 months preceding RfA.
  23. No CSD, PROD, or AfD notices for own creations 6 months preceding RfA.
  24. No reverted non-admin closures of any debate types.
  25. No unnecessary 'clerking' of admin areas - such as, for example, WP:PERM.
  26. 2nd or subsequent RfA not sooner than 3 months.
  27. 2nd or subsequent RfA not less than 1,500 new manual, major edits.
  28. No possible signs that the candidate has joined Wikipedia with the express intention of working towards adminship (includes hat-collecting and over-enthusiastic participation on admin boards).
  29. No canvassing on- or off-Wiki (off-Wiki discussion with your nominator is OK).
  30. Finally, and most importantly, people don't join the army just because they want to shoot guns, and they don't join the police force just because they want to drive a fast car with a blue light and a siren and hand out speeding fines. Which means, for those who don't get the metaphors, that users who join Wikipedia with the sole intention of working their way towards adminship don't get my support, which also means that 'I wanna be an admin someday' userbox.

Note: I often make exceptions to these criteria by taking an aggregate of the candidate's performance.

Sysop candidates need (and should practice and be able to explain to others):

THE BOTTOM LINE

In my opinion the bar is not too high, it's about right. If you check all the boxes above chances are that you'll pass with flying colours. However, the actual bar is set anew by the participants at each RfA depending on who turns up to !vote. My current issue is that the quality of the !voting and the turn-out of responsible voters are too low.

See how you voted

(Enter your name and copy the URL to your browser address bar)

  • http://toolserver.org/~tparis/rfap/index.php?name=YOUR NAME HERE&rfa=on
  • http://toolserver.org/~snottywong/cgi-bin/rfastats.cgi?name=YOUR NAME HERE&max=&startdate=&altname=

Participants at Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship

2450+ people are watching the main RfA page. It gets roughly 230 hits per day. 2450+ people are watching the RfA talk page. It gets roughly 347 hits per day.

Perennial issues

(Taken from Perennial proposals)

All the issues that are being constantly recycled are listed at Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Adminship

  • 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.

Too many questions at RfA

  1. Additional questions to be asked, or ban canned questions.
  2. Reason for previous rejection: RfA is a discussion and people may need to be able to ask questions they find pertinent towards making a decision. People should be able to ask the questions they want/need to ask to make an assessment based upon their individual criteria.
  3. Note: While there has been no consensus to ban canned questions, they have routinely been criticized as not being effective or adding much value to the process.

See also: The questions they ask at RfA

Unbundling of tasks

Can't be done: It's confusing; if we can't trust people to use their tools sensibly, they don't become admins. Period. A "partial admin" process would at least double the already considerable frictional effort expended at WP:RFA, as users debate who gets full sysop powers versus who gets only partial abilities.

Prerequisites for adminship

Reasons for previous rejection: While candidates with few edits and/or a lack of project-space contributions often fail per WP:SNOW or WP:NOTNOW, there are always exceptions. The encyclopedia should not lose out on a good candidate just because he or she has not achieved an arbitrary number of edits or does not frequent a particular area of the encyclopedia. In addition, edit counts are not a reliable indicator of an editor's experience or competence. It is better to evaluate candidates on the quality of their contributions, not the quantity of their edits. Finally, no one agrees on what the prerequisites should be.

On an RFC in October 2015 I said: By and large, those who vote regularly, intelligently, and objectively at RfA practice a code of criteria that a vast number of editors of the right calibre for adminship easily exceed. We must be wary however of those who apply ludicrous barriers to adminship, vote against the system rather than against the candidate, and those who just never seem to get it right. Some fairly recent newer regular voters to RfA appear to have brought with them some ridiculously high demands for edit count. Even if some arbitrary statistic might have shown that most successful candidates have 33,000 edits or whatever, it is absolutely possible for a candidate of the right calibre to have demonstrated within the right dispersal of 6,000 or so edits that they do indeed understand what is required of admins. Other newer voters insist on GA and even FA. One downside to this is that it makes adminship a meritocratic process - a trophy for good work or it simply forces candidates into half-hearted superior quality content work while they may already be more than satisfactorily helping us to build this encyclopedia.. Naturally a handful of medium sized, immaculate creations would be a plus, because I do ascribe the theory that 'Anyone who wants to police pages should know how to produce them' to be a quality for potential adminship. BTW, NOTNOW failures have nothing to do with any of this; they are generally the result of people simply refusing to read all the advice before transcluding an RfA, or strangely believing it does not apply to them. Such RfAs are the least of our worries.

Nothing has changed much. That RFC left the question open.

Summary of recent discussion participants

This needs bringing up to date

('First edit' means first edit to WT:RfA. Note that by September 2014 these figures may be well out of date)

RfA talk as of 3 January 2011
  • Nearly 2,500 people have commented
  • 1,371 commented 5 times or less
  • Of the 111 people who commented over 100 times, 60 were still active in 2010/2011
  • 13 users who are still active have contributed over 40 times
  • 237 users commented for the first time in 2010
  • 93 commented 1 time only
  • 163 commented 5 times or less

23 commented over 20 times:

The top ten contributors are
Micellaneous
edits to Talk RfA
  • Tofutwitch11 22 First October 2010. Total Wikipedia edits: 3,792
  • Kudpung 87 First April 2010. Total Wikipedia edits: 25,000 (66,116 as of 24 September 2014)
  • The Utahraptor 51 First October 2010. Total Wikipedia edits: 14,166
  • WereSpielChequers 478 First October 2008. Total Wikipedia edits: 84,277
  • Fetchcomms 19 First August 2010. Total Wikipedia edits: 36,989

The suggestions they make

    1. Each editor is permitted only one question on the candidate page.
    2. Questions are limited in length, which precludes the "one question" from being a multi-part monster.
    3. Questions must be candidate-specific, not repeats of questions asked of every candidate.
    4. Questions may not be redundant to those already asked by others.
    5. Questions that do not meet these criteria may be entertained on the talk page if the candidate wishes.
    6. Questions are not vetted in advance, but they are subject to amendment or removal if they do not follow the rules.

I think these may actually be more useful ideas for RFA than any of the proposals above. User:RL0919, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

  1. Why do you want to be an admin?

References

  1. ^ (February 16, 2011), The Missing Wikipedians Retrieved December 31, 2017.
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