Stewards/History

←historical pages	Steward history
This page documents the history of Stewards and the process for electing them, from their creation in 2004 to take over some of the workload previously handled by Wikimedia's sysadmins. Originally based on a "Steward elections through the ages" by Mike.lifeguard, 19 January 2010 (archived).

Stewards are users with complete access to the wiki interface on all Wikimedia wikis, including the ability to change any and all user rights and groups. See Stewards for a current description of their responsibilities.

History

March 2004 — proposal

As of early 2004, user rights were set manually in the database, requiring shell access on the servers. In a wikipedia-l post entitled "Developers should mind their own business", Tim Starling proposed separating user rights administration from software development.

Tim had already created the "developer" group, which allowed for managing user group management. He proposed this group also take care of account renaming and changing article histories when these features were coded (these would later be done by bureaucrats and oversighters, respectively).

He proposed these users be called "honorary developers", selected by nomination and vote "similar to the vote now conducted at the English Wikipedia for sysop access". Honorary developers could lose access via majority vote, arbitration committee ruling, or Jimbo Wales' decree.

April 2004 — foundation

The first "honorary developers" were elected in April 2004; 8 candidates who achieved 80% support in a simple vote were elected, out of 20 nominated. There were no voter requirements in these elections.

Honorary developer was quickly renamed to steward, a name proposed by Daniel Mayer (other proposals were community developer, WikiWarden, community warden, coordinator, Wikimedia servant, secretariat or secretary, and super-bureaucrat). Initial documentation was written; the original description stated "Stewards are people who are able to set arbitrary user rights on any Wikimedia wiki".

The initial steward policies were also drafted during this period, though not yet implemented.

2005—2010

(The following text is duplicated verbatim from the original blog post, and hasn't been integrated or expanded yet.)

By 2005, the second steward elections were held. There were 10 candidates, and voters simply signed “Yes” or “No” for each. A few opposers gave short rationales, but what discussion there was was confined to the talk page. These elections show the finalized principles of activity requirements, and conflicts of interest. At that time, there was only Wikipedia — the conflict of interest principle discouraged stewards from removing privileged access for their own language.

In 2006, we see a strong warning about the role of stewards:

   stewards are not extra-cops !!!

and another notice about the role stewards play. That is, caring for small wikis. That year, there were 16 candidates — and again, the process was a straightforward vote, with very short initial comments from candidates, and short comments from opposers.

2007 sees the increasing formalization of the steward role and the elections. Here, we see a standardized header, organized translations, and sections laid out for questions, yes, no, and neutral. Yet the question section isn’t used — in all, only 17 questions were asked for 18 candidates. Most candidates got zero questions. The talk page reveals a lot of discussion about administering the election. How should pages be organized? Should we use page protection? How should we format candidate pages? The main election page?

There were no elections in 2008. The 2007 elections were in Nov/Dec; the next elections were in February 2009. Again here, we see a very formalized election process, using subpages, templates, and transclusion to get as much as possible translated into as many languages as possible, and streamline the voting process for users. A separate questions page enjoyed much use: 150 questions were posed, many of them leading to protracted back-and-forth. No serious candidate was posed fewer than 4 questions. We also see in 2009 the first instance of so-called “generic” questions – supposedly asked to enlighten voters. Most of these simply ask for a rehashing of the candidate’s statement, and all were asked and answered in English (though most voters are not anglophone). These candidacy statements have been expanded considerably too – from a short introduction of a few sentences to a paragraph or two, translated into multiple languages. Because of the lack of requirements to put oneself forward as a candidate, 26 users ran in the election; at least an additional 5 candidates were disqualified. Most of the candidates didn’t understand what the steward role, and were demonstrably unfit to even run: 6 received less than 25% support. The 2009 elections also saw the institution of the #wikimedia-stewards-elections IRC channel to monitor and administer the elections, and a dedicated team of volunteers verifying the “smooth” operation of the election process.

And now we arrive to this year’s elections. 28 candidates have nominated themselves so far – an additional 11 have been disqualified already. X days before the deadline for submitting a statement of candidacy, the question page is already bloated with the equivalent of 338 questions posed to the candidates. For the first time, we see questions asked and answered in non-English languages, and we see the first example of so-called “generic” questions enshrined in their own section. Because, in previous years, these generic questions would have to be posed to each candidate individually, I’ve counted each “generic” question once per valid candidate. That estimation is on the low side because I’ve counted multipart questions only once. Again, the #wikimedia-stewards-elections IRC channel serves as home base for running the elections.

If you haven’t guessed, I have problems with how these elections are run. I haven’t even started on the confirmations either. I plan to blog about the elections as they unfold. No predictions, no attempts to sway the voters — it’ll be solely on a meta level: How are the elections run? Are they working? What needs to be changed? You may have guessed that “generic” questions are first at the guillotine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 10:51 pm and is filed under WMF, wiki.