Meta talk:Requests for adminship/Archives/2010

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Suggested changes to minimum criteria

At Meta:Requests for adminship#Regular adminship, the first criterion is Be an administrator, bureaucrat, or checkuser on a local Wikipedia or related project.

I'd like to suggest changing this to Be an administrator, bureaucrat, or checkuser on a local Wikipedia or other content project., and make a list of those projects which are not considered "content projects". While efforts as a sysop on flaggedrevs or testwikipedia are potentially useful, the criterion is mainly used to determine if a user has 1) familiarity with restricted-access tools of some sort and 2) familiarity with basic Wiki processes and ability to gauge consensus.

Also, we include checkuser (are there a significant number of checkusers without sysop rights?) and we don't include global sysop. Should GS's be eligible for Meta adminship without obtaining local sysophood first?

I don't intend to demean the efforts of those who work on "internal" processes and projects, but the communities in place on such projects are far different from those in community-led projects. Kylu 17:40, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

i do support this suggestion Mardetanha talk 17:54, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
Me too. A requirement of a adminship on an other project should include GS as they are sysops on projects where this is enabled (even if not elected). --WizardOfOz talk 18:00, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
I support this suggestion as well, testwiki (and similar) sysops shouldn't be eligable, but GS should, because they are dealing with a huge number of projects and they are coordinating their actions here - Hoo man (talk) 18:02, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
I agree, but I'm not sure of GS. Global sysops are about «antivandalism and routine maintenance» (some previous version said uncontroversial edit) and «they have no extra editorial control over content or the local community»; so it's quite different from being a local sysop (even on non-content projects). You could say that GS flag is more important than, for instance, local sysop flag on a quite small project like itwikiquote ;-) (although we have hundreds of smaller projects :-p); but we're not talking about "importance", it's not a cursus honorum. --Nemo 18:17, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
Comment Comment we already have some sysops from smaller projects :P --WizardOfOz talk 18:22, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
I was thinking of Shijualex's request for global sysop the other day while reading this comment. I agree that the terminology should be changed to content projects but there should be some distinctions on case to case basis and to that effect, content projects could be preferred over "related projects" so as to not become exclusionary of smaller projects. About the distinction between Checkuser and globalSysops, I thought the reason was to show support of the community they are coming from. Theo10011 18:29, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
  • (ec with Nemo) Thank you for bringing this, Kylu. I would change it to "Be an administrator on a content related Wikimedia project" (for at least 3 months of experience, perhaps??).
    About CheckUser. I think that CheckUser does not really provide you admin experience, but that you need sysop tools for that extension to be useful to you. Some projects (nlwiki, for example) have appointed users to the checkuser role w/o sysop tools. Unless they've had sysop tools before I do not think they should be elegible for adminship on meta. The same happens with the bureaucrat flag - without sysop it is pretty useless. I consider both, meta and commons; sensitive projects because actions taken here and there can affect all the WMF projects. --dferg ☎ talk 18:31, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

So, it seems fairly clear that the checkuser mention should be removed. Theo's point regarding content projects gives another idea, though: What of making it "elected sysop" rather than "content project sysop", since an election implies community consideration and approval, rather than (for instance) test.wikipedia (I pick on them because I have done this, there...)where someone simply has to ask the right person nicely. This would also remove weird cases, such as temporary admins on smaller projects who may not have community favor and sysops appointed by staff or stewards for whatever reason. My main concern is that we want people who have been vetted by another community previously: The main issue with this, of course, is that there are perfectly capable people with adminship who were around prior to wide-scale institution of elections for rights. Kylu 19:40, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

I understand the need to have community vetted Admins, but theres also the issue that some communities are just not that active, some have appointments without going through the proper process at all, direct appointments by stewads, staff, b-cats mostly because of the absence of an active community there. I hope for some consideration to those who have shown that they are experienced with using Sysop tools no matter how they were appointed, which brings me to Dfreg's recommendation for a 3 month experience criteria which might make more sense. Theo10011 19:46, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
One thing that concerns me is that barring this change, it's possible to do technical or maintenance only work on a smaller project by appointment, with no community interaction needed. Now, I'm not opposed to people who are primarily concerned with "internal" projects such as labs or strategywiki being meta-admins, I just want to ensure that they've got significant community interaction and have passed some sort of vetting prior to coming to Meta: Edits here, frankly, affect every project that the WMF hosts and in some cases (such as the Spam Blacklist) a number of non-WMF projects as well. We can always use the help, but it's sensitive enough that we should be somewhat cautious about who gets access to the rights. Kylu 22:54, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
I understand the importance of Meta, but you are also overlooking the nature of Meta. I don't think being well-versed in english Wikipedia policies and guidelines would bring any credibility to the tasks on meta, neither would the english Wikipedia community support. The concern here is, if the admin would be trust-able enough with the Sysop tools, I would argue smaller Wikis that receive their share of Vandalism would qualify an admin more than any content projects, especially the larger ones. I think it should not be written down in stone and should be considered on a case-to-case basis. Theo10011 23:24, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
I'm not sure why this is necessary. These are all just minimum requirements to apply/stand for election, they're not like "you fully qualified to be an admin if you fulfill these and we'll automatically let you be one." Why do we need to make it more restrictive? We can enforce our more restrictive views about an individuals qualifications during the actual vote, or on a case-by-case basis. Cbrown1023 talk 22:02, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
I absolutely agree, make it a case by case decision as mentioned above.Theo10011 22:06, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

I've given this a bit of thought since I saw the posting. I do think GS rights people should be considered for Meta rights. I agree that CU is not (on its own) a good indicator in some ways of admin experience but GS definitely is. I've always been of the opinion that Stewards would be welcome to have Meta admin rights for their time as stewards. I imagine a steward without rights on any wiki if such a thing occurred would be seen as a candidate for admin rights here to allow then to fully do the tasks of a steward. A GS will often come across spamming cross wiki - as such access to the SBL would be a benefit to Meta and wikis. --Herby talk thyme 08:12, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Silly poll for the preceeding question

Not a vote, just an attempt at gauging consensus before making any overly bold changes. Preferably, use *{{yes}} or *{{no}} and, if you want, an optional comment next to your signature. Thanks! Kylu 23:01, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Results being discussed bellow -- Dferg ☎ talk 11:39, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Global sysops

Should Global Sysops be considered for Meta adminship if the user has no other adminships?

Checkuser

Is Checkuser sufficient experience, without other adminships, for Meta adminship?

Non-content projects

Should projects such as liquidthreads, testwikipedia, strategy, and prototype allow an admin there, with no other adminships, to qualify for Meta adminship?

  • Support Support Depends on a case by case basis, 2 people(me included) from strategy wiki already asked for Admin-ship, preference could be given for content project but should not disqualify them. they would have familiarity with Sysop tools and general maintenance. Maybe their experience could be considered, I would also understand a time limit as an admin suggested above. Theo10011 23:17, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Oppose in part per Kylu -diff- I expect some sort of community interaction & tool use experience in a content related project before applying for admin here. --dferg ☎ talk 23:56, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support Support We shouldn't exclude people from being able to stand for election on Meta just because they're only active on something we consider a "non-content project". In addition, just because a project isn't a content project, doesn't mean it doesn't have a community and doesn't require admins to be experienced. For example, testwikis don't require any experience, trust, etc., while wikis like strategywiki are given based on trust and people can get a lot of experience there. We shouldn't specifically restrict people like that from applying. Cbrown1023 talk 00:16, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Oppose As this is a work just for exemple and without realy decicions which have to be maked in a "real" community. --WizardOfOz talk 05:16, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Oppose per others above --Herby talk thyme 08:26, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Oppose; I've dished out the admin bit like candy at liquidthreads and flaggedrevs because it's just for testing the interface. Not much at all to do with adminship proper. Some nuances of the community cannot really be learnt without being highly involved in a content-driven project. sonia 09:18, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Oppose mickit 11:03, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Oppose If there is a requirement. Cbrown1023 may be right: but if these meta-projects (we're talking about strategywiki, outreachwiki, usabilitywiki and mediawikiwiki, apart from test wikis) are not so different from Meta, and they have good admins who wouldn't qualify for adminship on Meta, this would mean that our requirement doesn't make sense, because someone can be a good "meta" admin without any experience on content projects. --Nemo 11:08, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Oppose -FASTILY (TALK) 23:31, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Oppose (Very late vote, sorry!! Missed that poll) - per other people above. -Barras 18:18, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
  • Oppose Oppose Maximillion Pegasus 22:58, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Election requirement

Should we have a requirement that adminships on other projects be elected positions in order to qualify for Meta adminship?

  • Oppose Oppose even a lot of content projects don't have active communities, many are appointed by stewards here or by B-cats directly. This would exclude any Wiki that is below a certain level of activity which a lot are, if you look at some of the request for stewards.Theo10011 23:17, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
    {{yes}} per my statement above. --dferg ☎ talk 23:44, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
    After a review, not sure about this so I abstain for now. --dferg ☎ talk 14:56, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  •   I still don't see why we need to make all of these requirements for people to just *stand* for election, so I'm loath to add even more restrictions, but this requirement sounds sane enough, if enough people agree with it. Cbrown1023 talk 00:16, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support Support Except for GS. --WizardOfOz talk 05:17, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  •   As I said in the previous section, maybe we can find good admins who don't meet the previous-adminship-requirement at all, still it would make sense to "force" them to make some cross-wiki experience on at least one other project. But I don't like the "election requirement" much because it could exclude sysops from lots of smaller projects where it's difficult to organize elections, and it can also be difficult to verify if someone was elected on that project (maybe back in 2005 or even before). I think that excluding "non-content projects" is enough. --Nemo 11:08, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support Support -FASTILY (TALK) 23:32, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support Support (Very late vote, sorry!! Missed that poll) -Barras 18:18, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

It does seem like the conclusions (as I see them) were not carried into policy here? --Herby talk thyme 15:05, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Seeing that there are no comments since October 2010 I guess we should update the policy. What do the other bureaucrats think? -- Dferg ☎ talk 15:09, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
We can change it. Someone should make conclusion. --WizardOfOz talk 18:14, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Likely conclusion?

Reviewing the above it would seem to me that the consensus on eligibility for admins here is

  1. Global sysops. I would suggest that very marginally they would be eligible. However it would seem sensible to re-run this poll on its own and "advertise" here.
  2. Checkuser. This would not be sufficient to allow admin here.
  3. Non-content projects. This would not be sufficient to allow admin here.
  4. Election requirement. From what is there there should be an "election requirement" however this may need re-running.

Solely my thought - other views welcome. --Herby talk thyme 09:49, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

  • As things stand now I agree with your conclusion. I see clear consensus that checkuser & non-content projects are not enough requirements for adminship at meta. Equally I do not see a clear consensus on the global sysops & election requirement requirements & suggest re-polling them. -- Dferg ☎ talk 11:41, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
  • Agree. --WizardOfOz talk 17:07, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment Comment This is a bit of a 'because I need to get it off my chest' comment so please forgive me, I did not see this discussion while I was working and never got a chance to vote. On the topic at hand however I don't actually think there is a very good consensus about the election requirement (4 support (1 of which was 3 months after the rest), 1 oppose, 2 neutrals that sure look to be leaning oppose) but I'm clearly biased about that since I think this entire discussion and decision is a serious mistake. Limiting people from applying seems meaningless. If they are not suitable for RfA let them stand, they will fail and likely get snow closed. If some people believe in these rules let them oppose because of them. Setting them in stone ONLY limits our possibilities of good admins. It does not do anything to keep away bad admins since those would almost certainly fail anyway. Even the admin on another project requirement to me is a little silly given this reason but we are making it sillier if we add the content Wiki only rule and the election rule further limiting ourselves. We already have a problem with engaging users from smaller wikis because they feel unwanted and unsupported. So instead we tell them "oh you only have 2 people in your language and so can't have a full election? Sorry you can't be an admin on meta, despite the fact that you can 1. apply for steward, 2. apply for GS, 3. may have been an admin for years and years at this point etc etc.
We aren't helping anything, we're just hurting. James (T C) 13:29, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
Progress report? - no further comments, can this be closed in one or another way? -- Dferg ☎ talk 23:04, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
What happened to this poll? πr2 (t • c) 17:13, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
Well, the result of the poll was that we don't want to add exceptions for people who are not sysops locally somewhere (except perhaps for global sysops if one stretches it a bit) and nobody proposed an implementation for the election requirement, which is practically impossible to enforce. In short, the old/current policy has been confirmed and hopefully we won't discuss this again. --Nemo 07:45, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
The policy helps hat collectors who already are admins on a wiki get adminship here, whereas users who actually spend a lot of time on meta, globally editing, or coordinating cross-wiki projects who don't commit time to one (non-Meta) project have no chance to become admin. πr2 (t • c) 00:59, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
I understand your opinion, the Meta community has been very consistent in not sharing it... I disagree with "no chance" because becoming sysop elsewhere is a concrete possibility; as for hat collectors, they're helped only by people not opposing their RfAs here, just oppose more often if you feel so. --Nemo 20:56, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
Changed on policy page: Meta_talk:Administrators (last section). πr2 (t • c) 04:03, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
And reverted; now new poll running for GS (as suggested by Herby above) at #Regarding adminship or elevated privileges on a Wikimedia content project. (By the way, yet another time discussing policies with personal examples and objectives in mind...) --Nemo 17:57, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Strategy Wiki and the Silly poll

In light of the silly poll which doesn't appear to be conclusive on any point, I have a query. Besides the position on GS and CU, the content project also seem to be a touchy issue. I have argued above that Meta might have a far reaching impact compared to all other wikis but its unlike any content project itself, knowing policies on commons or english Wikipedia doesn't bring any bit of extra qualification, the only thing it would provide would be community vetting, which I would argue again is not required here. There is a relatively small community and not that much user-generated content daily, if they were to apply other content project guidelines and sensibilities here, they might wait for months to generate a community consensus. if a user is active on meta and has some familiarity with Sysop tools it should be considered on a case-by-case basis. Meta is unlike any content project itself, so why are we discussing enforcement in favor of only content project veterans?

Also, this might be a conflict of interest but hoo man and I have both recently applied for an RfA, if Strategy wiki is discounted would it imply that we won't be able to run if the changes are enacted? I also want to distinguish between strategy wiki and testwikipedia, liquidthreads here, Strategy wiki had a lot of user generated content like any other typical wiki, research papers, proposals etc. It also received a daily onslaught of vandalism especially when the project-wide notices were put up, we spent hours deleting pages, banning user and protecting pages. There weren't a lot of admins around (25 or so) and 4 b-cats, over half of those are active here [1] in some or the other capacity. I don't think strategy wiki should be lumped in with liquidthreads or testwiki or any other backstage project, it generated a lot of content at its height with many users adding to it everyday. Theo10011 21:07, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Other user groups

There are other user groups at Special:ListGroupRights which are not addressed at Meta:Requests for adminship, such as Confirmed Users (confirmed group, confirmed user bit), Autopatrollers (autopatrolled group, autopatroller bit), and IP block exemptions (ipblock-exempt group, IP block exempt bit). I feel they should be addressed, either in the "Other access" section or in their own "Requests for ..." sections; otherwise, how should people apply to be members of those groups? Thanks!   — Jeff G. ツ 08:25, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

The 'confirmed' bit either doesn't work here, or can only be assigned by stewards (since the need is less here than on other Wikis—less need for images, and most of the necessary pages are unprotected—it doesn't really matter here). There is no formal process for acquiring IP block exemption anywhere; just ask a sysop or checkuser. All of these can be requested at Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat (except confirmed) so I'm not sure there's a need to add another layer of process. Meta-Wiki is by definition smaller and less formal. Best, PeterSymonds 10:35, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks!   — Jeff G. ツ 01:00, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
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