Wikipedia administrators: Difference between revisions

{{selfref|This is an article about Wikipedia administrators. For Wikipedia's policy page on administrators, see [[Wikipedia:Administrators]].}}

[[File:Wikipedia Administrator.svg|thumb|Icon that typically represents administrators on Wikipedia]]

On [[Wikipedia]], trusted users may be appointed as '''administrators''' (also referred to as '''admins''', '''[[sysop]]s''' or '''janitors'''),<ref name="works">{{cite book|title=How Wikipedia Works|last1=Ayers|first1=Phoebe|last2=Matthews|first2=Charles|last3=Yates|first3=Ben|publisher=[[No Starch Press]]|year=2008|isbn=978-1-59327-176-3|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/howwikipediawork00ayer_0}}</ref>{{rp|327}} following a successful request for adminship. Currently, there are {{NUMBEROFADMINS}} administrators on the [[English Wikipedia]].<ref name=WP>{{cite web|title=Wikipedia:Administrators|url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators|website=Wikipedia|publisher=[[Wikimedia Foundation]]|access-date=29 July 2015}}</ref> Administrators have additional technical privileges compared with other editors, such as being able to protect and delete pages and being able to block users.

On Wikipedia, becoming an administrator is often referred to as being "given [or taking up] the mop",<ref name=WP /> a term which has also been used elsewhere.<ref name=Mop>{{cite book | title=Taking Up the Mop: Identifying Future Wikipedia Administrators |author1=Burke, Moira |author2=Kraut, Robert | journal=CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems |date=April 2008 | pages=3441–3446 | doi=10.1145/1358628.1358871| isbn=978-1-60558-012-8 |s2cid=5868576 }}</ref> In 2006, ''[[The New York Times]]'' reported that administrators on Wikipedia, of whom there were then about 1,000, were "geographically diverse".<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 | title=Growing Wikipedia Refines Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy | work=[[The New York Times]] | date=17 June 2006 | access-date=23 January 2014 | author=Hafner, Katie}}</ref> In July 2012, it was widely reported that Wikipedia was "running out of administrators", because in 2005 and 2006, 40 to 50 people were often appointed administrators each month, but in the first half of 2012, only nine in total were appointed.<ref name=Atlantic /><ref>Further coverage:

* {{cite magazine | url=https://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-07/19/wikipedia-needs-editors | title=Wikipedia might be running out of administrators, figures show | magazine=[[Wired (magazine)|Wired]] | date=19 July 2012 | access-date=24 January 2014 | author=Steadman, Ian|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141006110912/http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-07/19/wikipedia-needs-editors|archive-date=October 6, 2014}}

* {{cite web | url=https://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/07/19/157056694/as-wikipedia-gets-pickier-editors-become-harder-to-find | title=As Wikipedia Gets Pickier, Editors Become Harder To Find | work=NPR | date=19 July 2012 | access-date=29 November 2014 | author=Lo Wang, Hansi}}</ref> However, [[Jimmy Wales]], Wikipedia's co-founder, denied that this was a crisis or that Wikipedia was running out of admins, saying, "The number of admins has been stable for about two years, there's really nothing going on."<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18886752 | title=Jimmy Wales denies Wikipedia admin recruitment crisis | work=[[BBC News]] | date=18 July 2012 | access-date=24 January 2014 | author=Lee, Dave}}</ref> Wales had previously (in a message sent to the English Wikipedia mailing list on February 11, 2003) stated that being an admin is "not a big deal", and that "It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone."<ref>{{cite web | url=http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-February/001149.html | title=Sysop Status | work=EN-I Wikimedia Mailing List | date=11 February 2003 | access-date=24 January 2014 | author=Wales, Jimmy}}</ref>

In his 2008 book ''[[Wikipedia – The Missing Manual|Wikipedia: The Missing Manual]]'', John Broughton states that while many people think of administrators on Wikipedia as judges, that is not the purpose of the role.<ref name=Broughton2008 /> Instead, he says, admins usually "[[Deletion of articles on Wikipedia|delete pages]]" and "protect pages involved in edit wars".<ref name=Broughton2008>{{cite book | title=Wikipedia – The Missing Manual | publisher=[[O'Reilly Media]] | author=Broughton, John | year=2008 | page=199}}</ref> Wikipedia administrators are not employees or agents of the [[Wikimedia Foundation]].<ref>{{Cite book|last=Kosseff|first=Jeff|title=The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet|publisher=[[Cornell University Press]]|date=April 15, 2019|isbn=9781501735790|url=https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Twenty_Six_Words_That_Created_the_In/faZzDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22wikimedia%22&pg=PT193&printsec=frontcover}}</ref>

== Requests for adminship ==

While the first Wikipedia administrators were appointed by Jimmy Wales in October 2001,<ref>{{cite magazine | url=http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/31/060731fa_fact | title=Know It All | magazine=[[The New Yorker]] | date=31 July 2006 | access-date=19 February 2014 | author=Schiff, Stacy}}</ref> administrator privileges on Wikipedia are now granted through a process known as requests for adminship (RfA).<ref name="works" /> Any registered editor may nominate themselves, or may request another editor to do so. The process has been said to be "akin to putting someone through the Supreme Court" by [[Andrew Lih]], a scientist and professor who is himself an administrator on the [[English Wikipedia]]. 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".<ref name=Atlantic /> Candidacy for the role is normally considered only after "extensive work on the wiki".<ref name="works" /> While any editor may vote in an RfA, the outcome is not determined by a majority vote, but rather by whether consensus has been reached that the candidate would make a good administrator, a decision that can only be made by a bureaucrat, a Wikipedia editor who is also appointed by the community through a "request" process, though the process is much stricter for them than for administrators.<ref>{{cite web|title=Wikipedia:Bureaucrats|url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bureaucrats|website=Wikipedia|publisher=[[Wikimedia Foundation]]|access-date=29 July 2015}}</ref> 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",<ref>{{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 }}</ref> with the record number of votes in one RfA as of May 2022 being 468 for the RfA of editor "[[User:Tamzin|Tamzin]]".

== Scientific studies ==

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.<ref>{{cite book | url=http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~sanmay/papers/wiki-cikm.pdf | title=Manipulation Among the Arbiters of Collective Intelligence: How Wikipedia Administrators Mold Public Opinion | author=Das, Sanmay | journal=Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management|year=2013| pages=1097–1106 | doi=10.1145/2505515.2505566| isbn=978-1-4503-2263-8 | s2cid=52865675 }}</ref> 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 adminship''<ref>See [[Wikipedia:Guide to requests for adminship]].</ref> page were the best predictors of whether the user in question would actually become an admin.<ref name=Mop /> 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."<ref>{{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 }}</ref>