Forum:Adminship request process

To date administrators have simply been users chosen by bureaucrats to have the extra access. Very seldom has there been any discussion with anyone else involved in the selection. I think that method is good for wikis starting out or wikis with less of an established community. Considering we are a much larger wiki and have been doing stuff through community discussion in this part of the forum, I think it's time we set-up a more formal process. I'd like it if people could comment here and say if they agree or not.

I'd also like if people could suggest on how they think it should be done. One thing I must insist on is that it can't be too lenient. I have seen one wiki where I think editors only needed >100 mainspace edits and a >50% community vote to become an admin. Despite being a small wiki, they wound up with ~40 admins, including many immature ones, resulting in months of chaos. I don't think this site will end up that bad, but would like to steer clear of that general direction.

Some suggestions/things to think about:
 * It should not be purely a vote. Someone giving a reason they believe the nominee should or shouldn't be an admin should be worth more than someone simply saying in favour or against. A count of people in favour and against can be used to give some general idea, but just barely passing 50% shouldn't be enough. On Wikipedia, I think, they say most who get >80% approval pass. Most who get <70% approval don't. Anything in between is left to the bureaucrat's better judgement.
 * How long should a request be up before a decision is made. On a number of larger wikis, they give it one week. Shorten if it's an obvious fail and lengthen if it needs more time. Given that we don't have as many editors who comment on decisions like these and not all of them check the community discussion forum (or wherever this would be set-up) on a regular basis, we may need more time.
 * How do people feel about self-nominations?
 * Don't think of being an admin as having a higher rank or influence over other editors. Administrators have extra access they can use to enforce established rules or what the community has agreed on, not to get what they want.
 * If we do end-up giving out lots of admin access in a short period of time, the process probably isn't strict enough. Please don't support users just because you get along with them. Support them if you think giving them access will help the site. Don't support yourself because you want to be an admin, support yourself if the site can benefit from having you as an admin.
 * You do not have to be in favour of introducing this process. If you think it will damage the site more than help it, please let us know and say why you feel that way.

-- Deltaneos (talk) 20:12, September 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree it's probably high time to get a community process set in place for admin requests, though I wonder if we wouldn't benefit more from a generalized process covering requests for adminship and bureaucratship as well as bot requests. That aside, I don't see any problems with self-noms; the trolls and vandals are pretty obvious, and we'd get candidates who are too inexperienced regardless. I don't think we should focus as much on percentages as Wikipedia does; unless I'm mistaken, you're the only currently active bureaucrat here, and your judgement is certainly quite solid. Probably, though, being an admin on other (active!) wikis should be counted as a bonus for a candidate. I would suggest starting with a 10-day process and seeing how that works out, and would caution against any blanket sentiment concerning a large number of candidates passing at once; it could be that we simply get a large number of qualified noms in a short period of time. =) 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 03:04, September 26, 2010 (UTC)


 * I like the idea of a more structuralized process for this sort of thing. This wiki has a lot of admins, but I'm pretty sure we have more inactive admins than active ones. One thing I would say is that I think edit count is sort of irrelevant. Quality over quantity. As far as the time factor goes, could we have a bot send a notice to all active users to inform them when admin selection is taking place, with a link to the topic? Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 03:34, September 26, 2010 (UTC)


 * or we can just use the note thing at the top, which currently says "We're discussing updates to our sidebar in the forum. You're welcome to participate!" and "Please read the Manual of Style before editing."
 * I also agree on quality over quantity; but also, it would depend on what the person would do with the extra functions (e.g. block continuous spammers, move images uploaded to an incorrect file name, etc.) in this case, it would be... resourcefulness over both quantity and quality. -Falzar FZ- (talk page|useful stuff) 03:40, September 26, 2010 (UTC)


 * That would be MediaWiki:Sitenotice, and I really need to wrap up the whole sidebar thing; no one's made any comments for almost two months, in spite of the draft I proposed.
 * That aside, the quality of a person's edits and how thy're likely to use the tools are pretty closely related, but there are a few things to keep in mind: even if someone has 2-3 thousand edits here, if very few of them are to discussion pages, I probably wouldn't recommend them for adminship since I wouldn't know if they really understand the community, or if they'd be able to interact with it in the ways having the tools require. And, to expand on my above comment of admins elsewhere getting a bit of a "bonus", I would assign highest value to admins on Wikipedia, since they are under intense scrutiny there and misbehaving admins usually end up at ArbCom fairly quickly; then maybe to other Wikimedia projects (though I'm not nearly as familiar with them as I am with Wikipedia), then to Wikia wikis, and lastly to third-party wikis - in these cases, the communities on the respective wikis (for Wikia and third-party wikis) should be looked at to make sure there are actually people watching what that person does, as well as that person's admin actions there, to see if they know what they're doing with the tools (and, more importantly, why they're doing it). 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 17:22, September 26, 2010 (UTC)
 * I was the last one to comment on it, I liked it (and I've been using it since you posted it), and put in my two cents, and then nothing happened...BassNettoHikari2...Chat Page... 00:42, September 28, 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I had been waiting on others to at least look at it and comment, but no one else ever did, until Delt commented on Oasis' new nav menu just now... 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 17:46, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

It's nearly a month since anyone has commented. Well that's four people in favour and hardly anyone else commented. As suggested, I've added the notice to the sitenotice and also the community corner to see if that attracts anything. -- Deltaneos (talk) 17:47, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

Has my approval. I'd like to see some new admins around to deal with vandals, problems and user requests. Toob (talk • contribs) 05:02, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

I agree to this too.-- HHTurtle  Talk  05:56, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

I agree, a dew more Admins would be nice...BassNettoHikari2...Chat Page... 07:04, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

I strongly agree, because there are always a number of vandals around, and we may also require regular maintenance around the wiki. Saiou (talk ) 09:48, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

I strongly agree that we need more active admins on this wiki, to stop vandals and also people who post useless trivia. IPlay4Fun (talk • contribs) 12:42, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, more admins to revert vandals who want to cause malice to our wikia, I still need my pages to be de-vandalized from a very bad vandal...BassNettoHikari2...Chat Page... 14:25, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

I'm not a regular contributor here, but this sounds like a good idea. Also, in terms of time and support requirements, I'd say that all requests should be open for at least a week (maybe two), and should get at least 70% support. Ajraddatz Talk 23:29, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

I agree with this idea because like some people have said there are vandals that just reck havok on some pages I've seen and i don't thinks it fair sometimes that a person and sat there for hours making a page and then gone in a matter of 5 seconds.

ty .:Crack Of Dawn:. (talk • contribs) 19:03, November 6, 2010 (UTC)


 * From the last few posts most people seem to be concerned with vandalism and feel more admins are needed to stop this. Regardless of how this goes, more users can and most likely will be made admins. What's being proposed is a system where all users can have a say in who does and doesn't get to be an admin, rather than have it be a one man decision. -- Deltaneos (talk) 20:25, November 6, 2010 (UTC)