Wikipedia administrators
On Wikipedia, trusted and experienced editors may be appointed as administrators (also called admins, sysops or janitors) by the editing community,[1]: 327 following a successful request for adminship. Administrators have some technical privileges not enjoyed by other editors, such as the ability to protect and delete pages and to block users from editing pages.
Becoming an administrator is often called "taking up the mop",[2][3] referring to their cleanup and moderation duties.
In July 2012, reports suggested Wikipedia was "running out of administrators" due to fewer appointments compared to previous years,[4] though Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales denied any crisis.[5]
Requests for adminship
[edit]Administrators are now granted privileges through a process called Requests for Adminship (RfA).[1] Editors may nominate themselves or be nominated by others. Candidacy typically requires "extensive work on the wiki". Votes above 75% support usually succeed, below 65% fail, and the intermediate zone is handled by bureaucrats.[6]
Role
[edit]Administrators have additional technical privileges for maintenance and enforcement, such as deleting pages, protecting pages, granting user rights, and blocking disruptive users.[7]: 66
Scientific studies
[edit]Studies have analyzed administrator behavior and RfA outcomes, including research from Virginia Tech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology, showing trends in voting and topic focus after promotion.[8]
References
[edit]- ^ a b Ayers, Phoebe; Matthews, Charles; Yates, Ben (2008). How Wikipedia Works. No Starch Press. ISBN 978-1-59327-176-3.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Administrators". Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 29 July 2015.
- ^ Burke, Moira; Kraut, Robert (April 2008). Taking Up the Mop: Identifying Future Wikipedia Administrators. CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 3441–3446. doi:10.1145/1358628.1358871. ISBN 978-1-60558-012-8. S2CID 5868576.
- ^ Meyer, Robinson (16 July 2012). "3 Charts That Show How Wikipedia Is Running Out of Admins". The Atlantic. Retrieved 23 January 2014.
- ^ Lee, Dave (18 July 2012). "Jimmy Wales denies Wikipedia admin recruitment crisis". BBC News. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Bureaucrats". Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 29 July 2015.
- ^ Ebersbach, Anja; Adelung, Andrea; Dueck, Gunter; Glaser, Markus; Heigl, Richard; Warta, Alexander (2008). Wiki: Web Collaboration. Springer. ISBN 978-3-540-68173-1.
- ^ Das, Sanmay (2013). "Manipulation among the arbiters of collective intelligence". Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Conference on information & knowledge management - CIKM '13 (PDF). pp. 1097–1106. doi:10.1145/2505515.2505566. ISBN 978-1-4503-2263-8. S2CID 52865675. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2021-02-19. Retrieved 2014-01-24.
External links
[edit]
- Wikipedia:Administrators, on Wikipedia itself
