Administrators (Wikipedia)
On the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, certain very trusted users are allowed to become administrators (also known as admins and sysops), following a successful request for adminship. At present, there are 1,419 active administrators on the English Wikipedia.[1] The privileges to which only administrators have access include the ability to delete pages, protect pages by restricting editors and block user accounts.[2] On Wikipedia, becoming an admin is often referred to as being "given [or taking up] the mop,"[1] a term which has also been used elsewhere.[3] In 2006, the New York Times reported that administrators on Wikipedia, of whom there were then about 1,000, were "geographically diverse."[4] In July 2012, it was widely reported that Wikipedia was "running out of administrators", because while in 2005 and 2006, 40 to 50 people were often appointed administrators each month, but in the first half of 2012, only nine were.[2][5] 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."[6] 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."[7]
In his book Wikipedia – The Missing Manual, John Broughton states that while many people think of administrators on Wikipedia as judges, that this is not, in fact, what their role is supposed to be. Instead, he says, admins usually "delet[e] pages" and "protect pages involved in edit wars."[8]
Requests for adminship
Wikipedia determines who will and will not become an administrator through the requests for adminship process (also known as RFA). Any registered editor may nominate themselves, or may request another administrator to do so. The process has been called "akin to putting someone through the Supreme Court" by Andrew Lih, 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."[2]
Scientific studies
A 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.[9] 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 page were the best predictors of whether the user in question would actually become an admin.[3] 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."[10]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Wikipedia's page on Administrators
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Meyer, Robinson (16 July 2012). "3 Charts That Show How Wikipedia Is Running Out of Admins". The Atlantic. Retrieved 23 January 2014.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Burke, Moira; Kraut, Robert (2008). "Taking Up the Mop: Identifying Future Wikipedia Administrators". CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems: 3441–3446. doi:10.1145/1358628.1358871. Unknown parameter
|month=ignored (help)CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list (link) - ↑ Hafner, Katie (17 June 2006). "Growing Wikipedia Refines Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 January 2014.
- ↑ Further coverage:
- Steadman, Ian (19 July 2012). "Wikipedia might be running out of administrators, figures show". Wired. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
- Wrenn, Eddie (17 July 2012). "Will Wikipedia edit itself out of existence? 50 volunteer 'admins' used to join site each month ... but last month there was just one". Daily Mail. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
- Popkin, Helen A.S. (17 July 2012). "Wikipedia admins face gauntlet of scrutiny". NBC News. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
- ↑ Lee, Dave (18 July 2012). "Jimmy Wales denies Wikipedia admin recruitment crisis". BBC News. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
- ↑ Wales, Jimmy (11 February 2003). "Sysop Status". EN-I Wikimedia Mailing List. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
- ↑ Broughton, John (2008). Wikipedia – The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media. p. 199. Search this book on
- ↑ Das, Sanmay (2013). "Manipulation Among the Arbiters of Collective Intelligence: How Wikipedia Administrators Mold Public Opinion" (PDF). Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international Conference on information & knowledge management: 1097–1106. doi:10.1145/2505515.2505566. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2021-02-19. Retrieved 2014-01-26. Unknown parameter
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