Wikipedia:2015 administrator election reform

WP:RFA2015

Thank you for visiting this project page. In recognition of the widely recognized problems with RfA, this project has been started to move past the disorderly and spontaneous discussion and move forward with a set goal in mind. Below, you can find a brief history of RfA reform projects, a short section describing why this project has been started, and finally a section detailing and linking to the phases which are required to accomplish the reform of our administrator election process.

A brief history of RfA reform

The current method by which we elect admins, RfA, was founded on 14 June 2003 by Camembert. The first promotion via the system, that of Quercusrobur, occurred on the same day. Before the invention of RfA, admin promotions took place through mailing lists. The first discussion on WT:RFA was started by Tim Starling six days later on 19 June, which was a humorous discussion. Discussions similar to the ones we have today began soon after, with the first apparent one concerning election standards. The first serious complaint about the process appears to have been made by Greenmountainboy on 8 January 2004, in a thread called "Attacked by everybody", in which he stated that RfA had turned into a place where everyone attacked each other. Most disagreed with the assertion.

As long ago as 2006, Aaron Schulz had recognised in an essay the same issues that have been perennially discussed for nearly a decade since. Hundreds of attempts to reform RFA have been made, many are in the archives of WT:RfA. Major RfA reform projects include WP:RFA2011, which was launched in 2011. It was created by Kudpung in his userspace on 25 March, and upon encouragement by others he subsequently moved it to Wikipedia space. The project accumulated a task force of over forty established editors, including senior Wikimedia Foundation staff. The launch of this project followed a comment made by Jimmy Wales that March, in which he stated that RfA was a "horrible and broken process". This comment was in response to the retirement of My76Strat (now John Cline) due to his failed RfA. Large amounts of data were compiled, but unfortunately no proposals achieved consensus as a result of the project.

Following RFA2011, the next comprehensive reform project was WP:RFA2013 in 2013. It consisted of a series of three RfCs, starting in late January and ending in early April. All proposals which survived to Round 3 failed. There have been no large-scale reform projects since.

Successful reforms to RFA include a number of unbundlings such as of Rollback in early 2008 and more recently the template editor userright.

Purpose of this project

Many editors agree that there is something wrong with RfA. Some users have explicitly stated that they are afraid of seeking adminship, for one reason or another. Most of the time, it seems to be related to alleged high standards or an unpleasant environment. However, different users have different ideas. Some users emphasize that we must fix the aforementioned high standards and/or hostile environment. Some point out that RfA could be easier to pass if it was not difficult to desysop troublesome admins. Others advocate unbundling the tools. And then comes the issue of finding solutions to these problems. Although there is admittedly very little precedent for success in RfA reform, as evidenced in the above section, the purpose of this project is to identify the problems with RfA and reach a solution as to how those problems can be fixed. Nothing will ever happen if we don't persistently try to fix the process; otherwise, we might as well shut down WT:RFA, since all discussion would be pointless.

Phases of reform

Reforming our administrator election system will follow a logical three-step process. First, the community will discuss what actually is the problem with RfA. There is general agreement that something is wrong, but we must also generally agree upon what is wrong. The second phase will attempt to find a solution to the problems identified by the community. This will arguably be the most difficult and prolonged phase, since proposals of this sort have very little, if any, history of passing. Each phase (mainly Phases I & II) will follow the format described on its respective page, listed below:

Phase I: October 15, 2015 – November 15, 2015
Phase II: November 17, 2015 – January 21, 2016 (The main Phase II RfC ended on December 29, 2015; the extended date reflects the duration of the clerking RfC.)
Based on the RfCs of Phases I and II, Phase III (implementation) will be quick and not require a separate phase.

Progress achieved

There should be broader participation in the RfA process. – Done. RfAs will now be advertised on MediaWiki:Watchlist-details and Template:Centralized discussion.
Ease the load of administrative tasks. – Not done. This is not directly related to RfA and should therefore be handled separately, e.g. through proposals to unbundle one or more admin tools.
The environment at RfA is too hostile. – Partly done. There is now a limit of two questions, and bureaucrats are allowed to perform specific clerking tasks, but in the future there may be further things we can do to remedy this problem.
The discretionary range is too narrow. – Done. The discretionary range is now 65–75%.
The standards are too high. – Partly done. The expanded discretionary range may result in more candidates passing, and therefore the issue of high standards may be mitigated somewhat. However, this issue is not fully resolved and in the future there will very likely be more proposals about it.
There should be active clerking at RfA. – Done. There was little community objection in the clerking RfC to allow uninvolved bureaucrats to continue to perform clerk tasks, but the community clearly rejected the creation of an RfC Clerk user group. However, the system of bureaucrat clerking defined by the RfC is vague, and may require community discussion for clarification in the future.
There should be defined standards. – Not done. In any case, this proposal passed Phase I very narrowly, and thus is not of high priority.