Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-04-15/News and notes

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Swedish Wikipedia uses a admin system in which each admin is only selected for a year at a time, to decrease the need for someone nominating another admin for de-adminship. Each month there are votes about a few admins' tools. This also means that non-active admins are sorted out without any particular process; the time merely runs out for them. The process can be followed here. Hannibal (talk) 22:22, 17 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The segmented by-lines for this article are reassuring. Does the Signpost intend to use them in all future pieces about matters in which Signpost writers have a conflict of interest? AGK [•] 00:17, 18 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- Yes, most definitely. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 01:29, 18 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I guess that a process like the Swedish Wikipedia has will only work well for smaller Wikipedias with less than approximately 100 admins. Swedish Wikipedia has currently 89 administrators; there are 268 in German WP, and 1,444 in English WP. If every admin has to be re-elected annually, you get an average of 7.4 admin re-election procedures per month with 89 admins, that's of course manageable. But with 268 admins you would get already more than 22 re-elections per month, and for 1,444 admins more than 120... I do not think that the process would scale well. Of course, the communities are much larger. But having to decide whether you want to re-elect 22 admins per month, let alone 120, will be too much for many individual community members and make the results less meaningful. Gestumblindi (talk) 20:15, 18 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That is a very good point, Gestumblindi. We may eventually have knowledge of enough admin systems to determine the extent to which (i) the size of the active community; (ii) the raw admin count; (iii) the age of the project; and (iv) cultural/linguistic and other factors, have played into the distinctiveness and commonalities between the systems. It would make a good PhD project.
I neglected to add here the comments of User:Savh, a respected member of the Spanish WP; given the short notice, he was unable to send them before copy-deadline, which was largely my fault:

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Our RfA system is quite similar to enwiki's, except for that all admins are granted the 'crat flag. Our de-admin process first requires 12 endorsements, [which triggers] a vote, where the approval percentage is 75%. I'm not a great fan of it, to be honest, but we haven't come up with a better solution yet, and this need for prior endorsement at least prevents heated "revenge" when dissagreeing with an admin. However, as you may already know, eswiki has no arbcom, the community being the only one being able to have sysops removed from their duties. The admins should only be the enforcers of blocks, based on the community, and there is currently an ongoing discussion about allowing bans on users, which are at the moment treated as indef blocks.

Admins with fewer than 50 logged actions over the past two years are automatically removed. This was approved recently, and led to complaints from desysopped users who were still [marginally active. Among] the arguments put in favour this measure were Jimbo's quote about adminship being "no big deal" ....

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Tony (talk) 11:32, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]