Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024

In October 2024, the first administrator elections were held as a trial process. The community voted on 32 candidates, 11 of whom were successful.

Schedule

October 8–14 – Call for candidates
October 15–21 – SecurePoll setup phase
October 22–24 – Discussion phase
October 25–31 – SecurePoll voting phase
November 1–5 – Scrutineering phase
Results
Debrief phase - to collect feedback
Workshop phase - to draft mini RFCs
Mini-RFC phase - many little RFCs to improve the process for a hypothetical next election
Renewal RFC phase - one RFC to get permission to do additional election(s)

Voter eligibility

The trial election used the Arbitration Committee Election suffrage requirements. To vote, an editor must have met the following criteria:

created their account over 2 months before the election
have 150 mainspace edits by 1 month before the election
have 10 live edits in the year running up to 1 month before the election
not be sitewide blocked during the election
not be vanished
not be a bot
not have already voted with this or another account

Procedure

The overall process lasted 10 days: an initial 3-day period for discussion and questions, and a 7-day period for a secret ballot vote. Election cycles were advertised in advance, including watchlist notices.

Period 1: Candidates sign up

Candidates signed up by a specified date prior to the discussion and questions period. Just like RFA, candidates could be nominated by other editors. During this phase and the SecurePoll setup phase, candidates and nominators could adjust their candidate subpage as they saw fit.

Period 2: Discussion and questions

During this 3-day period, the community asked questions and raised issues, as well as providing positive feedback. Candidates were encouraged to participate in the discussion period, answering questions and responding to feedback.

During this discussion-only time, participants were discouraged from posting messages of support/opposition that lack points for discussion. This phase was for sharing thoughts on the candidate or any other topic that may relate to the candidate's applicability – not for indicating personal voting intentions.

The monitors for this phase were Theleekycauldron and Pickersgill-Cunliffe. Discussion for all candidates can be found at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Discussion phase.

Period 3: Voting

Once the discussion period is complete, a secret ballot was held for 7 days, using SecurePoll. During this period, discussion was closed. The ballot contained multiple candidates; however, this was not a competitive election. Voters were asked to evaluate each candidate individually, and all candidates who met the pass threshold were selected to become administrators. Thus all, some, or even no candidates could have been selected.

Tallying and results

After voting has ended, the election was scrutinised by three stewards whose home wiki is not the English Wikipedia. They checked for any duplicate, ineligible, or sockpuppeteer votes, and struck them as necessary. Once scrutineering was complete, votes were tallied, results were announced, and new admins were granted administrative privileges. The pass threshold was 70% or greater. The vote tally was calculated by Support / (Support + Oppose) for each candidate. The scrutineers for the October 2024 election were Johannnes89, EPIC, and Yahya. In the October 2024 administrator elections, scrutineering took 4 days.

The results of the October 2024 Administrator Elections are as follows:

659 votes were cast, of which 43 were determined to be duplicates, leading to a total of 616 valid votes.

Scrutineer ratification

EPIC (talk) 19:23, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
—Yahya (talk • contribs.) 19:25, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
--Johannnes89 (talk) 22:50, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Rationale

The number of requests for adminship (RFA) has declined from a peak of 920 in 2007 to just 36 in 2016, and has since averaged around 23 per year. This suggests problems with the RFA process, which might be mitigated with a different process, such as administrator elections. Ways that administrator elections might help include:

Reducing contention via secret voting - Reduces the opportunity for contentious discussion amongst participants. For example, voters do not have to disclose their vote, nor give an explanation for it. This avoids unnecessary direct confrontation of opposers, or of the candidate.
Shorter discussion period - The discussion period is limited to three days, instead of seven.
No possibility of a bureaucrat chat
Many candidates - So less pressure on individual candidates.

Reasoning for holding the trial

The result of the request for comment discussion regarding running a trial election was

The community supports trying this proposal for 1 election, after which it will be reviewed in Phase II. While there are concerns regarding the implementation details of this proposal, given this is a trial run, there is sufficient support to run the election as written.

Accordingly, the trial election was held, with implementation details (such as scrutineering) worked out based on discussions on the Admin Election talk page.

After the trial, further request for comment discussions were held to discuss how to proceed, thus allowing the community to alter the process if desired, or choose not to continue.

Comparison with requests for adminship

The trial election differed from WP:RFA in several ways. Some of these aspects were unique to the trial, and were later revised at RFC.

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References