Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Debrief

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After collecting comments for awhile, the next step will be surveys and RFCs (on a different page) to make changes to the administrator elections rules and workflows, and then an RFC to see if the community is interested in having a second administrator election.

Visit the RFC workshop page to translate your debrief into actionable changes.

Feedback from candidates

Bastun

The election process - some thoughts from a candidate (written in advance, posted after results posted):

• First, congrats to those elected!

• There needs to be a limit on the number of candidates in any one election. 32+ candidates is a lot, and expecting voters to properly scrutinise them all, especially if they're not familiar with the candidates, is also a lot.

• This means, I suspect, that a lot of people relied on one or more of several voter guides. There seemed to be a bit of confusion over whether they were allowed or not, but they appeared, so that point is moot.

• What was deemed important in both the Discussion pages and items included in voter guides is interesting and bears some discussion.
  • I found the AfD stats relevant and interesting, for example.
  • Edit count, for me, is a definite for inclusion, as is block log. Test blocks, or erroneous blocks, though? I'm honestly not sure why they were mentioned. An admin made a mistake one time (in the latter case), and fixed it. Why then mention it in terms of a candidacy?
  • The declined CSDs are, I suppose, an element worth considering for getting a handle on a candidate's understanding of policy, but strike me, anyway, as less relevant.
  • The inclusion of 'Good article'/FAC stats, I'm not sure about. Some of us are gnomes, some of us create lots of stubs, some do minor enough copyedits and/or small additions to articles. All of these are valid uses of Wiki time. Do Good/Featured articles carry more weight? Should they, for an administrator? Apparently they do, at least for some editors (I wasn't aware of this myself, prior to the election, but I don't spend much time on RfA).
  • 'User talk archiving & transparency' - to be honest, I was surprised to see this come up in Novem Linguae's and Femke's guides. I (and others) have big red Xs against our names because of this one, but WP:OWNTALK exists: Although archiving is preferred, users may freely remove comments from their own talk pages. (And I had to look that up, because I certainly wasn't aware beforehand that "archiving is preferred"!) Frankly, no, I am not leaving hate-speech comments on my talk page for, possibly, months, or, in an archive, forever. Likewise, another candidate removed a (dubious) 3RR warning from their talk page - six years ago! - but OWNTALK explicitly says The removal of a warning is taken as evidence that the warning has been read by the user; another candidate removed a notice and thanked the person who placed it. IMHO, this 'stat' should be dropped.
  • There are other 'mop-like' areas where editors can be involved, but there were no stats supplied. Things like number of 3RR/edit warring reports made, number of AIV reports, number of SPI requests submitted. I don't know how easy it would be to retrieve them, though. Perhaps Ritchie333 could adapt or develop a script to compile such statistics?
  • ANI is an interesting one. Yes, I've been "up before ANI" at least twice, a voting guide reminds me. One of those occasions was just over four years ago, was ARBGG-related, started with a damning indictment and discussions about just what I should be banned from, and, after WP:BOOMERANG was brought up ended with... well, no consensus. Another was slightly less than four years ago and, if I'm not mistaken, no admin sought to get involved (and who could blame them?!) And discussion eventually petered out. So... is it fair to highlight such visits to ANI? This is an election, not a court. In the latter (at least in Ireland) "prior convictions" can't be raised until a trial has concluded. "Was charged with and not convicted" couldn't even be brought up. In prosecutions, there's a statute of limitations. Should there be one in admin elections? Maybe? Maybe 5 years? If someone really wants, obviously, the archives are there, and searchable, but I'm dubious about the value of pointing out minor infractions (or lack thereof!) from several years ago.

• The one issue that did bother me was Tryptofish raising our past interactions, from a content dispute that occurred approximately ten years ago. Clearly, it's something that still bothers them, and that being the case, I really wish they'd reached out to me, well, long before now. (And I will reach out them, shortly after this process has concluded). I would have liked to respond to their second post on the issue, but it really didn't seem like the correct venue to get into "he said, she said."

• That said, all of the questions were reasonable, and the experience, for me at least, was largely stress free.

So, that's it. Thanks for reading, if you made it this far. I think the process is good - an improvement on RFA, for sure. Certainly, it wouldn't put me off from running again (as I'm writing, I don't know the results). There are some obvious learnings - a maximum number of candidates being the obvious one. Other things I'd like to see would be a slightly longer discussion period that takes in at least two days on a weekend and two weekdays (so Thursday to Sunday or Friday to Monday or Saturday to Tuesday). Thanks to those who proposed the process, got support for it, and implemented it. Definitely a worthwhile experiment, and one I'd like to see become the norm. Cheers, Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 20:14, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

How do you feel about the lack of feedback @Bastun? I often say that one failure at RfA gives a candidate the keys to success at a second run because then they know where to improve and what to work on. But the lack of feedback from this RfA method, from my point of view, is somewhat problematic. Candidates just don't know where they went wrong in some cases and how they can be doing better. Hey man im josh (talk) 20:45, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Frankly, I now oppose using a secret ballot. Simply put, if no-one bothered to make a negative comment but 100+ people voted against you, you are left completely in the dark as to why. FOARP (talk) 21:53, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

The least opposed candidate got 74 opposes. Assuming the least opposed candidate would have achieved a unanimous or near unanimous RFA, that means 74 folks opposed everyone. That suggests that for you, with 106 opposes, only 32 were personal. We also had triple the # of voters of a typical RFA. If you had RFA'd, that suggests that maybe you would have only gotten 32 / 3 = 11 opposes. You're right that knowing the rationale for those 11 opposes would be helpful, but it probably also made the process gentler for the candidates, which was the goal. Anyway, food for thought! –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:38, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't think this is true. There are several "camps" in what voters like at RfA which tend to support different types of candidate. I assessed every candidate and voted actively on everyone based on that; I looked at an offline voters' guide to gain a different perspective, and was surprised to find minimal overlap between my supports/opposes and theirs. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:50, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I guess the lack of feedback is the quid pro quo for the "gentler" process? At least one person did say they were open to offering feedback (Sdkb) and I took them up on that (thanks!) after voting ended. And I'd definitely be open to hearing from others why they opposed, too. I mean, I'm not promising to change, or anything, but it would be nice to know, y'know :-) Ideally, there could possible be an (anonymised?) 'constructive criticism' opt-in, maybe, where if Jbloggs2024 wants to leave feedback, candidates could opt-in to receiving it? I dunno, I'd have to think more about how that might work, without being as personal as RfA can be, while still being useful? Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 23:42, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback Bastun. Mind if I cut and paste this over to Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Debrief? –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:55, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

No problem, Novem Linguae, fire away! Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 21:59, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Bastun, thank you for your detailed thoughts here, and I want to acknowledge that I saw what you said. If you want to discuss this with me at my talk, please feel free to. I'll say here that I did not post what I did because I disagreed with you over a content dispute. I had never seen a reason to discuss it further with you, based on the tone of the discussion we had at the time, nor would I have considered it a prerequisite to commenting on that or any other RfA page, but it's fine with me if you want to come to my talk page whenever you feel ready to. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:27, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, will do. Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 23:45, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I can have a look at developing some more stats scripts if it's helpful and I've got the time (which might not be this week or next, though). Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 21:45, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I think in large part, a lot of the nuance was lost due to the lack of participation in the discussion section. Not sure if this is due to the short discussion period, the lack of nominators (who usually closely monitor discussion), or the number of candidates. A prime example was the list of declined CSDs -- in a normal RfA other editors would likely comment on their significance, but in the election candidates either had to let them stand without comment or break the long-standing tradition against commenting in your own RfA. Many candidates did line-by line rebuttals, but others didn't since it might seem to be a faux pax. Similarly, with the ANI threads and comments from Tryptofish that you mentioned, in a full RfA there likely would have been much back-and-forth on the significance of them -- just look at all the conversation around the first oppose at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Voorts which ran concurrently with the election. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:13, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

The inclusion of 'Good article'/FAC stats, I'm not sure about. There's definitely a voting block at RFA that wants administrators to have content writing experience. The essay User:Ritchie333/Why admins should create content kind of sums up their philosophy, I think. I did not personally factor in the "GA" column in my voting guide when making my voting decisions, but a significant number do, I think. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:07, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

If you could say the experience, for me at least, was largely stress free, I think we can count the elections as a huge success. The kinds of things that surprised you - ANIs from a long time ago, etc - are exactly the kind of thing that cause contentious and stressful RFAs. -- asilvering (talk) 19:28, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

To echo what AntiDionysius and Peaceray say below and what others will no doubt add, I would welcome feedback, especially from those who opposed or abstained, either on my talk page (and logged-out IP is fine) or by email. Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 23:54, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Some discussion on Voorts's RfA and some of the discussion here has given me food for thought about the AfD stats. I think mine are largely good up to now, and I used the AfD stats compiled by [[U|Asilvering}} myself in part, when deciding how to vote. But... Of late, participating in WP:NPP, I've come across a whole lot of articles that shouldn't yet be articles, particularly ones that don't meet notability guidelines and are WP:TOOSOON, especially those breaching our guidelines for notability of future films and as yet unreleased or minor/non-charting albums. Yet we currently have over 700 articles on unreleased films! When I've encountered new such articles recently on NPP, I've moved them to draft space and pointed out the respective guidelines. In most cases, inevitably, they'll be moved back to article space within a day or two. I have AfD'ed a number of these, but the result will often be keep. Clearly, if I have an eye on running for the mop again, I should stop, lest it hit my stats... Thoughts welcome! Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 12:13, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

If AfD is consistently keeping articles that notability guidelines say shouldn't be kept, then the notability guidelines don't accurately reflect community consensus and need to be changed. That's off topic for here though. Thryduulf (talk) 12:25, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

In this particular case I would say that's more likely to be the result of limited AfD participation than actual community consensus needing changing. -- asilvering (talk) 16:53, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't worry about your stats as such. My aim in compiling the AfD results comments was to get people away from just looking at the stats and thinking about their wider context instead; AfD results come up pretty often in RFA and the link to them was very accessible from the discussion sections, so I was worried people might just look at the % match rate and nothing else. I know some people do care about match rate, and I wanted to show the "objective" numbers up front, so I left it in, but if I do this for an election again maybe I'll leave it out entirely.

As for AfD participation... well, like all aspects of editing, you can cynically play it safe if you want, and that will probably serve you well overall, but it does do some damage to your soul. You can see some fallout over (imo) correctly listed AfDs in Significa liberdade's RFA as well. It is my firm (though possibly self-soothing) belief that good arguments matter significantly more than "success", and that those making poor arguments would be unlikely to pass an RFA. But that doesn't mean those making good arguments will sail through without any opposes from people who think you're showing evidence of deletionism. Ultimately the choice is yours. But you're likely to get a lot of people questioning your decisions as an admin anyway, so you might as well get used to it in advance. -- asilvering (talk) 17:14, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, good feedback there, both. Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 17:27, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Recent patterns at AFD are a better source of truth than the guidelines themselves. Feel free to adjust your mental flowchart based on the patterns you see in recent AFDs. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:15, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Queen of Hearts

Placeholder charlotte ^👸♥ 20:57, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

My immediate thought is that we should definitely reduce threshold – the most supported candidate (who I'd venture to say would've had a unanimous or near-unanious RfA) only had 85%, and (IMO) quite a few of the candidates in 60–70% would've been good. I shall (try to) write more once I'm not confined to a phone. charlotte ^👸♥ 22:18, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

FOARP

General

• Thanks to everyone who worked, stood, and voted in this.
• Getting 106 oppose votes when no negative comments were raised in the entire process..... is what it is. My perspective is a pass is a pass. I think if this were a traditional RFA a lot of these people wouldn't have contributed. If I were any of the people who got over 50% but less than 70%, particularly Valenciano who got fewer opposes than me, I would be feeling hard-done-by right now.
• There seems to have been a block of voters either down-voting every single candidate, or opposing every single candidate whose name they didn't immediately recognise. It's hard to explain people getting so many oppose-votes when no negative comments were made at all about their candidature.

Proposals

• The real risk with this process is it ends up just cannibalising the admins gotten through the RFA process without resulting in more admins. To avoid this we need a process with a high through-put, especially if the pass rate is going to be less than 50%. For that reason we need to hold regular elections - at least every quarter, possibly every month. Any cap on the numbers of candidates need to be scaled to the regularity with which the election is held.
• I really am not sold, at all, on the voting process. I really don't think we've gotten a better process than even just 10 community members discussing someone's candidature in detail and then casting open support/oppose !votes. I would still prefer a more discussion-based process simply because I don't think this process teaches candidates anything - if you failed in this election with no negative comments made whatsover about your candidacy then just what is it you are supposed to do? The voting system also adds complexity to these elections that will hinder them being held regularly.

Points raised by voters

• Cryptic - I did not think much of the discussion period. The number of page-views on a lot of the candidate pages was low and it did not seem like there was much engagement. However, for the candidate pages where there was "drama", there also were (magically!) more page-views, which rather points to other sites linking to these discussions and lots of viewers following these links. FOARP (talk) 22:10, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
• Floquenbeam - One point I haven't seen discussed is that, with a 70% support threshold, an oppose vote counts for a lot more than a support vote. To overturn each oppose vote, ~two support votes are needed. So those ~70 "oppose-everything" voters impacted the process much more than those ~60 "support-everythings". FOARP (talk) 22:16, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

  Yes, that's why I show 7 more admins in my alternate universe. Floquenbeam (talk) 22:19, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

AntiDionysius

I largely echo what FOARP said above about the lack of feedback for why people voted against. Personally I'm interpreting my almost-but-not-quite result as a case of WP:NOTYET, but it would be good to have that made more clear.*

The aim of this was to make the adminning process less daunting by making it less of a meat grinder of negative scrutiny. I think that has been achieved. But if all that does is make candidates more confused when they fail to pass (or worse still, actively encourage more votes against because voters don't have to provide reasoning), then I'd call it a lateral move on balance, since we also want to get the rate of new admin promotions up.

But to qualify myself still further, maybe we just need to build up more of a community norm of raising things during the (probably slightly longer) discussion period and/or run smaller elections in which voters don't choose "Oppose" partially/wholly out of fatigue. I don't know.

My evaluation of the experience is still overall relatively positive. It was pretty painless, and I don't regret doing it at all. --AntiDionysius (talk) 21:27, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

* And if anyone has any other insight/feedback for me, I would very much appreciate hearing it!

I voted to support you. the lack of feedback. I'll add my feedback in case it helps. For my private notes for you, I wrote "Anti-vandalism editor. Discussion phase comments mostly positive." –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:46, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate the transparency and feedback, thank you! AntiDionysius (talk) 23:09, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

You were one of a handful of my abstentions. I saw a lot of positives, but 15 months' active editing is on the lowest end of what I'm comfortable with supporting. In an ordinary RFA you would have had more of a chance to demonstrate maturity, and that may have tipped the scales - but I evaluated you far too late to ask anything. I would encourage you to consider an RFA in a few months, or standing in a future admin election. Vanamonde93 (talk) 00:25, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the insight. What you say makes sense, and I had indeed been going to wait a few months before giving it some thought again. AntiDionysius (talk) 00:45, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Looked at my notes; you had only 13 months of active editing, with a gap earlier this year, suggesting inexperience; 2 articles created, no articles with >=50 edits & low recent mainspace %age, suggest possible lack of engagement with content; 1.3k in Wikipedia space is a bit low too. I'm afraid I didn't evaluate your contributions in detail as the active 13 months falls below my threshold. I'd suggest waiting 5 or 6 months and doing some work on content, not necessarily more than creating a few properly referenced start articles or even just participating in the referencing drive -- just something to indicate to content-focused voters that you remember we're building an encyclopedia. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:07, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Makes sense, thank you. Getting some more content creation (and probably some AfD work) under my belt is on my Wiki to do list over the next couple of months. AntiDionysius (talk) 15:37, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I'd also advise you to lay off the G11s. If people think you're deletion-happy, that can really hurt. -- asilvering (talk) 19:32, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate the advice, thank you. Your comment to that effect during the discussion phase clearly stuck in my brain because there have definitely been a few instances in the last few days when I have not tagged something I would have in the past, with that in mind. AntiDionysius (talk) 20:26, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

If you do more AfDs be careful not to appear either too deletionist or retentionist, and make sure your responses are largely meaty, policy-based comments. Bringing lots of good sources to support GNG from diligent work at the Wikipedia Library gets brownie points with most camps. Poor work at AfD can be very offputting, and is perhaps more visible to the community than declined G11s. Espresso Addict (talk) 08:35, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Got it, thank you. Balance and good sourcing in all things is never a bad policy. AntiDionysius (talk) 11:11, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

ThadeusOfNazereth

Alright, I've had a day to reflect and I have a few thoughts. First, I think that we can definitely call this a successful trial! Eleven new admins is almost as many as we had in all of 2023 and as many as we were on track to have this year. There was also way more participation than a standard RFA - 616 votes! That said, there are some common-sense changes I think would be beneficial to future elections:

• Limiting the number of candidates at a time to ten. I do not think that blanket opposes were the right course of action to not being able to evaluate all candidate, but I do think they were a justifiable course of action.
• Lengthening the discussion period and making sure it crosses over with a weekend. This should boost participation, which is really important for fairness but also good for candidates like me, who received basically no negative feedback of any kind but still had a good number of oppose votes. I don't know what I did to trigger those votes (although I could take a guess) and having that knowledge would be really helpful!
• Allowing discussion to continue during voting - Again, this would boost participation.
• Crowd-sourcing an agreed upon "stats list" for candidates. This should be presented in an entirely unjudgemental way (so no checkmarks or Xs, no green or red) but would help solve for the lack of other voter guides. We can narrow down the details in the future but the biggest concern here is making sure it doesn't prioritize content editors over gnomes.
• Reducing the threshold to 65%. I think this is reasonable given that there seem to be more oppose votes in general with this system.

ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)^{Talk to Me!} 17:02, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Peaceray

I would also be curious to for anyone who has any insights or feedback for me. For instance, I am wondering as to how large my lack of any FACs played into the nay votes.

I would be most appreciative of any feedback or advice, here, on my talk page or by email. Feel free to comment from an IP address if you wish to remain anonymous to me. Peaceray (talk) 22:37, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I've been of the mindset that a featured article or GA isn't as valuable as once thought. It's essentially just a way to show "content experience", which can be shown in a number of ways, as opposed to checking a box. Hey man im josh (talk) 22:45, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

It's a minor plus for me to see GAs as it indicates that the candidate can receive and act on criticism. FAs mean zero to me, though. ☆ Bri (talk) 23:11, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Just curious, why to GAs hold a small sway, but FAs none? Something about the process differences, or just that FAs come after GAs generally? —penultimate_supper 🚀 (talk • contribs) 23:26, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Because I don't have any FAs myself, ha ha. No, really: the demonstration that you can listen to another editor is already there if you can clear the GA bar. I don't think the additional skills required to take things through an FA are necessarily indicative of the grind work that most of adminship consists of. ☆ Bri (talk) 00:16, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Sable232

I was the 16th editor on the list when I put my name in with two days left, so I expected the total number of candidates to end up around 20-25, not 35. 35 was too many - from comments I've seen from others, it seems some candidacies got overlooked on account of the sheer volume. I also expected more questions and discussion than there was, at least for me. I wasn't sure how to interpret the lack of that - and having received the greatest number of Abstain votes at 298, I really don't know how to interpret that.

Having not been elected, I'm glad to have not gone through RfA, but not glad that I have hardly any feedback, positive or negative.

If this process continues, there should be a limit to the number of candidates. Adding additional standard questions may help also - I figured I'd get some that I almost always see asked in RfAs (e.g. "You see these usernames at UAA, how do you respond?").

I'm reluctant to mention this, as it requires others to invest their time, but some sort of pre-candidacy process to give feedback to those interested in running would help. If the call for candidates started with a committee of sorts that could give some general feedback on whether they should run or if there shortcomings that are likely to sink them, that would be beneficial. "I know Wikipedia needs more administrators, do I fit the bill?" was more or less the question I was asking when I decided to run.

Overall, I don't regret participating in this - it was a worthwhile experiment for Wikipedia. Wikipedia needs more administrators, but every editor has their own criteria as to what makes someone capable of being one. Some follow the "no big deal" philosophy while some have very high expectations. RfA puts that balancing act out in the open, which this process didn't seem to do.

(If anyone has some constructive comments related to this, or simply why they supported/abstained/opposed me, I'd be glad to hear them.) --Sable232 (talk) 22:59, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I abstained on yours. I was going to support, but I found a snarky edit summary from this year, and those make me uncomfortable when it comes to admin temperament. If I had found more than one I would have opposed. If I had found zero I would have supported. One was a gray zone though, maybe it's just a bad day, so I sat it out and let others decide. Hope that gives you some helpful feedback.

Maybe consider WP:ORCP for pre-election feedback. I think we did have a link to it on the call for candidates page, but it was probably easy to miss. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:17, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae I think there was also a timing issue. By the time the call for candidates went out, there wasn't a lot of time to decide to run, go through an ORCP, draft a nomination statement/find a nominator, answer the three questions, etc. (and it wasn't really clear the edits to the nomination statement/three questions were going to be allowed during the setup phase). --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 19:58, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Feedback from me, can’t remember how I voted. But a cursory evaluation of your questions and discussions show a lack of FA/GA activity and no apparent specialisation in admin areas (same as me, perhaps). This may have led to abstentions. starship.paint (talk / cont) 05:22, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Alright, I opposed because there was an 82-month gap between your edits. Because I can't find an explanation for it (and because I couldn't ask on the discussion page on time), I thought a similar gap will happen if you were elected as an admin. Mox Eden (talk) 13:39, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

It was largely a matter of having other things going on at that time, and not being here regularly turned into not being here at all. Not much else to it. --Sable232 (talk) 01:05, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I think you received a lot of abstentions because there really wasn't a lot to go on in your question answers and the discussion. Not so much on the red flags, but nothing that really stood out, either. I think you would have done much better in a less-crowded field (but maybe then someone would find some skeleton in your closet that tanked your candidacy, who knows). I was impressed by your really well-reasoned AfD participation, so you were in my "sure, no big deal" support column. I didn't expect you to be elected, but I didn't feel compelled to abstain. Having nominators and writing out fuller answers to the questions would have made a big difference; I hope you'll run again with that in mind. If you don't think you have any closet-skeletons, I think RFA (rather than another EFA) is the right way to go - in general I think RFA is probably better for the "quietly good, makes few waves" type of candidate. -- asilvering (talk) 20:04, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Having expected more questions, I didn't want to go overboard on statements/answers that might've been deemed TL;DR - especially as people's threshold for that gets shorter all the time. If I try again, I'll keep that in mind. --Sable232 (talk) 01:05, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I noticed the big gap too, but wasn't too bothered by it given the long consistent service since 2018. I agree you need to write more in your nomination statement. Other things that I noted were relatively low in Wikipedia space (1.2k); seems to mainly edit on a single topic, which suggests less breadth of experience; last 500 mainspace non-minor edits went back to 31 October 2023, which was significantly longer than most other candidates. I felt your last 500 mainspace non-minor edits were mainly removing text, reversion and discussing which image to use, without showing much evidence of recent content building. Also, there's not a lot of content creation recently (2 articles since 2010). I note now that you were doing lots of article creation in 2006–8, and perhaps going back to doing some of that kind of work would convince the content-focused voters of your candidacy. Espresso Addict (talk) 08:59, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

I second asilvering's opinions. My notes were "Not a very strong candidate, but also no red flags after 18 years and 30K edits", so I supported you. The "strong candidate" part probably referred to the lack of work in admin-lite areas and no GA/FA (you mentioned other content work that to satisfied me, but I suspect other voters were less forgiving). On the plus side, I was impressed that nothing looked "wrong" with you as a candidate after such a wiki-life. Toadspike [Talk] 17:15, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Starship.paint

Being under scrutiny was a bit stressful, but that is to be expected. Now that the result is out, I would be happy to get explicit feedback. starship.paint (talk / cont) 23:54, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

You were one of my 3 abstains. You were well-spoken and I liked your vibe and your style of answering questions and discussing, but the major drama from your past (I think I remember seeing your name a lot on the WP:FRAM pages?) led me to sit it out. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:04, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae: - thank you for the feedback! You are right on seeing my name at WP:FRAM, and you are right that there was drama (caused, in part, by me, for which I take responsibility for). This was obviously going to be an albatross, but unfortunately, my past is unchangeable. starship.paint (talk / cont) 05:13, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

• It is difficult to give this feedback, but since I've asked others for feedback I will give you mine: You were one of my oppose votes. It was nothing personal - the issue was the block log and the relatively low participation at AFD, which in this election, where it didn't really feel possible to discuss the issues (especially not as a fellow candidate!), were fatal. I honestly think you might have succeeded had this been a traditional RFA - where people could discuss the issue with you more and put your activity since 2019 in context - and would encourage you to give RFA a shot in six months, after a bit more work at AFD. I don't think any of us knew before entering this process that having even a single question mark over our candidature was going to be fatal in most cases. FOARP (talk) 18:03, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  @FOARP: - I am grateful for your honest feedback. I do not begrudge you for opposing. Your feedback is valuable. I will work on AFDs before any future admin run. starship.paint (talk / cont) 10:30, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

• Positives were generally good balance across spaces, mainly consistent editing since 2011, and lots of people have thanked you, which is always a good sign. The main thing I noted negatively was that some of your recent created articles were a bit underwhelming, eg Shooting of Aderrien Murry doesn't do much to unpick the long-term effects of the shooting or show signs of long-term coverage. I didn't look at your block log or recall the FRAM thing; many editors did not distinguish themselves over that, so I hope it didn't disproportionately affect your votes. Espresso Addict (talk) 09:16, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

  Thank you Espresso Addict for your insightful feedback. At the time that I wrote the articles, that was the information available. But, I can get to working on them and updating them based on current information. I will improve these articles before any future admin run. starship.paint (talk / cont) 13:59, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

I supported you due to name recognition/generally having a good impression of you, but I suspect that heavy involvement in several CTOP areas makes it easy for people to find a reason to oppose, especially when they don't have to explain themselves. If you run again, I think you'd do better at a regular RfA. Toadspike [Talk] 17:18, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

@Toadspike: - thank you for the feedback. I am pleasantly surprised that I was able to leave such an impression on you. Your feedback on RFA is appreciated - you are not the first to have suggested that. I will take that on - if I run again, I will go for RFA. starship.paint (talk / cont) 05:59, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

You were #34 of 35 on my ballot, per my screenshot. I didn’t expect to have to vote all 35 in one sitting. I reviewed most of the candidates, and voted oppose abstain or support seriously, but at the tail end I ran out of time and block opposed remaining as admins should be reviewed before getting the bit.

I wish I could have voted one candidate at a time, as per RfA. SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:31, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: - thank you for the feedbak. No hard feelings, you did what you thought was right, and I wouldn't have passed even if your vote had changed. starship.paint (talk / cont) 09:22, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

In hindsight, “abstain” would have been logical. SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:27, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

I thought you passed? Sorry. SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:28, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: - I got 54% when the passing mark was 70%. No worries! Perhaps you can evaluate me on a later date if I run for RFA. starship.paint (talk / cont) 14:10, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

As I do not know who many of my supporters were, I am posting this message. I am looking for RFA nominators (preferably someone who is or has been admin before) willing to nominate me. However I will not run for RFA soon. I have taken on the post-election feedback and intend to first improve my AFD record, do some GAN reviews, and improve/update my created articles before any RFA run; this will take time. starship.paint (talk / cont) 03:14, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

EggRoll97

Welp, it's over. I will admit I'm glad it's over, since the biggest stressor was actually the voting, not the discussion. The discussion, honestly, I expected to need to answer more from the community, but I found it a fairly lax process, if not very in-depth. The voting, though, is sort of stressful from a viewpoint of not having any idea how it's going. On one hand, it's great to not be able to see the way the vote trends, but on the other, it's also an unknown. As for the results themselves, I'm grateful that I even got to ~40% on the results. The discussion phase was a bit underwhelming though, and I saw pretty much a neutral comment (AfD), a neutral or slightly positive comment (GAN/FAC), a pretty good negative, though explained in Q9 (CSDs), a neutral (HJ Mitchell), and a positive (Lightburst), and then failed by a wide margin. There's a lot of candidates in this one, so I do get the lack of feedback, but if anyone has any feedback that didn't get tossed onto the discussion page, feel free, I'm open to it. EggRoll97 ^(talk) 00:18, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

• My opinion is that more content creation work is needed, and luckily this is one issue that you can remedy, Work your way to a GA, and if you can, an FA. starship.paint (talk / cont) 05:33, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  Seconded. Toadspike [Talk] 17:18, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

• With 2.2k edits in mainspace and ~2 short page creations that are not dabs or lists, I suspect it's a case of just needing more experience. Espresso Addict (talk) 05:49, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  For what it's worth, I had 3 stubs and 3 lists (one of which was featured) when I passed last September. Hey man im josh (talk) 11:37, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  @Hey man im josh: - you said in your RFA that you had “6 featured lists I helped to promote”, and you had two admin co-nominators. Not comparable in my opinion. starship.paint (talk / cont) 14:39, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  @Starship.paint: I could have been clearer in what I was trying to differentiate and get across. I was referring specifically to the items created as opposed to improved upon, as some people do focus on a person's creations as opposed to their overall body of work. I do agree that EggRoll97 needs more demonstrated content work. Hey man im josh (talk) 14:41, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks Hey man im josh for clarifying. I don’t have that stance myself. Improvement is improvement. The result is the same. starship.paint (talk / cont) 14:48, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  100% agree! Hey man im josh (talk) 14:51, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  Seconding EA here. Obvious WP:NOTYET, imo. -- asilvering (talk) 20:08, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Ahecht

Although I'm very grateful to have been elected, I was disappointed by the discussion period. It simply felt too short, even as a candidate, and by the time the final questions rolled in, there wasn't much time for discussion. Ending the discussion so soon, especially where there is so much time between when they closed and when voting closed, just invites the conversation to move to other venues or offwiki, which I'm not sure helps anyone. I think a good compromise between the current system and a full RfA would be to limit the Q&A period to three days, but allow discussion to continue for a full seven, and then immediately open the polls. The stressful part for the candidate is being available to answer questions, they're not "supposed" to be involved in the discussion.

Which brings me to my next point. As I posted elsewhere, a lot of the nuance in the evaluation of candidates was lost due to the lack of participation in the discussion section, which meant that either negative information went unanswered or that the candidate themselves had to be the one to reply. A prime example was the list of declined CSDs — in a normal RfA other editors would likely discuss their significance, but in the election candidates either had to let them stand without comment or break the long-standing tradition against participating in the discussion section. I split the difference and gave a brief neutral summary of the false-positives, but some candidates did line-by line rebuttals while others left them unanswered to avoid a faux pas. I'm not sure if the lack of discussion was entirely due to the the number of candidates, as the short discussion period and the lack of nominators (who usually closely monitor discussions) likely also played a role.

And speaking of nominators, I think Hey man im josh's analysis of nominators hit the nail on the head: given the lack of productive discussion or time to evaluate each candidate's history, a large number of voters voted based on either "have I heard of this candidate" or "have I heard of the person vouching for this candidate". I was surprised to see 1/3 of the candidates pass, as I had either expected to see the majority pass (based on the voters that released their votes, off-wiki voter guides, the fact that I found 20 candidates I could support, etc.) or see only 3-4 pass (based on the ease of voting oppose without the fear of being badgered or seeming like a spoilsport). On further reflection, I'm not sure that that nominations being so important is a bad thing necessarily, unless our goal was to get rid of the nomination process. I found that the biggest mental hurdle of this whole process for me was to get myself to reach out to potential nominators, but again, I'm not sure that that's a bad thing either.

Moving forwards, I think the obvious thing to do is hold another election with a fewer number of candidates and see what impact that has in terms of discussions, atmosphere, and success rate. More guidance could be given on expectations for nominations, candidate participation in discussions, voter guides, etc. Once we see what impact that has, there may be room to optimize the timing and/or the success threshold based on the results of a smaller election. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 00:35, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Mdewman6

My initial reaction is that I am disappointed with the blanket opposes and blanket supports. I realize some of the blanket opposes was a protest to the number of candidates, and some of the blanket supports were an attempt to counteract some of the blanket opposes, but ultimately, blanket voting goes against the spirit of the process and is a disservice. When the best a candidate can manage is 82%, something is wrong. I may have more to say later.

That said, no regrets in participating in the process, or the outcome. Mdewman6 (talk) 05:01, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I also wonder how many blanket opposes were in protest of the election in general. Mdewman6 (talk) 05:03, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Frost

When I signed up, I didn't expect there to be a discussion phase as I thought the point of the election was to reduce stress for the candidates and that voters should be able to do their own research and vote on their own. So when it happened, it looked the same as RfA with the slight difference of there not being votes on the page.

Several voter guides, like the ones by Femke and Novem Lingaue, I think played a huge role in influencing the election and were biased in favor of users with content creation, which isn't a bad thing but obviously is unfair to users like me who don't have a GA, long tenure, endorsements, etc, but aren't bad in other areas. I know this is an encyclopedia and creating content is what we do but protecting it is also just as important and I think this aspect is often overlooked and vandalism fighters undervalued. There's also the idea that edits by automated tools should be dismissed as insignificant. I don't agree with this because every edit I made with them was reviewed carefully and with great care and I could just as easily make them manually so I don't think it's a big deal, and they are as significant as manual edits. I also tend to make large content addition in a single edit rather than dozens of edits of small addition, like for example, this comment, so perhaps this is why my edit count showed less manual edits.

As a candidate, I felt it was necessary to acknowledge the conclusion of the election and say something about it. It was a huge success, kudos to the people who helped to coordinate the whole thing. I hope to see more of these elections in the future and holding it quarterly, as suggested by FOARP and Leijurv, is a good idea. Congratulations to the eleven new admins, I voted support for most of them, all those in 60%-70% plus a few more below that. The blanket opposing is a problem but the simple fact it didn't stop eleven new admins from being elected is good enough of a reason to safely ignore it. I think cutting the number of candidates to 10 isn't ideal because then there'll be lesser candidates elected. If, for example, all 10 get elected then great, but chances are voters will feel compelled to oppose some even if they're all excellent candidates. I agree with many people here saying the discussion phase should be extended to at least 7 days.

I didn't expect a good result for myself given the feedback I've received and I've been in the project space for about 4 months so getting 102 support votes here is a huge deal. I thank those voters for supporting me, the opposers for giving me a check of my readiness to be an admin, and also the users who commented generally about my editing in the discussion phase - HJ Mitchell, SerialNumber54129, Femke, Ritchie333, Asilvering, Cryptic, Peppery, ClaudineChionh and Bugghost. I invite others to offer further feedback on what I can do to improve my editing, my chances for adminship, etc. Frost 06:16, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

The main thing I noted was that you had only been active continuously since June this year, and before that there was a gap back to 2020; I think in RfA most voters look for a relatively long recent spell of contributions up to the RfA. The other thing I noticed was that a lot of your highly edited articles are on the same topic, which suggests a lack of breadth of experience. You might try branching out into other topic areas? (Though there are some prominent single-focused admins/bureaucrats around, so perhaps that's just my preference.) Espresso Addict (talk) 09:51, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

My feedback: The proportion of automated edits and the short time since coming back to Wikipedia were the main flaws I saw. Claiming interest in histmerges was a plus, since that's one of the nastier admin tasks. Toadspike [Talk] 17:26, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

DoubleGrazing

• The first thing I'd like to say is a big thank-you to everyone who made this happen. Those who planned and organised the whole thing – which turned out to be bigger and more complex than at least I expected – and to all who turned up to vote, all 600+ (!) of them. And of course to my fellow guinea pigs candidates, with congrats to those who made it, and commiserations to those who didn't (this time around). We couldn't have had an election at all, let alone a successful one, without everyone playing their part. So thank you! --DoubleGrazing (talk) 06:44, 5 November 2024 (UTC)
• I'll start with the positives... which is pretty much everything. From my point of view, the entire process ran very smoothly. Not much was expected of me (in part, because I didn't get many questions), and luckily I didn't have any IRL issues getting in the way of my participation, so it all felt very easy and relaxed. Compared to an RfA (the little I know of which, never having been a nominee) the experience was much more 'gentle', although one or two of the other candidates might have a different take on that. Bottom line: would I recommend this format to someone considering running? Absolutely. --DoubleGrazing (talk) 07:07, 5 November 2024 (UTC)
• A few thoughts on numbers:
  • Much was said about the large number of candidates, mostly negative. I think it was also a positive, in that it highlighted this as a possible problem area, so that the rules and procedures can be drawn up to deal with this issue going forward; call it early 'stress testing', if you like.
  • There was some speculation about a candidate passing with very few for-votes, just on the basis of absence of against-votes. I don't think this was ever realistically likely to happen (and didn't, on this occasion). That said, some sort of minimum level of support probably should be defined, to allay such concerns.
  • Tied in with the previous point, we also need to consider voter numbers. This time we were lucky, the doors of the polling booth were flung open, and the voters came in their multitudes. But what if we only got, say, 60 voters turning up? How do we ensure that doesn't happen? How do we deal with it if it does look like happening? What about legitimacy of the results – is passing the 70% (or whatever) threshold always enough, even with a very small voter turnout?
  • There was also some discussion around how often these elections should be run, with how many candidates each time, and how many new admins would this result in, etc. I think before any of that, we should probably ask what size of the admin corps are we aiming for, ie. how many current (active?) admins should we seek to have at any given time? Then we can design an electoral system that seeks to deliver that, perhaps even adjusting as the size of the corps changes over time.

--DoubleGrazing (talk) 07:49, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

• Regarding nominations/endorsements (and I'm repeating a point here I already made elsewhere), future candidates would benefit from more clarity on this, esp. given how important it seems to be as a predictor of success (whether that's because the nom itself influences voting behaviour, or likelihood of admin endorsement merely correlates with candidate quality). It doesn't need to be complicated, just "accept a nom if it's offered, and consider asking for one if it's not offered; you can also run without it, but this may affect your chances". It would be enough to at least bring this matter to the candidates' attention, because I for one didn't even think of it! --DoubleGrazing (talk) 07:57, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I entirely agree with this point, DoubleGrazing. As i mention lower down the page, it never crossed my mind that we could have nominators, so i think a brief clarification along your lines would be useful. Congratulations, by the way ~ Lindsay^Hello 13:39, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes, agree entirely. Never crossed my mind beforehand. Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 14:02, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Seems reasonable. I added this to encourage candidates to think about nominators. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:22, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Valenciano

Overall, I think this was a success, particularly since we’ll add 11 admins, all of whom look like worthy candidates. Like every new and experimental process there are certainly some issues which became obvious through it.

• First as everyone agrees, there were far too many candidates, which probably led to voter exhaustion. When I look at my result, I’m both heartened to get the support that I did and frustrated to just miss the cut, especially since I’m the only unsuccessful candidate to get fewer oppose votes than half the successful candidates. That leads to the issue that others have noted.
• Secret ballot is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it makes the process more pleasant, on the other I really have no clue why people opposed me and what I can do in the future to win their trust. That makes me wonder if I should try again in a hypothetical future election or just go for RFA the traditional way with noms in either case?
• The shortened discussion period also led to a disappointing lack of feedback in the case of me and other unsuccessful candidates. I’m grateful to those like Femke who commented and pointed out things I’d erred on at WP:RFPP. That’s useful just as an ordinary editor who contributes there. The end result is that we don’t know why we failed or why people opposed. I was towards the bottom of the list of candidates, one of the lowest in terms of page views and the third highest in terms of abstains, which may suggest voter fatigue. But I’d be happy to hear from people who did oppose me on things I could improve.
• I agree with a candidate limit of around 10. But I have noted elsewhere that that throws up a potential problem with start times. If the nominations period opens at 18:00 UTC time then that’s great for candidates in Europe, but not great for candidates in East Asia/Australia/New Zealand, who would wake up to find they’d missed out, so that’s something to think about when going forward.
• Another thing to consider if this does end up oversubscribed would be the perennial question of minimum requirements. If spots are limited then it would make sense to exclude WP:SNOW candidates, probably with a 5k edits / 1-year tenure requirement, since no candidate with less is realistically going to succeed and any exceptional ones still have the traditional RFA route available.
• I’d support a 5-day discussion period, with voting opening on the 3rd day and continuing after close of discussion taking in a weekend. If anything damning is discovered, people would always have the chance to change their votes.
• Voter guides should be allowed. Though some thought should be put into what goes in. I agree with Bastun’s point regarding talkpage and WP:OWNTALK, I was surprised and disappointed to get an X by my name, due to following OWNTALK over a 6-year-old message. The “CSD fails” should also be tweaked/improved. In my case it threw up a number of false positives.
• 70% threshold in the middle of the RFA discretionary range seems fine and should stay for now. Give it another go and review that after.

All in all, this is definitely something we should try again, with some tweaks which I and and others have suggested. Valenciano (talk) 11:49, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

There were lots of good things about your editing. The main negative things I noted were that your content creation was a while back, with few created articles since 2016; and your last 500 non-minor mainspace edits looked to be mainly semi-automated. It looks like you missed out by a fairly small margin, so perhaps try to make sure your recent edits/page creations reflect what you want voters to scrutinise (most people only look at the most recent), and try again, perhaps at RfA with a nominator?

I'm not sure what the OWNTALK issue is (I didn't look much at the guides as I'd done my investigations before they were permitted); admins are pretty much required to keep all messages that aren't outright vandalism, but nothing says admin candidates have to do that, and certainly not for 6 years straight! Espresso Addict (talk) 10:09, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Appreciate the comments. Regarding WP:OWNTALK, that was a point raised by Bastun which I wholeheartedly agree with. OWNTALK makes it very clear that users may remove talkpage messages. It's then taken that the message is read and understood and it's in the page history anyway. In some of the guides (for example) I'd a big red X by my name due to reverting a message in April 2018 even though there were (are) no rules against that for non-admins. I mean if it had been asked in an RFA ("you removed this message in April 2018, what is your view on admins and transparency?") I'd have said, yes I'd be fine with following a different standard if I was an admin, so it hardly seemed fair and I'd no way to address it. I guess that's the nature of the beast with elections. Valenciano (talk) 19:22, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I think that's fair, apologies. I forked my overview from Novem, and while I changed some other columns, for instance to get more types of content creation acknowledged and fewer red crosses there, I didn't seriously change this column. This was in contrast with blocks, which were discounted when less serious and old. Reverting warnings is often less serious, so should have been changed too.

That said, WP:OWNTALK says archiving is preferred, and just like WP:EDITSUMMARIES are preferred, it is something that can be indicative of good communications which is key to adminning. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 20:18, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Your guide was helpful and useful, but I just think those guides need more nuance than simple ticks and x's in that, if I've archived every message bar one in the last decade, singling out the one from over 6 and a half years ago where I didn't doesn't give an accurate picture. Again, it's something which could have been addressed in a standard RFA but couldn't be in this format and we're all thinking aloud how to find the best way forward if we continue this. Given that guides will likely be a thing, some thought should also go into what they contain. What would probably be more relevant in a guide would be things like your feedback on my candidate page regarding my WP:RFPP blunder, which was very valid and definitely an "oops, won't do that again" moment for me. Valenciano (talk) 23:19, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Agreeing with Valenciano here (obviously :-) ). It was a new process, so when I saw the user guides and the big red Xs, I was somewhat nonplussed. In my own case, I had answered Novem's (perfectly valid!) question (and mentioned another instance too!), so I was surprised to then see the issue included in two guides, not only because removing hate speech from one's talk page rather than archiving it seems perfectly valid (at least for a user, if not an admin), but also because there is literally no rule that says "all talk must be archived." Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 23:33, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

@Bastun, @Valenciano, do you participate in many RFAs? No judgement, just a neutral question. I ask because I'd expect that kind of thing (and yours in particular Bastun, with the edit summaries) to come up in RFA and I'm surprised you were both surprised by it. -- asilvering (talk) 23:39, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

@asilvering Sorry, I was on the road and only just noticed this today. I do sporadically take part in RFAs and don't remember this coming up before. My point is more that, if someone had 40 AFD votes, 39 of which matched consensus and one which didn't, it would seem strange to have a column in a guide "Does the candidate's AFD votes match consensus?" with an X in it. It just seems disproportionate. But my main point is that if something like that does come up in an RFA, it's very easy for the candidate or supporters to address it with context. When it's in a guide it's not possible to do so, unless the candidate asks the guide writer, which runs the risk of being seen as "badgering." Valenciano (talk) 20:46, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

I was planning to say that candidates can choose to email me if they think the entry is wrong or otherwise misleading. You're absolutely right that it is risky socially to point out when these guides are not as informative as can be as a candidate. Will state this next time. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 20:54, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Personally, I don't. I used to participate irregularly some years ago, but stopped doing it regularly a long time ago. Again, Novem's question was perfectly valid, and I thought my answer was too, which is why I was surprised to see it come up as a red X, in two guides, albeit with a note. I've gotten very little feedback, so don't know if it played a part in my 'opposes'. Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 23:53, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I only knew this from reading RFAs, and old RFAs at that - circa 2019 was the last time I can remember it being brought up.

I write edit summaries, but I don't rely on them much myself. FOARP (talk) 14:59, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

For clarity, the red X in my voter guide was from not archiving this. The edit summaries were a separate issue. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:42, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

100% honesty from me: I only selected to get the reminder to put an edit summary in my edits after realising it was important for RFA circa mid-2019 or so? And I only knew that from reading oppose !votes at RFA.

I do not personally rely on them a lot to see what other editors have done, and I don't really understand not passing editors at RFA based on their lack of usage of edit summaries. I think if it was really important, we'd have the reminder switched on as default, and punishing editors for not realising that it's important when nothing tells them it is isn't very fair.

Valenciano was one of my support votes and I would very much encourage them to RFA or AELECT again. FOARP (talk) 14:57, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Hawkeye7

• Overall, I consider the admin election trial to be sucessful, and hope that they will continue on a regular basis. One of my main reasons for running was to support the process. It seems clear that this process has considerable support. I am not be certain that there would be such a large field in the future, though, given the novelty factor.
• I understand the concerns of people who consider adminship a big deal, but I do not believe that setting the bar high is in the best interests of the project of building an encyclopedia. What it has resulted in is a steep decline in the numbers of admins, with an increasingly small number of them bearing an increasingly large workload. This is unsustainable. The result of this election has merely been to match what occurred in 2019. A lot more new admins will be required.
• That being the case, we should lower the pass threshold to 60%.
• The number of voters was high - higher than the number that usually turn out for RfA
• I like the way that discussion only occurred after nominations had closed. We should do this for ArbCom elections too.
• Something I did not anticipate was the cameraderie amongst the candidates. That was really great.

Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:09, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

LindsayH

Somehow i missed this page until five minutes ago; i did, however, write the following about ten days ago:

The trial is about two-thirds of the way through as i start this ~ we're most of the way through the third day of questions and discussion, which leaves only the voting and, of course, the declaration of results. How do i feel it has gone for me? Well, whatever the results, and obviously at this point i don't know them, i am quite happy with the way the process has gone. The actual creation of the self-nomination statement and answers to the first questions was easy ~ though this may be the point to mention that i didn't even consider looking for a nominator because it never crossed my mind that i could: Somehow i understood that candidates had to self-nominate, and whether that was my own blindness or foolishness or a lack of clarity in the instructions we may never know; in case it's the latter, if we do anything like this again we might consider being explicit. Other than that, as far as i'm concerned, the entire process has been easy and pain-free. Things i might say about it, in no particular order:

• I liked having all the information ~ nominations, questions, discussions ~ on one page as well as linked from the main, made it easier;
• I was quite disappointed by some of the comments on talk:RfA which came across as petulant or irritated or rude ~ from editors whom i did and do admire and am sure did not intend them to be perceived that way;
• For me there did not feel to be a lot of pressure, which i had been expecting based on everything i've seen on RfAs since about 2011: I think that the fact that the three busiest days were very strictly not for voting but purely for asking, answering, and discussing made it much easier ~ though i also recognise that i had an easier ride than some candidates, likely because i'm so unlikely a candidate that no one thought it worth their while;
• As Mr Serjeant Buzfuz has said on my talk page, the election opportunity seemed to show that there are people on this project who want to contribute, to give back, and are willing to step forward, with just a general goal of "I want to help.";
• Perhaps that surprisingly large number of volunteers was a shock, but if we want to keep the potential flow available we need to do something other than merely say, “Well, that wasn't what we expected, and we won't do that again!” and refuse to have any more elections;
• That this process came out of the latest of i don't know how many attempts at RfA reform is, surely, a good thing: The community, or a portion of it, was able to agree on something that has been for a decade and a half at least extremely contentious and has defied all attempts at reform;
• Some of the comments on talk:RfA, both before and then during the process, have been quite helpful, thoughtful, community-minded.

One final (at least for now) point is that someone else has started working on the CS1 errors i mentioned in my nomination statement. Now i can't prove that this is because of that statement, but it is certainly indicative that the current rate of reduction is substantially higher than just about any time previous to it; and, yes, i do have a daily spreadsheet showing the numbers of these errors, so it's not merely anecdotal. The point is, though, that this is super: If i do not become an admin, if the person or persons who are now working on reducing that backlog voted against me ~ so what? The backlog is being reduced, error messages are going away, as a result of mine action. I feel great about that!
~ Lindsay^Hello 23:18, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

(edit to add) I agree with Hawkeye7 about the camaraderie; i almost always remember the RfAs i have participated in, and i now have a warm feeling and a little smile when i see any of the eleven(!) successes' signatures highlighted with the "Admin colours". It felt good going through it together.

As with almost everyone else, i agree about the large number of candidates, but i don't feel that made this a failure, merely gave us something to tweak for next time ~ for there really should be a next time: This was a success.

Again, as with others, if there's any feedback, i'm always happy to receive it. ~ Lindsay^Hello 08:45, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

@LindsayH: - if you are not interested in content work, nobody can force you, then I would suggest that you establish a niche or specialisation that is relevant to being an admin. starship.paint (talk / cont) 14:26, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Spy-cicle

Swamped with work, but will get round to sharing my thoughts.  Spy-cicle💥  ^Talk? 23:05, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

Feedback from voters

Novem Linguae

• Suggestions
  • max 10 candidates per election (I didn't mind the 32 candidates, but a lot of folks suggested less candidates on the talk page, and this would be an easy fix. I also think modifying the # of candidates is better than elongating the discussion period, because the latter would make the candidate experience worse)
  • lower support threshold from 70% to 65%. the candidates in the 65.00%-69.99% range of the October 2024 admin elections were good candidates, whom I mostly voted support for. would have been good for them to pass
  • put the discussion phase on the weekend, to help out voters with day jobs
  • alphabetize candidates in SecurePoll. i assume many folks research the candidates before arriving at the vote screen, so might as well make it easier to transfer the votes over.
  • change voter suffrage to extendedconfirmed, to match RFA and to greatly simplify the SecurePoll voter eligibility workflow
  • create a subpage that is linked from the main election page where links to voter guides can be added
• lessons / other notes
  • 616 votes total, lowest # of support+oppose votes for a candidate was 318. so there are absolutely no concerns about quorum. more voters per candidate than a typical RFA.
  • candidate with lowest # of opposes was 74. this suggests that 74 of the 616 voters (12%) blanket opposed everyone.
  • candidate with the highest support percentage received 83.42%. this suggests that there is at least a -16.58% support penalty for doing AELECT compared to RFA. judging from ACE, it may be as high as -20%
  • elections are best pre-scheduled, not spontaneous when a candidate list fills up. we pretty much have to use pre-scheduling until enwiki gets local electionadmins, due to the WMF T&S election calendar not having that many openings and having months waits until the next opening.

–Novem Linguae (talk) 20:48, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

It's a minor point, but your suggestion about 74 voters blanket opposing everyone presumes that the candidate with the least opposes had no valid opposition, only blanket. I would not be surprised if the real number of blanket opposers was much lower. Giraffer (talk) 21:22, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I imagine it could be a little lower, but I wouldn’t guess it’s a lot lower. We regularly have RfAs where people earn 98-99% support. It surprised me that no one was close to that range and did suggest a fair amount of blanket opposition even if maybe configured slightly differently (if not blanket opposition to all, at least to people they hadn’t personally encountered). Innisfree987 (talk) 22:04, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

You are assuming that the 74 people who opposed that candidate cast exclusively/mainly oppose votes, rather than 74 people having a reason to oppose that candidate specifically. We cannot know which it is. Thryduulf (talk) 22:12, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I saw one or two people volunteer that they had voted against everyone they didn’t recognize, and I find it surprising that where many RfAs have well over 90% support, no one did here, so I think those are good reasons to suspect there was some blanket rather than only specific opposition. Innisfree987 (talk) 22:21, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I would expect that editors were more willing to vote oppose in the elections, given the hostility that voting oppose can sometimes produce in normal RFAs.

That only six candidates had less than 200 abstentions for me indicates that people blanket abstained on candidates they didn't know or didn't have time to investigate. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:49, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Owing to said admissions of opposing those not recognized above, I would lean more towards "didn't have time to investigate". Aaron Liu (talk) 23:14, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

An admission in a small group is a poor way to analyse data. There could have been some blanket opposes, but the minimum opposes was 74 while the minimum abstentions was 122. If the same logic is used to explain both, then more people blanket abstained than blanket opposed.

Even that is poor analyse though, as it assigns a reason for voting that doesn't come from the data. What can be said is that only 9 candidates had more than 200 opposes, but only 6 candidates had less than 200 abstentions. That shows that people voted abstain far more than oppose (born out by the numbers 7,367 v 5,089).

Also there is a relationship between support votes and opposes, the more support votes someone received them in general the less opposes they received. The same is not true of abstain votes and either support or oppose votes. Support votes only lead to a small reduction in abstains, and oppose votes numbers show no trend at all.

That implies that oppose votes were as reasoned as support votes, but abstain votes were fairly consistent regardless of the candidate. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 00:21, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. Opposers do not see point in opposing a candidate against 100 supports and getting badgered as a result. Ca ^{talk to me!} 23:23, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I think if we had 32 RFAs in a year, a bunch of those would be unanimous or near-unanimous. So this is why I assume that the AELECT candidate with the least opposes received all blanket opposes. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:42, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

If we alphabetize candidates in SecurePoll, IMO we should alphabetize the list of candidates as well. That, or have the SecurePoll be in the same order as the list of candidates. Otherwise, we may introduce an additional source of participation bias by introducing another set of fixed first/last candidates. Aaron Liu (talk) 23:17, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

create a subpage that is linked from the main election page where links to voter guides can be added

It feels more in line with wikitext to transclude or link to the category for voter guides. Note that ACE (ArbCom elections) does this by maintaining an {{hlist}} of all guides in a collapsible box that is a part of the header along with a notice that the guides contain opinions of individual editors. This may satisfy those who believe too much prominence for opinionated voter guides will make voters half-ass their choices, and this is already working in the ACE. Aaron Liu (talk) 23:19, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I'd like to push back against this idea that the high number of oppose votes was from having too many candidates. This played out almost exactly the same as WP:ACE: the top candidate only got around 80%. My hypothesis is that all secret votes will have a -20% penalty when compared to a public consensus process like WP:RFA. –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:58, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

References

Femke

• I think we should be careful with limiting the number of candidates too much, so to not take away opportunities from people. Reviewing this number of candidates was tough (took me >20h to investigate), and some maximum is needed, but I'd rather it be at 12-15 than 10, especially as some people will withdraw during the process. After the first 1-3 elections, we'll likely have much less pent-up demand, so it may be a self-resolving issue anyway. If we can do elections very frequently (say every 2 months), a number as low as 8-10 makes sense, but that will require a lot of scruniteering capacity / organisational capacity. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 21:01, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
• Most of the 65%-70% candidates were good. I'd support a lowering of the percentage to 2/3rd or 65%. I think next time there will be more candidates with noms, given the stark difference in success rates, which would push up the support %. A longer discussion phase may bring up more issues, however, so not too sure about that.
• I do like the fact that we have fewer noms, which makes this more of a WP:NOBIGDEAL process. Perhaps there will be a move towards 1-nom candidacies.
• I'd like for the discussion phase to be changed in a few ways:
  • Longer (4-5 days)
  • At least one day at the weekend
  • Some overlap with the voting period. Some people are likely only engaged during the voting phase. It would be good if they get an opportunity to talk about their experience with the candidates, be it positive or negative.
• While I'm not a fan of restricting (!)voting to ECs, the case for doing it during elections is stronger, as it simplifies the voting roll. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 21:46, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Saqib

Thank goodness the admin election is over - now I can focus on the real elections tomorrow! On a serious note, I’ve never taken an interest in RFAs before, but I recently voted for the first time in an RFA and this election because I realized it’s very important to make sure our admins are the best this community has to offer. Overall, this election was a good starting point, but it definitely needs a lot of improvement. I suggest we cap the number of candidates in future admin elections. This time, it was nearly impossible to vet everyone and many of us had to abstain - a wasted vote!! Also, it shouldn't be a first-come basis for nom; that only adds to the chaos. We should also reconsider how often these elections are held; once or twice a year seems far more sensible than more frequent elections, which might just dilute their significance, imv and I also think, we definitely need more than two days for discussions - this time wasn’t nearly enough to engage meaningfully with each candidate. Just my 2¢. --— Saqib (talk I contribs) 21:21, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Giraffer

Some suggestions:

• A candidate cap would be good. Arguments have been made about this possibly discouraging candidates from running (because they think it will exclude others), but frankly if you use "someone else could do it better" as a reason for not running, you're probably better off not running in the first place. You have to want to become an admin.
• The discussion period should definitely be longer. Three days is extremely short, and still would be even if we had half the number of candidates. At any rate, we should not be limiting discussion length because it makes candidates uncomfortable—compromising our level of scrutiny to appease potential applicants is a very bad idea.
• Listing the voters on the ballot in the order of the candidate list would make voting smoother.
• I don't think trying to compare this process' results to RfA is particularly useful. This was so different to RfA (timing, degree of scrutiny, candidate profile) that I think it's impossible to draw any firm conclusions about the relationship between the two, or at least anything worth basing changes off of.
• Novem makes a good point about matching RfA suffrage (500/30) here. You shouldn't be allowed to vote in one process but not the other when they do the same thing.
• Election guides should be allowed. No idea if they should be linked or not. I was initially against allowing them, but after this election I've changed my mind.

Giraffer (talk) 21:37, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Floq

• My estimate is that *very very roughly* 60 people just blanket supported, and *very very roughly* 70 people blanket opposed. This is based on two candidates who I believe would have sailed thru a normal RFA with minimal opposition and one candidate who was running in good faith, but was clearly WP:NOTNOW.
• Just for fun (this is not terribly scientific), I reduced the Supports and Opposes by these numbers, and it would have meant 7 more new admins who would have gotten >70% of those who didn't blanket support/oppose. Mdewman6 would have been the last elected in this parallel universe. There's also a more natural gap of almost 10% between last admin elected and first candidate not elected doing it this way.
• I don't know how to "solve" blanket supports. I suspect, but am not sure, that a lot of the blanket opposers wouldn't have done so if the number of candidates was a more reasonable number, so a cap of some kind would be good.

--Floquenbeam (talk) 21:51, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I wonder if some of the near-blanket support (if there are any) might be a response to the vocal near-blanket opposers? With a smaller group of people, we might significantly reduce both groups therefore. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 22:52, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

I guess I will fess up to this. My rationale was that since opposes are weighted 3x more than supports, and I found the declarations of blanket opposition to be frustrating, I was making a small impact in evening it out. ForksForks (talk) 03:20, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I wonder if we could ask the scrutineers how many were 100% support or oppose? There's been a lot of guessing on this point, and aggregated numbers would not seem to compromise anyone's privacy of vote. Espresso Addict (talk) 05:37, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Nobody has that information. It's called a secret ballot because no individual's vote(s) is/are able to be specifically discerned. Risker (talk) 06:40, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't think that could be true. The scrutineers can cancel ballots if they determine one person voted twice, for example. Maybe the information is deleted later on, but it existed during scrutineering for sure. Leijurv (talk) 07:23, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

The scrutineers can determine how many votes a person cast, but not what the content of those votes was. The information probably exists (or existed) in the database but that would require a sysop to access not a scrutineer. Thryduulf (talk) 09:59, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Just to be clear - not even systems administrators (i.e., "sysops")can see it; the actual vote information is hashed similar to the way that a password is. The vote is never available in plain text. A sysop can theoretically cancel a vote and reset the voter, in the same way that they can do a reset for a password, but they can't actually see the content of the vote. Risker (talk) 18:09, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Small correction: hashing is one way encryption. SecurePoll uses two way encryption. WMF T&S typically holds the encryption key. Also, there is a way to do SecurePoll polls without encryption, although I don't think this is typical. –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:48, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Oh, ok. I assumed secret meant only available to scrutineers. I would have thought the pattern of voting would provide info for estimating whether someone might be a sock of someone else. If all the scrutineers are doing is checking for duplicate votes, the system seems to do that for them? Espresso Addict (talk) 10:37, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

A second vote by the same account should just overwrite the first (and AIUI it normally does but there are occasional glitches). Scrutineers see the metadata associated with the vote, e.g. IP address, user agent, full timestamp) and use that to determine whether someone is attempting to use multiple accounts to vote more than once. Thryduulf (talk) 11:55, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Tryptofish

• I'll probably add some other thoughts later, but I'll start with my impressions of how it worked out in terms of a process of getting us more good admins, without getting unqualified ones.
  • In my private vote, I supported 18 candidates and opposed 14. Of the 11 who were actually elected, 10 were candidates I supported, and 1 was a candidate I opposed. So I'd say the process did a pretty reasonable job of matching what I would hope would happen if the process were to accurately separate the qualified candidates from the unqualified. If anything, there were some people whom I regard as well qualified, where I'm disappointed that they didn't make it.
  • I think the worries expressed before the results came in, that we would get stuck with a bunch of unqualified admins, proved to be unfounded.
  • And I think that the editors who said publicly that they were going to oppose everyone, because there were "too many" candidates, probably brought the success rate down lower than it would have been ideally. (So some of you who didn't make it: please know that this wasn't necessarily a rejection of you!)
  • Another concern that had been raised was that someone might be elected without a sufficient "quorum": but there were hundreds of votes for every candidate, successful or unsuccessful, so that concern turned out never to materialize.
• Given that the intended purpose of the trial was to find a way to get more good admins by providing a process that would attract more candidates: I would say that the trial was a clear success. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:14, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Cryptic

There's no way to know why the candidates did worse than what you think they'd have done at RFA. Maybe voters blanket opposed everybody for no good reason. (Unlikely it was enough to matter.) Maybe voters felt free to oppose when they wouldn't have wanted to be the the first, maybe only, voice against 200+ public supports. (Wasn't that part of the point?) Maybe the candidates were worse than the RFA average, and ran in this election instead as a consequence of that. (There were a few where I'm convinced this was the case.) This process changed too many things at once to draw any sort of conclusion. If enough candidates you liked ended up around 50%, would you be arguing to put the pass threshold there instead? I mean, it would've meant that the rest of the candidates I supported got promoted, and still none of the ones I most staunchly opposed.

Something that I think worked very badly was the limited discussion period. People were discussing the candidates from the moment they signed up to the end of new candidacies - as long as a week for the earliest - throughout the additional week until the start of the discussion period, through the three days of the nominal discussion period itself, and then for the whole week of voting. That they had to do it in userspace and presumably on Discord and at Wikipediocracy and so on was both ridiculous on the face of it, and made it artificially more difficult and time-consuming for voters: if we wanted all the information possible, we had to track down all these separate discussions instead of just looking at the official discussion pages. Yes, this happens at RFA too, but it barely even counts as secondary there. If the candidates felt that only having to answer questions for three days was a positive part of the process - none have mentioned it yet either way - then a better way to deal with that would be to state an "official" position that candidates are only expected to participate during a set time period. —Cryptic 22:04, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Utopes

I wrote a bit, but it might just all be baseless. Collapsing pre-emptively.

Theorizing

As a quick aside out of the gate, I think any candidate with 50%-70% supports in this election should run an RfA right now, in my opinion and if they're still inclined for it. My guess is they would all decently pass with maybe some minor hiccups, unless something really dubious pops up via a lengthy discussion period, but I seriously doubt that. For the candidates that passed with 70% or above in this election, I imagine that all of them would have anywhere from 90% to 99% supports in an RfA. SilverLocust, as an example, had the highest support ratio out of anyone in this election. A "cream of the crop" candidate, best in 35. If they ran an RfA, I'd imagine they'd have a showing similar to Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Asilvering... yet in the admin election they were docked 20% out of the getgo(!), and only had 81% of the vote. I think what this has shown is that running in an election is not the best option for everybody, in regard to an admin pipeline. Three days is excruciatingly short for a discussion period. While the signups occur earlier, none of the two weeks prior really matter in regard to learning the candidates, because there is no opportunity to discuss, so imo we are basically meeting the candidates for the first time on October 22nd, and we say goodbye on October 25th. If you are a candidate who only needs three days to win the trust of the community, due to being well known in the WP-sphere or otherwise, you're in luck with the admin elections! There'd be a lot of "name-to-face recognition" already going into it, which really helps your chances. (Which in the example of Wikipedia, would be more like "name-to-contribs recognition", and certainly benefits election candidates). Regarding the new admins we got out of this, I was familiar with all of those names prior to the election, with the exception of Peaceray. If you're a candidate that might not have interacted with a majority of the voting base prior, it's going to be a bit more of an uphill battle, as it will likely be trickier to gain the wholehearted trust of the masses from just three short days consisting of four short questions, especially if the voters didn't already know you or your contributions prior. To those candidates, it's not that they wouldn't be suitable admins, but that the admin elections might not've been the suitable venue. There was no way to tell going into it what the exact percentages would be, but we know now! The "borderline" candidates actually might find some solace in a full 7-days worth of discussion, as it might allow them to really knock it out of the park with answers, with a deeper back-and-forth, and with more reassurance regarding admin fitness. The 50%-70% group I think REALLY should give RfA a try. The fact that more voters wanted those candidates to be admin than not, I think is really relieving and is a great indication towards the future. If SilverLocust was down 20% from what their RfA might've been forecast at (81% in the elections is imo a 99% RfA forecast), I think it might be fair to say that "20% is the magic number". This is just speculation and there's no real way to know in advance, but a getting 65% in the elections might translate to an 85% RfA at minimum. So all in all, I think the admin elections are a REALLY suitable pathway for users who might be considered "no-brainer candidates", whom would sweep an RfA with little pushback or controversy. Of course though, there is zero way to tell going in if someone is a "no-brainer candidate", and that's always the hard part because generally you'll NEVER know what the community thinks until you run, or until you open up a WP:ORCP. I think its especially tricky if nobody leaves feedback, so it's incredibly hard to tell what areas "need to be improved on" for those who didn't get the bit this time. I think this is a shortcoming of admin elections, and is a benefit of RfA to at least know why people are !voting the way they are, even if it's not something that some people want to know. But, what we've seen on Wikipedia historically with RfA-second-tries, they a habit of being successful on the second attempt if the faults of the first attempt are fully addressed and learned from. And I really want to see all of these candidates go for an RfA, to really give the community ample time to do its thing, if they're up for it. I think there's a lot more to be learned from that, than just an anonymous number on a screen as a result of a securepoll. But some people prefer that too, so in the end it's totally up to preference. All in all though I think this was a good experiment which I think needs SUBSTANTIAL changes if it were to ever run again. Utopes (talk / cont) 22:34, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Utopes _{(talk / cont)} 22:34, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

As a follow-up comment, I am highly opposed to reducing the threshold lower than 70%. There were a LOT of HIGHLY QUALIFIED users that didn't get the bit this time. But the solution is not to lower the numerical bar, it's to have those candidates immediately open an RfA this week, and pass with flying colors in a transparent system where they're able to hear the concerns of the userbase, if any exist and if they're interested in hearing them. But for the people who at least had majority support in the election, I think all would probably pass RfA. Utopes _{(talk / cont)} 22:38, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

If I might make a comment, without it coming across as pointed, but I did not particularly like your voter guide. It gave a long list of people you were going to oppose without any rationale as to why. At least I knew after reading it that you and others were going to oppose my candidacy (and I am grateful for your candour) but I had no idea why you were going to do it.

I avoided saying anything during the process out of desire not to look like I was attacking opponents simply for saying what they thought, but I'd be very grateful if you can explain it here. Don't feel that you have to spare my feelings on it. Obviously, of course, you don't need to answer if you don't want to. FOARP (talk) 09:32, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

isaacl

Regarding the scheduling for future elections, should the community decide to continue: personally I think it would be helpful to have a regular cadence, so everyone knows when they are coming and can plan appropriately. (There can be a small amount of planned variance to avoid hitting the same days in the month each time, to help accommodate those who might not be available at certain periods in the month). I suggest every three months to start, as a balance between keeping the pipeline flowing while not overwhelming volunteers. I suggest opening sign up lists ahead of time for future elections, so anyone interested can sign up way in advance (to multiple slots if they want), with the actual list of candidates finalized at a deadline before the election. (Any cap can be imposed at the deadline.)

Ajraddatz

Happy to see how this process went. Clearly the issue with adminship and requests for it isn't a lack of candidates, it's the RfA process (no surprise). This has shown to be a more humane way to allow people to put themselves forward for the role, and it was an absolute pleasure seeing things that generally suggest people being open to considering adminship as less of a big deal: fewer inane questions, successful self-nominated candidates (almost half), a relatively limited number of oppose-everyone voters.

As others have noted, timing, candidate limits and feedback remain the outstanding items. Once every 4-3 months with a 10-15 candidate limit seems like a good balance; presumably after a few cycles the number of prospective candidates would go down. On feedback, I know it's possible for securepoll to have a "comment" option - I'm not sure if this could be done for every candidate, but it may be worth exploring. We could have a system where the electionadmins (if/when enwiki gets their own batch - see here for more details) provide a summary of comments for all candidates after the election, everything anonymized of course, and without needing to provide every single comment given. That might at least give candidates who weren't successful some idea of what to improve on for next time. -- Ajraddatz (talk) 00:13, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm somewhat hesitant to the idea of anonymous feedback. I imagine that people can be incivil without repurcussions, hidden behind anonimity. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 10:18, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Agreed, which is why I would prefer a summary of the anonymous feedback rather than a complete list. Election admins (or whoever is responsible for viewing the comments and summarizing) could use their judgment to avoid incivil/unhelpful comments. A quick one-line summary would even be fine, or raising three of the most commonly-cited points. -- Ajraddatz (talk) 16:27, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Vanamonde

• A longer discussion period wouldn't hurt.
• Though some people clearly blanket opposed, the results shook out in a way that's not unreasonable - many suitable candidates were elected, many unsuitable ones were not. I don't believe we should immediately tinker with the percentages. I would hope and expect that blanket support/oppose will become less common as trust in the process develops, and the threshold being in the middle of the RFA discretionary range makes a lot of sense.
• Is there a technical reason the securepoll setup cannot happen contemporaneously with discussion? If both happened over the same week, we could shorten the process by three days while lengthening discussion.
• I encourage everyone not to see an unsuccessful candidacy as a failure; given the advocacy beforehand for opposing everyone, a final percentage in the 60s or even 50s demonstrates considerable community trust. Vanamonde93 (talk) 00:16, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  Is there a technical reason the securepoll setup cannot happen contemporaneously with discussion? I was the architect of the 1 week SecurePoll setup phase. Now that I/we know more about how SecurePoll works, exactly which partners we need to work with (WMF T&S, Cyberpower678) and how long they take, exactly what the workflows are, etc. it would probably be safe to shorten this a bit. 1) Switching the voter criteria to extendedconfirmed and/or 2) enabling local enwiki electionadmins and local enwiki elections would help a lot with this, as we could simplify the SecurePoll setup process and number of partners (and therefore the amount of time needed). However, one advantage of the one week SecurePoll setup phase was that candidates had plenty of time to answer standard questions 1–3 and to get their nominators to post their statements. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:33, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks for the insight, Novem - but my question was actually a bit different - even if you needed a week, there is no reason we couldn't simultaneously be discussing candidates, right? I assume at some point the schedule was formed such that one activity was occurring at once, but this needn't be the case in the future? Vanamonde93 (talk) 05:19, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  I don't think 3 days would have been enough to set up SecurePoll. The 7 SecurePoll setup phase + 3 discussion phase = 10 days we had was enough though. Some SecurePoll setup did occur during the discussion phase. For example, finding and fixing a bug in the eligible voters list. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:47, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Espresso Addict

Initial thoughts:

Positives

• The turnout was excellent, and no candidate failed to receive a reasonable quorum of votes. I do think an explicit quorum is necessary, preferably expressed in support votes, and it should be clarified whether self-voting is allowed.
• I see little evidence that many voters just opposed all candidates out of an objection to the process. In particular I'd be surprised if anything like 74 voters opposed everyone. Fwiw, I opposed a few of the people with high support %ages, and they were all real opposes. As I've said above, I think what is going on is that there are several different clusters of voters who tend to support different types of candidates (perhaps content – anti-vandalism/&c – discussion – technical ?) and only those with enough activity in several of these spheres will get 100% support.
• The outcomes, with the 70% threshold, generally roughly aligned with what I would have expected to see at RfA. There was one pass that surprised me, and one fail likewise. I think some of these candidates would have sailed through RfA but many others imo would have had a rough ride, including several who passed. In any subsequent RfC I would strongly oppose reducing the threshold based on these results.

Negatives

• 32 candidates is far too many. I spent four days spending all my free time on assessing candidates, and still felt I only skimmed and did not perform due diligence. I'd suggest no more than 6–8 to get a realistic chance of most voters fairly assessing all candidates, and run at fixed intervals of 2 or 3 months. Candidates who get bored waiting to get to the top of the queue can run in RfA, and indeed the queue is likely to form a "slush heap" for potential nominators.
• The discussion phase simply did not work for me. Part of this was the truncated timescale and the divorce from voting, but part of it was what I perceived as a "wall of niceness" atmosphere. In RfAs I'm comfortable opposing, ie writing a polite note that states the reasons I consider the candidate not suited for adminship at this time. I did not feel there was any place to do this, or any interest in predominantly critical feedback, so the single comment that I ended up making (after several person-days of candidate examination) was on a candidate I've interacted with frequently, where I felt the discussion was rather unbalanced. In RfA, the back-and-forth of questions, responses, voting comments, discussion is extremely effective at clarifying the candidate's strengths and weaknesses.
• There does seem to be some evidence that being high in the candidate list led to increased attention, and this might need addressing (though hopefully with fewer candidates it would be less of a problem).
• The mess over whether voters' guides were in or out was enormously time-wasting. I spent hours writing out some of these basic stats for myself while they were not permitted, and then this got duplicated.
• I missed having nominators for the bulk of candidates; it's immensely reassuring when someone whose judgement one trusts is prepared to nominate a candidate.

Espresso Addict (talk) 00:34, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Is it completely ridiculous to suggest fixing the issue with candidate list order by just manually shuffling the order once daily during the conversation period? —penultimate_supper 🚀 (talk • contribs) 02:15, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

That would require someone to decide who got to go in the (arguably advantageous) top slot, which I think would generate a great deal of heat. Espresso Addict (talk) 02:20, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

One could argue that people who sign up early should have a slight advantage for taking the action, although I doubt that there could be enough impetus for nobody to sign up otherwise. (I agree that unless we use some external widget, shuffling the list order is nigh-impossible.) Aaron Liu (talk) 03:51, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Leijurv

• Getting less feedback/discussion has upsides and downsides. I think it's "part of the deal" that if you do this process you'll get less public scrutiny, but also less feedback for how to improve.
• Limiting the number of candidates to, say, 10 would be good.
• Elections should be scheduled far in advance (at least a month). They should not occur "whenever" the number of candidates reaches 10. Candidates need to know in advance when they'll be expected to answer questions.
• To prevent strange incentives from a candidate limit, elections should be scheduled more frequently if they are filling up each time, and less frequently if not (but not less than annually). I think a good starting place would be once a quarter.
• The discussion period should include span both weekend days and at least one weekday.
• Discussion should begin at least 24h before voting begins, but they should overlap otherwise. I don't think it was useful to have discussion and voting have no overlap.
• Candidate lists (such as on SecurePoll), if possible, should be alphabetic ordered BUT with a randomized barrel roll. This randomizes who is on top, but, if you have notes in alphabetical order they are still in order (you just need to wraparound back to the beginning once). (inspiration from this video I saw last week; they do this in Montana).
• Suffrage should be changed to match RFA.
• I think the data is inconclusive on support percentage. If we had way fewer candidates, we might have fewer blanket supports, but also fewer blanket opposes - net effect inconclusive. Let's leave it at 70% for now.

Leijurv (talk) 02:49, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

SmokeyJoe

I think anonymous voting in elections is the wrong path for Wikipedia. Wikipedia should instead stick with consensus as the governing model. At RfA I think it is valuable to look at nominator statements, and detailed support and oppose rationales. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:55, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

The consensus path leads to disproportionate stress for janitorial (but powerful) duties. I'll note that this was already agreed to in the RfC, although its consensus may change. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:52, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Having gone through the process, I'm given to agreeing with @SmokeyJoe here - It's pretty useless to candidates to get 100+ oppose votes without any explanation as to why. FOARP (talk) 09:35, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

The purpose of RfA is not to provide individualized feedback to candidates, it is to select administrators. --JBL (talk) 00:35, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

That is a terribly limited view.

Oppose and support rationales are important for other voters, they lead to discussion, and support consensus decision making. Feedback to the candidate is important, but more important is feedback to the community on what community expectations are. SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:14, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I am glad to hear that you agree with me that the purpose of RfA is not to provide individualized feedback to editors who happen to run. Indeed you seem to agree with me completely, since everything you mentioned as a purpose obviously falls into the category "selecting administrators" (even though you seem to have a terribly limited view of what possible methods could be used to make the selection). --JBL (talk) 00:51, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

User:JayBeeEll, my apologies. I appear to have read a particular nuance in your earlier answer that I cannot find anymore. SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:17, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

The numbers are pretty clear that fewer experienced editors than ever are interested in enduring RFA. Without fixing that, we may have so few admin volunteers that we have to make bad tradeoffs like restricting editing site-wide. How would you propose solving for the decreasing number of admins while still using a consensus-based process? Steven Walling • talk 00:34, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

User:Steven Walling, Hi. I have had a number of ideas, but not a lot of knowledge.

There have always been some RfAs that appeal to sail through without stress. They tend to be the overqualified candidates.

There are some editors with well defined criteria that cause them to oppose at RfA. Where these are reasonable, I expect that if these were well documented, they would not be stressful.

Some had unreasonable fail criteria. If there were documentation of known criteria, and consensus was found that these were not respected by consensus, then they could be banned. It’s been my feeling that these editors with unreasonable criteria have largely gone away.

Do admins who have just passed RfA report that it was unreasonably stressful? Is it mainly a perception issue, for those who are qualified? Again, definition of “qualified” would be nice.

I think there is a bigger role for nominators. I think existing admins should do more in the way of nominating. Perhaps this should not be always done individually and publicly, but maybe admins should set up a nomination committee, discuss possible nominees privately, before announcing on-wiki (eg the nominee’s talk page) that the nomination committee considers them qualified.

Some RfA reviewers spend effort studying the candidate’ contribution history. I can understand this being stressful, particularly if it is not known what they are looking for. SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:30, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

• "Do admins who have just passed RfA report that it was unreasonably stressful" --> I think it's good to quantify this. RfA is usually stressful, but not too horrible. In around 10%(?) of cases, it's extremely stressful and unpleasant, and you can't predict this well in advance.
• If the reformed RfA elections do not resolve the problems with RfA, an elected search committee with powers akin to Arbcom selecting WP:CU/OS is something I would support. Informally, frequent nominators do talk to each other about possible nominations.
• WP:Advice for RfA candidates#Further reading has an overview of selected recent Category:User criteria for adminship, which can give you an idea what different people look for in contribution history.

—Femke 🐦 (talk) 08:46, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

"maybe admins should set up a nomination committee, discuss possible nominees privately" I tried to set up something of this nature some years back, in response to an earlier RfA improvement drive, as a wikiproject for nominators. It was not a success in the slightest because we could not agree either to discuss potential candidates on or off wiki, or with or without notifying them; became inactive almost immediately; and later was deleted. If you want to have another go, I'll try to dig out the link so that you can try to avoid our dismal failure. Espresso Addict (talk) 08:59, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Admin Nominators hasn't been deleted, but as you said, it's inactive. isaacl (talk) 23:26, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks -- I thought it had been deleted, but obviously I was wrong. Espresso Addict (talk) 08:07, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

• I tend to agree. I think this process in the long run won't be any less stressful - the discussion just moves somewhere else where it can't even be moderated. Rather than knowing why people oppose you, you're left just knowing that lots of people did without any idea why. People should at least be able to say that they are supporting/opposing the candidate, and why, in a central place. FOARP (talk) 11:17, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

Kingsmasher678

First off, thanks to all of the candidates for running, and all the voters for voting. The whole process is ultimately dependent on those two groups, so know that you are appreciated.

Positives

• I like the anonymous nature of the voting, and think it insulates the candidates from some of the anxiety.
• I think that the general process worked quite well, and offered some real benifiets compared to RfA, such as time commitment to candidates.

Negatives

• The discussion felt rushed, and didn't give quite enough feedback. A certain level of candor is needed when we entrust the bit to an editor, and I felt that there was a slight overemphasis on restricting some forms of criticism, or at least that was my personal impression.

• Some clearly (in my mind) solid candidates slipped through the cracks here. This may be do to a number of things, but I would consider down-the-ticket opposing a likely factor, as a form of protest vote. I have no idea how or if we should try to address this.

• Far to many candidates were included. However, I feel pretty strongly that this won't happen in the next election, since I think many people where waiting to try out the new process or attempted on a whim.

• Inadequate feedback for failed candidates.

Recommendations

• Extend the discussion to five days and have the final two days of that discussion fall on weekends.

• Increase the suffrage requirement to match RfA.

• Give a hard date on which the results will be posted, perhaps 5 days after voting closes. This will give candidates the exact end of the process, and should give scrutineers plenty of time.

• Though I don't think it will be a problem in the future, impose a 15 candidates limit per election. Anymore than this is just to much to deal with.

• Create a centralized location for feedback to be given to editors who opt in after results are posted.

Kingsmasher678 (talk) 03:55, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Ca

Overall, I am happy with how the election proceeded. The discussions were civil, and the general atmosphere is an improvement from RfAs. Other editors have already commented on the major points of improvement. My concerns of confusing voting interface still remains however. (Wikipedia talk:Administrator elections/Archive 4 § Voting interface; order. I nearly voted 'support' for the candidates I intended to oppose and vice versa. I suspect it may have contributed to the higher percentage of "opposes" than in a regular RfA. I suggest making it clear in the instructions the order of the radio button options. Ca ^{talk to me!} 06:22, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

SportingFlyer

I personally don't think this worked.

• Three days was nowhere near enough time to comb through all of the discussion for all of the candidates. As a result, only those at the top of the queue received any discussion at all. If this continues, I'd extend to seven days for discussion at a minimum. I don't see a need to limit candidates, but if we have a lot of candidates, we should have up to two weeks of discussion.
• The cut-off feels incredibly arbitrary. The fact someone missed despite having fewer opposes because they had a lot of abstains feels odd to me.
• If you've been elected as an admin, there should be a process where we submit you for re-election if there are problems with your adminship that don't rise to the level of arbitration.
• At least one user who I thought would be elected easily did not get elected easily. I would much rather know why people opposed me.
• I don't like this process. I don't think I'd mind a secret ballot if it were attached to the end of an RfA discussion period, but I like to consider my supports or opposes at RfAs and I do not feel as if I had the ability to do so with this election. I'm not sure if that will change in the future, so I would be against continuing this. It might be better run as a pre-RfA "straw poll." SportingFlyer T·C 07:11, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

AirshipJungleman29

Worked well enough. The problems with the somewhat farcical "discussion phase" weren't as consequential as I feared, and I think quite a few of the oppose votes can go to there being too many candidates. Overall, a good foundation to build on in the future. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:46, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

fanfanboy

I liked this process and I thought it was a success. However, as many of us agree on, there are a few kinks to work out.

• The discussion period was short and often would result in discussions where I had almost nothing to go by so I had to rely the editor's statistics. I agree with others that we should increase the length of the discussion period to 4-5 days (preferably 5). We should also have the discussion period on weekends.
• As for voter guides, I relied heavily on them. The ones I looked at were based on statistics and were very helpful. I think it's a good idea if we link to these kinds of voter guides from the discussion page(s). I'm not to keen on linking to opinion based voter guides however.
• Reading all the discussion pages and other information of the candidates took a very long time, and I think we would benefit by only allowing a max of around 15 candidates.
• There were good candidates which didn't get accepted, while I am okay with this, I agree with Novem and others that the support threshold should be lowered to around 65%.
• I also support changing the suffrage requirement to extended confirmed. If non-EC users can't vote in RfA, they shouldn't be able to do so here.

I overall really liked the process, and I did better research on the candidates here than I have done in any RfA which I have participated in. I hope that this process gets renewed. fanfanboy (block talk) 14:40, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

And there were plenty of EC people who couldn’t vote. I was just barely ineligible, because I’d been away from active editing for some years and only got back to it just about a bit before the election. Now, whether that’s really a loss is arguable, I’m not the most active community member at this moment, but I saw some names I valued from my time lurking the last few years while not actively editing, and thought an election had more space for mid-engagement voters like me, and into realized once I tried to vote that I wasn’t quite eligible. A few people like me who are EC, but have been more passive in the last little while might have shifted some results, but again that’s not necessarily a good thing if we want elections to prioritize active voices. Overall I do think EC makes sense as the cutoff though. —penultimate_supper 🚀 (talk • contribs) 15:38, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I hadn't realised there were active EC+ editors who were disenfranchised because of lack of recent contributions. That's a shame as long-term contributors who are familiar with the candidates can definitely be a source of useful feedback. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:30, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

CMD

The large number of oppose votes relative to an RfA should not be a surprise. This was not a long discussion that opens with a raft of support votes and where opposers get nagged, this was an election. Voters were given a ballot paper with 32 candidates, and when deciding who to vote for, the main material available is the nomination page for each candidate. Given how short discussion was, for the most part these were responses to the same few questions. If these answers from the candidate did not make a persuasive election pitch, then voters are unlikely to vote for them. Without positive noises coming from discussions (not that there weren't some in this process, just much less than there would be in an RfA) and a long list of supporters, there is little to change wavering voters into yes voters, and nothing to dissuade them from being no voters. CMD (talk) 15:28, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Wehwalt

I think the process was a success. I see no need to limit the number of candidates, the community sorted through the three-dozen odd quite well, and I suspect by the third run, there will be fewer than a dozen. On this one, there were a few I was sorry not to see elected and one or two surprise elections but that's doesn't detract from the success overall. Suggest making this a quarterly event.--Wehwalt (talk) 15:13, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it sorted through too well. As said above, it appears many candidates did not receive due attention. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:23, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Their time will come, and probably sooner by making this a regular event multiple times a year than by limiting the number of entrants. Wehwalt (talk) 16:46, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm fairly sure we needed to match the schedule with WMF T&S's or something. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:59, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

ActivelyDisinterested

Over all I would say this was a success. Although there were a lot of abstentions, likely caused by having so many candidates, even the candidate with the most abstentions had over 300 combined support or oppose votes. That shows that engagement was high, but tempered by having to many candidates at once. I spent likely 30mins or more checking each candidate, having so many candidates made that laborious. Hopefully this is just pent-up candidates taking advantage of the first election. Having regular monthly or quarterly election would alleviate the problem. I'm not surprised by this process having more opposes that a stand RFA for two reasons; first in standard RFAs there is no incentive to oppose if the candidate has already garnered a lot of support votes, and second unless there is already a wellspring of oppose votes editors may not want to expose themselves. So in private polls they are more likely express themselves truthfully. I know a few editors said they would blanket oppose, but I don't think that was a major issue as it doesn't appear to be born out by the data. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 18:08, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

asilvering

I'm delighted by the results. Here are my suggestions for next time:

• max 10-20 candidates per election
• lower threshold to 65%, or even 60%
• 4 or maybe 5 days of discussion
• voter guides allowed but not endorsed; I see some calls for a "neutral" guide but I don't think that's a good idea. If we must, we could separate the guides into two categories: "informational guides" and "personal guides".
• since we're likely to cap the number of candidates, I think we should also raise the requirements to stand, so that places aren't taken by really obviously WP:NOTYET candidates. Suggested metrics: length of tenure; number of mainspace edits; at least one advanced perm (incl AfC pseudoperm). (Sure, people pass RFA without advanced perms, but anyone who could reasonably pass admin elections shouldn't find it hard to at least pick up AFC or something.) (this bullet point added later asilvering (talk) 20:13, 5 November 2024 (UTC))

-- asilvering (talk) 19:38, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Voter guide categories was something I thought of suggesting myself. fanfanboy (block talk) 20:02, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

PhotogenicScientist

Excess Oppose votes, and the use of Oppose vs Abstain

Looking at the data, sorting by number of Opposes, there's an obvious flat grouping in the number of Oppose votes in the 90~120 range. After this plateau, the number of Oppose votes started to rise exponentially (technically, more like "cubically"?). 14 candidates (~45%) received Oppose votes in roughly this range.

There's a similar, but less pronounced grouping of Abstain votes in the range of 195~215, after which the number of Abstentions slowly and steadily rises. 10 candidates (~32%) received Abstain votes roughly in this range.

There's no such flat grouping for Support votes, which rose fairly consistently among all candidates.

I think it's safe to assume (based on how frequently this has been brought up by others above) people were generally overwhelmed by the large number of candidates, and many voters did not do an in-depth review for each candidate. So, Oppose and Abstain appear to have been people's preference when they didn't know much about a candidate. My personal takeaways from this are:

1. A significant number of people prefer to Oppose a candidate when they can't thoroughly vet them. I suppose this represents the "adminship is a big deal" crowd. They'd rather have fewer, higher quality admins, and don't want to allow "sub-par" admins to slip in without a thorough vetting.
2. A larger number of people prefer to Abstain from voting on a candidate when they couldn't do a thorough vetting. I suppose this represents the "adminship is a no big deal" crowd. They'd rather place trust in others who have done their vetting, and Support or Oppose with reason. They themselves don't mind if we get more admins this way.
3. With the high threshold of 70% required to pass an admin election, people of a mind to Oppose hold more power than those of a mind to Abstain on such candidates.

PhotogenicScientist (talk) 16:17, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Jessintime

If we do limit the number of candidates (I think 10 would be too few, FWIW), there are a couple things we should consider. 1) These elections should be happening at least twice a year, if technically possible. 2) Limits on who can run. I don't think it would be fair to see the same handful of perennial candidates running each time and stopping others from being on the ballot. A simple solution might be to say if you ran once, you have to sit out the next election. Same thing if you've run at RFA within the last however many years. ~~ Jessintime (talk) 19:53, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps a limit of two adminship requests per 12 months? That would allow 2 RFAs or 2 election candidacies or 1 of each. Thryduulf (talk) 20:29, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I think that limit makes sense. A umber of people that didn't make the cut this time were WP:NOTYET or a "victim" of us not finding the right threshold for success immediately. So would find it a shame if they couldn't run in the next election. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 20:34, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Have a waitlist, sorted first on time since last election/RFA run, then on signup order. So if we're running elections with a maximum of, say, 10 candidates per cohort, all seven who've never run are in; the one whose last failed RFA was in 2012 is next; then of the five who failed in the last election three months ago and already want to run again, the first two of those to sign up can go ahead and try our patience, but the other three have to wait until (at least) next time. Entirely incompatible with the absurd discussion time limit, of course. —Cryptic 21:36, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Just Step Sideways

• I'll just add my voice to the chorus of people saying we need a limit on the total number of candidates. We don't do this in arbcom elections, which this is modeled on, because there are only so many seats available. This isn't the case here, hypothetically we could have wound up with 30+ new admins, or none at all. Most people do not have the time or inclination to do the research on over thirty candidates. This could be fairly easy to implement, to steal a suggestion made elsewhere, when a threshold is hit, say twelve candidates, it automatically triggers a second round of voting for any new candidates, say, a month later.
• As to the possibility of blanket voting, it seems likely, but I'm not sure what we can or should do about. I did not blanket vote exactly, but I simply did not have a clear impression pf at least half the candidates due to the sheer volume of them, and I imagine I'm not the only one who opposed everyone they had no real read on. Plenty of people obviously chose to abstain, in fact the distribution of abstentions is rather telling as to who is most polarizing among voters.
• The lack of clear rationales for opposition isn't a bug, it is built in to this sort of process. I feel for the candidates, I ran in what turned out to be the final functionaries election. Eleven of us ran, nobody got elected and by and large we had no idea why, and ArbCom decided that didn't work for them. So, I'd say this is a choice: you want clear and specific feedback regarding why you didn't get in, you need to run a tradional RFA. You run in the election, you take your chances. Just Step Sideways ^{from this world ..... today} 20:26, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

MtBotany

Here is some information for people trying to figure out what the voters did. Won't say who I voted for or against, but I voted for nearly every candidate, opposed two, and abstained on one (if I recall correctly what I did). I did not get up to speed on this nearly as quickly as I would have liked or needed to do given the timeline of how it was going down. If I had to do it over I would have tried to prepare my remarks and questions earlier and been less likely to be overwhelmed by the flood of, I think, very reasonable candidates. The number of passes is lower than in traditional RfA, but not totally suprising to me. I think, in addition to the gauntlet for candidates, there can be a bit of a gauntlet for editors to express an opinion that is contrary to to the way an RfA is swinging. It took me most of a day away from my normal editing to review before voting, not sure how much more or less time other people were taking. Given how much I am on Wikipedia and how obsessive I am, I felt like 10-15 would have been a much better number of candidates in one batch. I'd be happy to deal with such elections as often as 12 times a year. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 00:04, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Bugghost

Notes:

• Election went well, but there were too many candidates, which burned out voters/discussion participants
• We have candidates expressing that they didn't know why they were getting oppose votes
• This may have been modesty, but I noticed a few self-nom statements effectively saying "I'll throw my hat into the ring, why not?" - which is a nice sentiment but kind of undervaluing the role/process (but whether this a problem or not is up to personal opinion)
• Some expressed that not enough discussion points were brought up during the discussion phase

I think the above could be solved by formally requiring all candidates to have opened a WP:ORCP in the 6 months leading to the election. Those who want more feedback will get it, the "barrier to entry" would be raised slightly so less "why not?"/NOTYET candidates would make it to the ballot, and the ORCP would be available at the time of the discussion phase, and so important topics would have been raised in advance. It would also (hopefully) mean that the candidates would know what areas they were weaker in, and also provides a good place for potential nominators to volunteer.

I was disappointed by the number of people who said they opposed anyone who's name they didn't recognise. However I don't agree with the assessment that the data results indicate that there were large groups of people who opposed everyone - I think secret elections likely give a more reflective/nuanced result than RFA's, as RFA's naturally encourage landslides (as there is no point casting a dissenting opinion when the outcome is already obvious). It could be true that lots of people blanket opposed, but we don't have the data to know that - it could just be that these are close to the "genuine" % of people who support the candidate.

I agree with Utopes that a lot of the >60% candidates should open an RFA, as I believe they'd fair well. BugGhost🦗👻 07:19, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Regarding suggestions that elections should be open-sign up until a certain number is reached, and then scheduled - I don't think this is a good idea, as candidates should know in advance when to expect the discussion phase. Regular intervals with a first-come-first-served max capacity (of about 15?) is my preference BugGhost🦗👻 08:02, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

I like the idea of requiring an Optional RfA candidate poll a great deal (though the name might need changing!). I suggest that you suggest it at the Workshop phase, so it doesn't get forgotten. Espresso Addict (talk) 09:38, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Added :) BugGhost🦗👻 20:18, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Robertsky

My thoughts:

• I echo the need to have a cap on the number of candidancy. With 35 candidates this time round, the level of scrutiny that each candidate has is much lower than a RfA, or even multiple RfAs running at the same time.
• As such, many of my votes had been based on my prior interactions with the candidates that I am aware of. That being said, I think I only voted a couple against and a couple abstain.
• A regularly scheduled series of elections may spread the candidancy out. However, we should also be cognizant that we limit perennial candidancy.
• This round of voting is relatively fuss-free/drama-free. I hope it is the same in subsequent rounds of elections, if any.
• On voter guides, I don't see why they should not be included. Yes, they may sway some votes, but if we have a number of guides with varying opinions, then it is no different from reading analysis of politicians from different news organisations (with assumption that we are not as polarised as some of the news organisations in USA.)
• I thank the compiled list of candidates on wiki, Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Candidates#List of candidates should be randomised as much as possible. Yes, there is caching to worry about. Maybe this is something can be implemented via JavaScript (IA work?). Having a randomised view of the candidates may help in spreading the scrutiny across more evenly.

– robertsky (talk) 09:32, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Risker

• Way too many candidates; definitely put a limit with 10 as the maximum. (15 is still too many.)
• Discussion phase way too short and needs to extend into (and logically, through) the voting period.
• Enwiki Checkusers should be doing the scrutineering. None of the information available to scrutineers is significantly different from the information that CUs deal with every day; they don't need additional permissions; and they will often be familiar with perfectly legitimate situations where more than one user is likely to be using the same IP address. As noted above, scrutineers do not have the ability to determine how anyone voted. We should not be dependent on third parties (which is essentially what stewards are) to manage our own administrator selection process.
• No surprise that there is the appearance of some people "block opposing" or "block supporting" or even "block abstaining" for any number of reasons, but the primary one was likely the number of candidates.
• It is worth saying that voter participation was extremely high (616 voters, which I suspect is probably a near-record, and certain a first since 2015). This cadre appears to include a large number of people who do not normally participate at typical RFAs. Perhaps we can take from it that a lot of *voters* find typical RFAs to be way too stressful, not just the candidates.
• I've heard and read some comments from some participants feeling that it's time to get back to thinking that adminship isn't as big a deal as some make it out to be. Maybe some of the RFA "regulars" take adminship way too seriously.
• Noting that the changes for admin recall happened during the course of this vote, and it could have had some big impacts on how willing people were to take a chance on candidates they hadn't thoroughly vetted.

That's probably enough for me. Risker (talk) 09:48, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

"Perhaps we can take from it that a lot of *voters* find typical RFAs to be way too stressful": Possibly mainly those who want to oppose but don't want to be badgered. I'm not sure recall will make that much of a difference; a year is a long time to suffer someone who is highly active but isn't suitable. Espresso Addict (talk) 10:18, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't actually say that, Espresso Addict. I stopped spending time at RFA because, even though I almost always came by to support a candidate, people would show up on my talk page to demand an explanation of my support vote. And reading the badgering on oppose votes, and the "gotcha" questions specifically designed to highlight that someone who didn't have the tools yet hadn't thought of every way they could possibly use the tools, was genuinely depressing. So I just stopped participating. Yes, I do believe that there are some RFA regulars who really do make RFA so unpleasant that even voters have decamped from there. Risker (talk) 15:49, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Oh, golly, I hadn't realised people badgered supports on their talk pages. Sigh. I find myself opposing a lot these days (possibly my standards are too high) but try never to badger people. Even as broadly a supporter of RfA, it is very interesting how many longstanding editors who would imo pass RfA came out of woodwork to stand in this election. Food for thought. Espresso Addict (talk) 22:56, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

“people would show up on my talk page to demand an explanation of my support vote”.

This is the downside of being a respected leader. I have often cast naked !votes in the support section, and have never been questioned on it. Before I !vote, I look to what people like you written. SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:20, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I've had people try to harass me by making failed logins (like, 80+ of them in a short period - you get notified for each one by the UI) after an RFA vote. It probably won't surprise you which high-drama RFA it was. FOARP (talk) 11:13, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

This cadre appears to include a large number of people who do not normally participate at typical RFAs. Perhaps we can take from it that a lot of *voters* find typical RFAs to be way too stressful. Perhaps. As a datapoint, I don't normally vote in RfAs not because I find it stressful but because by the time I see them it's usually clear enough which way the wind is blowing that unless I have something specific to say I don't see the point. Whereas with the election process you don't know whether or not your vote will be the one which determines the outcome, so you are incentivised to vote on anyone about whom you have an opinion. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 15:38, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Mox Eden

In my opinion, I consider the admin elections an absolute success. I'd recommend doing it again. Also, here's my full disclosure on the candidates.

My suggestions:

• I'm against a candidate limit of any amount. Even with 32 candidates, I can still properly vet all of them, even when it's last-minute.
• However, the discussion phase should be extended from 3 days to 5, as I ended up losing sleep making my voter guide in such a limited time, and to avoid blanket voting because of limited information. Overlap with the voting phase is optional.
• I didn't realize that the suffrage requirements also included non-extended confirmed editors until it was pointed out. Suffrage requirements should be changed to exclude non-extended confirmed editors, just like the traditional RFA.
• ORCP should be made mandatory and be done a month before the elections, to discourage "throw my hat in the ring" / clearly WP:NOTYET candidates.
• Elections should be held every 2 months.
• Unsuccessful candidates from AELECT should not be allowed to go through AELECT again, especially if future elections are made routine. Any subsequent requests for adminship must go through standard RFA instead. This is to prevent people from simply waiting until the next election arrives and apply again, without any improvement in behavior from last time.
• Voter guides should be linked from the main AELECT page to avoid the hassle of finding them. However, they should only be found in a collapsible box to avoid the impression of making them seem compulsory to read.

— Mox Eden (talk) 11:54, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

JayBeeEll

Elections are obviously better than RfA, the case for extending the discussion period and for capping the candidate pool around 15 or 20 are reasonable, the idea of a waitlist for future candidacies is good, and obviously everyone who got 65% or above should have been elected (as well as some of the people at lower percentages). --JBL (talk) 00:43, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Cullen328

I an very pleased that we have eleven new administrators so in that sense, this initial round was a success. Frankly, I had difficulty properly evaluating 35 candidates, and so I support a limit on the number of candidates in an individual election. This aspect was unanticipated, as far as I know. A dozen candidates seems right to me but I would be OK with anything from 10 to 15. I am troubled by the concept of "blanket opposing" which I think is unnecessarily hurtful to the candidates and should be discouraged. I did not oppose any candidate unless I saw something of significant concern to me about that person. If I felt that I lacked enough information and enough time to dig deeper, I abstained. A very good start overall. Cullen328 (talk) 05:04, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Ratnahastin

Really not pleased with admin elections. To me it feels like a circumvention of stringent standards of RfA. Especially since adminship is not temporary but permanent. There is no need to degrade the quality of the existing admin selection process. Ratnahastin (talk) 05:19, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Steven Walling

The problem we are trying to solve as a community is our attrition among active admins, while maintaining a high bar for trusted roles. This clearly is solving that problem without introducing major new ones.

To make the process easier on voters and candidates, I'd suggest...

1. Limit to max of 10-12 candidates
2. Try running the elections regularly, like every 3-6 months, on a predictable set of scheduled dates that don't fall near major events like holidays or national elections in the English-speaking world.

If we even ran elections twice a year, while allowing anyone who wants to go through RFA adhoc, we are on the path to turning around the steadily shrinking admin corps. As we see how recall performs and get more practiced, we could attempt to run the elections more frequently if necessary. Steven Walling • talk 00:15, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Caeciliusinhorto

One of the major concerns raised at WT:RFA in the run-up to these elections is that candidates would not get sufficient scrutiny and would pass with only a small number of votes – Risker suggested 70 support+oppose voters as a minimum number of votes we should require for a candidate to pass. This turned out to not be a concern at all.

The candidate with the least total Support+Oppose votes got 318 – in RfA terms, we need to go back to September last year to find an RfA with 318 votes. The fewest Support+Oppose votes for a successful candidate was 374, which in RfA terms has only ever been outstripped twice, by Floquenbeam 2 and Tamzin; the most-successful election candidate, Queen of Hearts, had 494 support+oppose votes, which is more than even those, and both QoH and SilverLocust got more than the record 340 supports in Tamzin's RfA.

Insofar as the elections proposal was intended to encourage more new admins, it was clearly wildly successful: 11 is about the average number of new admins we've had per year through RfA since 2020, and we got that in a single election cycle. Maybe we wouldn't keep up that volume if we made admin elections a regular thing, but even bumping up new admin recruitment slightly can only be a good thing. We can quibble about thresholds (I suspect that unless some major skeleton came out of somebody's closet, all of the candidates with >60% support would have a good chance of passing a traditional RfA, and with good nominators some of those in the 50s could do it) but this certainly seems to me to have been successful enough that we should do it again. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:50, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Daniel

My opinions...

• Run every 2 months (6/yr) or 3 months (4/yr) on a fixed schedule — feels like 4/yr will be enough now that the initial wave is done.
• Limit of 12-14 candidates
• 2 day break between nominations closing and discussion phase opening
• 5 day discussion & questions phase, encompassing at least one full weekend, to provide appropriate opportunity for scruitiny (honestly I think this should actually be 7 days but could live with 5 to start with)
• 7 days of SecurePoll voting is correct as is.
• Extended-confirmed as the benchmark for voting.

I think this was a success overall. It's given us new administrators at a time that we really needed them. Like everything new it wasn't perfect, but it was a really good first attempt and I think balanced protecting the candidates with protecting the project. Special thanks to those who did a lot of the legwork to make it happen. Daniel (talk) 05:29, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Legoktm

• I agree that there were too many candidates to properly evaluate; I am not super in favor of a limit just because it makes it more difficult for candidates. I would like to see another unlimited round and see how many candidates we get, just to see if the initial batch was so big because we have such a backlog of people on the cusp of adminship but not interested in RfA.
• If we continue with elections they continue to produce results, I hope we can deprecate/obsolete RfA in a few years.
• I hope we, as a community, can continue developing processes that are clearly not perfect from the beginning and refining them over time instead of stalling out because we don't hit perfection during the proposal draft stage.

On that final note, a huge thanks to everyone who pushed this forward and to the candidates for going through an experimental and slightly bumpy process. Legoktm (talk) 03:39, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Tazerdadog

I cast a blanket support vote, largely because I personally have a much lower threshold than the community consensus for granting adminship. I did research every candidate, and struggled significantly with 2 votes, but ended up supporting everyone in the end.

I think it is important that we maintain a minimum number of candidates per cycle. The herd effect of putting 30+ people through the process at once served to reduce drama, and I don't want to see us knee-jerk overcorrect to a large group this time and lose that.

I would support reducing the pass threshold by 10% or so - my eye test is we turned away good admins, but did not let any controversial candidates come close.

Thank you to everyone who participated in and organized this election. Tazerdadog (talk) 11:09, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

I also did a near blanket support with only one oppose and 2 abstains, and have very low expectations for adminship (granted, I'm fairly new around here). fanfanboy (block_talk) 13:19, 12 November 2024 (UTC)