Wikipedia administrators

While the first Wikipedia administrators were appointed by Jimmy Wales in October 2001, administrator privileges on Wikipedia are now granted through a process known as requests for adminship (RfA). This may have been implemented as a result of RfAs attracting increasing levels of attention: Stvilia et al. quoted that "Prior to mid-2005, RfAs typically did not attract much attention. Since then, it has become quite common for RfAs to attract huge numbers of RfA groupies who all support one another". The record number of votes in one RfA, as of May 2022, was 468: The RfA of the editor Tamzin was supported by 340 users and opposed by 116, amidst controversy over that candidate's criticism of supporters of Donald Trump. Bureaucrats have the technical ability to grant or remove an editor's access to the administrative toolset. Bureaucrats are also "approved through community consensus". == Role ==

Once granted administrator privileges, a user has access to additional functions in order to perform certain duties. These include "messy cleanup work", deletion of articles deemed unsuitable, protecting pages (restricting editing privileges to that page), and blocking the accounts of disruptive users. Blocking a user must be done according to Wikipedia's policies and a reason must be stated for the block, which will be permanently logged by the software. Use of this privilege to "gain editing advantages" is considered inappropriate. == Scientific studies ==

A 2013 scientific paper by researchers from Virginia Tech and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found that after editors are promoted to administrator status, they often focus more on articles about controversial topics than they did before. The researchers also proposed an alternative method for choosing administrators, in which more weight is given to the votes of experienced editors. This corresponds to a modality of plural voting. Another paper, presented at the 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, analyzed data from all 1,551 requests for adminship from January 2006 to October 2007, with the goal of determining which (if any) of the criteria recommended in Wikipedia's Guide to requests for adminship were the best predictors of whether the user in question would actually become an admin. == References ==