Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Request for comment on administrator activity requirements: Difference between revisions

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Should we increase the minimum activity requirements for administrators to an average of 20 edits per year, over a 5 year period? Worm^TT(talk) 19:04, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators are trusted members of the community and therefore have certain additional tools. However, standards for administrators have risen over the years, and many legacy administrators do not meet the standards we would expect of new administrators. One such expectation is that of activity levels. Ever since 2011, we have removed administrators who are fully inactive for over a year. However, we still have many administrators who fall far below a reasonable level of activity to be considered well versed in the changes in policies and procedures of Wikipedia.

As such, this proposal suggests updating the Procedural removal for inactive administrators, as per below.

This raises the bar for Administrator activity levels from more than 0 edits in a rolling 12 month period (i.e. 0 edits per year over 1 year) to 100 edits in a rolling 5 year period (i.e. average 20 edits per year over 5 years). This would encourage those admins who participate less in our project to increase their participation to a minimal level, rather than simply encouraging them to make a token edit each year.

Administrators should be given ample opportunity to increase their level of contribution, should this well-publicised RfC be successful it should go into force at a date that the community can get ready for. All administrators should be notified of the change if the RfC is closed successfully. All administrators who will be eligible to be desysopped should be notified of the risk at least twice on their talk page before removal. For those at risk of being desysopped for criterion 1 they will be notified one month prior and several days prior. For those at risk of being desysopped for criterion 2 they will be notified 3 months prior and 1 month prior. In addition, any editors who are falling lower than an average of 50 edits per year over a 5 year period should be notified by talk page message annually that they are at risk of falling below the required level in the future.

These numerical values will also help Bureaucrats in their judgement for "Restoration of adminship", under the "A bureaucrat is not reasonably convinced that the user has returned to activity or intends to return to activity as an editor" requirement. An admin should show that they are unlikely to fall back to inactivity criteria before being resysopped.

A report run on 16 March 2022 has shown that has shown that this change will affect 197 administrators, approximately 20% of the group, warning a further 163. It should be noted that these activity requirements should be considered minimal and can be increased in the future.

• Support as proposer I've been thinking about this for quite some time, and have put together some data over the past few days to see what might work. In my opinion, 20 edits a year is not onerous and should be a very minimum that we should be expecting of our administrators. Equally, we should understand that sometimes admins have periods of inactivity and we should allow that. This proposal is aimed to strike the balance of finding that minimum requirement (roughly 1.5 edits a month), while still allowing breaks. I've done my best to phase it in, so that we can adjust to the change too. Worm^TT(talk) 19:03, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. In fact I would be willing to support up to 100 edits per year (as opposed to the proposed 20) and as short of a 3 year rolling period. Additionally I would also support removing the notification requirements. The idea should be we have admins who are still actively trying to be a part of the community rather than having to be nudged and reminded. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 19:08, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support And no, it is not a coincidence that several arbitrators are concerned about these type of admins. We've had case after case of clueless "legacy admins" stirring up drama with bad blocks and so on. This seems like a reasonable standard of engagement for retaining admin status. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:13, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support "Legacy admins" that can't meet these very minimal expectations are not actually acting as administrators at all. They retain the bit and the ability to do harm with no actual responsibility or improvement of the project. I cannot think of any good reason not to implement this. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 19:16, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support On a good day, I can do 100 edits. On a really good day, I can do 100 mainspace edits. Let's start with this proposal and see how we get on. Hopefully, it will reduce the pressure on Arbcom that have had to deal with administrator accountability and conduct a bit too much recently. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 19:19, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - indeed, if anything I think these are too lenient. If somebody's been effectively absent for this long, they may be so out of touch as not to be entirely capable of handling the current Wikipedia culture and expectations. --Orange Mike | Talk 19:22, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. I would prefer a higher minimum, and I like Barkeep49's suggested 100 edits per year average over each rolling three years. But this is a good start, and I strongly support it. Boing! on Tour (talk) 19:24, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support (Non-inactive admin comment) This will gently draw legacy admins back into the project, if they so want, less than onerously—and as yer man suggests above, this is extremely, almost too lightweight—and should, concomitantly, play a role in admin retention; not by drawing them in, but by going some way to ensure they don't get desysopped for failing to keep up with events. Cf. several recent arbcom cases. SN54129 19:24, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Twenty edits annually is less than two per month. I'd suggest we could increase the requirement, but this is a good step. Calidum 19:26, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 19:34, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• The proposal is nice and simple, as it can be checked by looking at Special:Contributions and clicking "100". I'm pretty pro legacy admin retention, but I also find it depressing if this leads us more than 5 years into the past (sometimes 10 years) for some admins. A higher threshold than 1/year may either lead to people not bothering or could actually lead to them rediscovering that they like editing Wikipedia. We could actually consider weakening the "one year inactivity rule" instead. —Kusma (talk) 19:37, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - Sorry, Kusma. We still don't need admins making less edits within five years. Also, helps reduce likelihood of ArbCom cases. George Ho (talk) 19:39, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  I haven't opposed the proposal and am actually pretty supportive. My main point is that the requirements should fit with the 50/100/250/500 edits thresholds of Special:Contributions so they are easily checked. —Kusma (talk) 19:47, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  Oops, my bad. George Ho (talk) 19:59, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  @Kusma: The number of edits to display in a contributions page is entirely customisable and can be set by a URL parameter, e.g. this link will show your edits in groups of 314 [1]. It would be trivial to create a user links template that contains a link for the last "X" contribs (as long as the number is less than 5,000). 192.76.8.70 (talk) 20:34, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Support making less than ~20 edits/actions per year shows a lack of engement and a high change of a lack of understanding of current policies. The fact that almost 200 users with these tools have failed to meet this isn't a good look. Terasail^[✉️] 19:42, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Like several others above, I would have been willing to support a stricter requirement, but I know there has been reluctance about this in the past. This is a modest expectation for someone who wants to retain advanced tools, and a step in the right direction. --RL0919 (talk) 19:46, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. 100 edits in 5 years is a very generous requirement to meet. All but the most truly checked-out administrators should be able to manage 20 edits a year. 28bytes (talk) 20:02, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• No - What we are doing now seems to work. You can always justify more and more, until you discover you've gone too far, and you run off someone who might have come back as a good admin, because they didn't want to do RFA. I can't blame them. So to me, the only question is, "is the current rule adequate and working?", and I would say yes it is at this time. What bad thing has happened? Nothing. Crats have a little more leverage and leeway than 10 years ago, and now the public can opine due to the 24 hour wait. It seems fairly balanced right now. Change for change's sake always has unintended consequences. Aaaaand, this is still super easy to game. Trivial, in fact. So it might make us feel good, but it isn't a real solution. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 20:03, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  To you, preserving and keeping an admin tools is "trivial"... or not a big issue. However, there are potential security risks, especially per WP:SECUREADMIN. Has hacking a less active admin's account happened before? --George Ho (talk) 20:41, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Support It would go to say if you are active on Wikipedia, you are going to be knowledgeable of what is going on, and how to respond as an admin. Makes sense, if you aren't active, you don't really need to use the tools. RickinBaltimore (talk) 20:07, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - Donald Albury 20:10, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support any standard that isn't particularly hard to meet. In July of 2014 I failed to hit Wikidata's requirement of 10 admin actions in 6 months, and was desysopped for it. Due to that same inactivity, I wasn't even aware that such a policy had been passed. I then missed my first notification, and got a "last call" notification on a beautiful day in Marseille and decided I'd rather keep walking around. And y'know, that was fair; I felt that at the time, and feel that now. Admins who aren't sufficiently in touch with a project to meet any arbitrary (reasonable) standard should not be admins there. This would finally be a leap in that common-sense direction. I'm fine with blatant gaming, because that means someone's still at least somewhat aware of current community norms. And it's not like there's ever a shortage of work; even a true "content admin" can still take 20 (or 100, or more) CAT:UCSD speedies a year. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 20:14, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I would probably change the numbers of some of the criteria, but if we get sidetracked by discussing that, we will paralyze the discussion. So I'm supporting this for now, on the assumption we can fiddle with the numbers up or down later. Don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. --Floquenbeam (talk) 20:17, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, I like the idea of an average over 5 years rather than just raising the minimum for one – it accommodates scenarios in which a person may have a longer term absence yet still wish to re-engage with the project. Giraffer ^{(talk·contribs)} 20:19, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per above. Therapyisgood (talk) 20:22, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support for many good reasons already given. It's not a lot to ask, and it will be a net positive in reducing problems with out-of-touch admin actions. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:29, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I'd support much more stringent requirements, but am not opposed to this as an incremental improvement. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:42, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Question is there a difference between "log actions" and "administrative actions"? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 19:25, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Jo-Jo Eumerus: - I believe so. For instance, viewing deleted content is an administrative action, but is not a logged one, and I don't think editing fully-protected pages goes into the admin log, either. Hog Farm _Talk 19:29, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Yeah editing protected pages wouldn't be logged as anything special other than an edit. I have been corrected, anything is tracked. Terasail^[✉️] 19:30, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    Special:AbuseFilter/942 * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 19:34, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It is probably worth noting that the mention of logged actions is from the text that already exists at WP:INACTIVITY. @Worm That Turned: Perhaps it would be good to highlight the text that is being added/modified, so editors can easily see what would be changed? --RL0919 (talk) 19:41, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea @RL0919 - I've put it directly above the modification Worm^TT(talk) 19:48, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I do not think that editing through protection is a logged admin action in the normally understood sense of the word. Logged actions show up in the users' own log. Luckily for our purposes here it is not a particularly important distinction. The vagueness of that term is one reason why I am supporting this when I had my own proposal in my sandbox that was tied entirely to logged actions. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:52, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• There's at least one bureaucrat who would be affected by this proposal; since the wording refers only to administrators it seems we would end up in the odd situation where someone is a 'crat but not an admin. Perhaps this requirement could be applied to 'crats as well? (If anything, familiarity with current community norms is more important for 'crats that it is for admins.) Extraordinary Writ (talk) 20:00, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  The question of keeping bureaucrat activity in sync with admin standards came up during the discussion that implemented our initial admin inactivity policy. It was addressed as a separate RfC after the admin change was approved. Presumably the same could be done this time. --RL0919 (talk) 20:17, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  That's fair: I imagine it would probably (hopefully!) be uncontroversial to sync the requirements back up. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 20:20, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• To give some context to my support comment that this is a modest requirement, there is a list of links to inactivity policies for various Wikimedia projects at meta:Admin activity review/Local inactivity policies. Many are more strict than what is proposed here, with shorter time limits, higher editing numbers, and/or requirements to have logged admin actions (not just edits). --RL0919 (talk) 20:11, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• This is a reasonable step forward, but if I'm interpreting things correctly, a 1-edit-a-year administrator could still simply request the tools back the moment they're removed for falling below the 100-edits-in-5-years threshold, correct? Just wondering if a companion change to the resysopping criteria might be needed. 28bytes (talk) 20:14, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  Worm addresses this partially in the statement in that they could request it but the crats would presumably deny it on a "has returned to activity or intends to return to activity as an editor." basis. But bigger picture you're right that should probably be adjusted if this passes. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 20:18, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  This. I think the has returned to activity or intends to return to activity criteria is something that we were very reluctant to lean on much at first, but with time it is becoming more accepted. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:43, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]