Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship

Requests for adminship and bureaucratship update

RfA candidate	S	O	N	S %	Status	Ending (UTC)	Time left	Dups?	Report
Voorts	121	9	3	93	Open	21:06, 8 November 2024	3 days, 20 hours	no	report

Current time is 00:27, 5 November 2024 (UTC). —

Recently closed RfAs and RfBs ()

Candidate	Type	Result	Date of close	Tally
				S	O	N	%
AirshipJungleman29	RfA	Withdrawn by candidate	27 Sep 2024	34	21	4	62
Significa liberdade	RfA	Successful	21 Sep 2024	163	32	10	84
Asilvering	RfA	Successful	6 Sep 2024	245	1	0	>99
HouseBlaster	RfA	Successful	23 Jun 2024	153	27	8	85

Badger hunting season

At my own RfA, I said this about badgering opposes:

Perhaps a better question is why we've decided that it is uncivilized to have a candidate respond directly to accusations, but it is highly civilized to have a dozen other people respond nebulously on their behalf. The circumstances behind an oppose vote, especially one based on something that happened a long time ago, are generally arcane and half-remembered even by their participants; why would bystanders be better-equipped to address them? I feel like they usually aren't, which is part of the reason people make up for quality with quantity, and we end up with giant walls of text below every oppose. I don't know how this could be formalized, but it seems to me that if you see an oppose that's so goofy you feel you absolutely must take action, it's probably better to channel your outrage into asking the candidate a somewhat open-ended question that lets them address it.

Anyway, rather than just pontificate on the issue, I am going to do something about it: the next time I see an oppose on an RfA, I'm going to go through and specifically ask the candidate an open-ended question about anything they'd like to say in response to it. My hope is that this will allow people to offer some response if the oppose is total chickenshit, or at least offer a different perspective, and in any case cut back on the need for white-knighting. Since I only get two questions, this may need some cooperation from other editors. Would anyone like to help with this? jp×g🗯️ 21:48, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't think there is a general view that it's uncivilized to respond to commenters. I do think there is close scrutiny on the candidate's conversational approach, particularly if they seem overly defensive. I'll agree that isn't necessarily giving it due weight compared with the rest of the candidate's body of work. Unfortunately there isn't a good way around this without the community agreeing to delegate the evaluation of candidates to a smaller group. Personally I would like to see candidates decide on a case-by-case basis how to best convey their points, as this is what they will have to do as an administrators. I appreciate, though, why some would like to give candidates a more one-on-one interaction forum in which to discuss a given issue. isaacl (talk) 22:45, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

I do agree a lot of threads get drawn out by people speculating on how the candidate might respond, and we get towers of speculation that can blow up issues rapidly. It would often be more productive for everyone to wait for the candidate to make a statement before pre-emptively responding. It's difficult to manage without a moderator, though. isaacl (talk) 22:50, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

I think you hit the nail on the head: people feel a need to defend someone who is unable to defend themselves (or, at least, for them to defend themselves is considered poor form). The person going through RfA knows their responses will be evaluated by !voters. They will not go nuclear over oppose we don't need more administrators, but they can respond to oppose user has not created sufficient content with links to the 15 FAs they wrote.

Count me in. HouseBlaster^talk 23:48, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

I'll absolutely be a part of that experiment. There's nothing technically wrong about the above plan, in my opinion, although I suppose one potential downside is that it then effectively forces candidates to respond to those points. And if they choose not to do so, either due to stress or simply not taking the inquiry seriously (or bad-faith reasons which don't require mentioning), that can be a bad look which can impact their future prospects. I think it'd be best to ask (or at least consider) first whether they want that sort of target-setting to be employed. _{Duly signed,} ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 14:31, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

In addition, if you couple the above scenario with some sort of moderation plan in that the candidate ought to respond to an oppose !vote first before pile-on refutation commences, that then creates a possibility in which oppose !votes can simply be unchecked if the candidate defers a response. I'm not yet decided on whether or not that's a bad thing. _{Duly signed,} ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 14:36, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

• @HouseBlaster and WaltClipper: I have put my money where my mouth is here, at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Paine Ellsworth 2. This might be a chickenshit question (it's a "which of these four things would you like to address?") so it may need more than one Q to answer fully. jp×g🗯️ 04:05, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

  Oops: @WaltCip: jp×g🗯️ 04:38, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

  @JPxG: Haha, no worries. The nick change was partly a joke because I kept getting called "WaltClip" up until the day I had it changed. Thanks for pinging me on it. I will have a look. _{Duly signed,} ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 13:44, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

  I liked your question and hope to see it on future RfAs. It's a great opportunity for a candidate to take stock of a situation and then directly address arguments while maintaining civility. TROPtastic (talk) 23:41, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Maybe we should expand the very good essay WP:TYFYV to include a section about not dogpiling regular opposes, rather than just the serial "too many admins" types it was originally written for. The Wordsmith^{Talk to me} 01:57, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Taking the most recently closed request for administrative privileges as an example: Clovermoss responded directly to oppose statements in a matter-of-fact manner. I do not believe the responses were considered to be uncivilized. isaacl (talk) 18:37, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

General thoughts about younger admins?

Wikipedia:Age and adminship states that there have been numerous discussions on age and adminship, while referencing a WT:RFA thread from 2008. This dicussion is about the concept of 12 year olds being admins (Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Nousernamesleft is an example of that, apparently this used to be a more commonplace occurence). I was wondering if there have been more recent discussions about this topic since then? I can see an older teen possibly being a successful RfA candidate. However, I strongly suspect most voters would prefer admins be adults and that this would likely be a less controversial opinion than it was at the time. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 14:52, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

The number of talented young people in the movement, quite frankly, amazes me. I keep meeting them at conferences. Software developers that just graduated high school that program better than me. Admins who ran when they were under 18 and passed. My advice to young folks who want to RFA would be: keep your age a secret. Then nobody can prejudge you negatively based on it :) –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:01, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Personally, I've never thought that age should make any difference, other than roles that require more contentious topics (oversighter, check user etc). Realistically there is no requirement for a user to denote their age. Maturity is what we look for. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:04, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

I think that part of the attraction of involvement in Wikipedia to many is that it doesn't matter who you are, in general you will be judged by what you do. Wehwalt (talk) 15:23, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

There was a shocking amount of ageism in leeky's first RfA. -- asilvering (talk) 04:00, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

I stand by my words and position; name calling won't change that, since I see it as child protection, not ageism. Jclemens (talk) 04:05, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

I asked a variety of functionaries about this not too long ago and was surprised that all indicated an openness to even young teens. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 04:19, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Advice for RfA candidates says "Wikipedia has several very young successful admins; it also has various older people who behave like children." See Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump for real-life examples. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:09, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

Notwithstanding the enforcement of COPPA to the extent required by law, candidates should not feel the need to disclose their age and should not be required to answer any such optional questions on that basis. As Novem Linguae said, it is best to not give people a reason to oppose on that basis. I wish I could share the idealism of Lee and Wehwalt in that people on Wikipedia are more apt to judge by actions instead of by status, but in all the years I've been here, I can say firmly that this is not a commonly-held belief, although I too align myself in believing that maturity is more important than age for an administrator. _{Duly signed,} ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 14:05, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

I didn't even think about the possibility of actually asking a candidate how old they are, I was thinking more about self-disclosure. I think it would be inappropriate at best to ask how old someone is. I understand why someone would rather not say how old they are (preventing assumptions about their behaviour, privacy, general safety, etc) but I also don't think that diminishes the experience of those who do wish to be open about themselves and their experiences. I've always been fairly open about the fact that I created my account when I was 16, for example. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:51, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

I would advise under-18s not to share their age. Lots of under-18s have better temperament and self-awareness than most adult admins, but won't be supported by adults who have the preconceived judgement that they are "a child". I was under 16 when I joined and I think 80% of what I did wrong was due to the site's learning curve or my own limitations and would have been no better had I been 10 years older. I believe I can often detect when a volunteer is young, but mostly based on humour/socialising/interests rather than any inherent difference in knowledge or skills. We need a diversity of volunteers and under-18s are a part of that. I don't expect to ever support a 12-year-old RfA candidate (or think I ever have done before), but it's old enough to be a grandmaster. I wouldn't rule it out if the candidate showed good temperament, ability to create content and had some experience of the more hostile areas of the site. — Bilorv (talk) 21:28, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

In general, yes, there are likely to be concerns. One may extrapolate various areas of concern from the Child Protect policy and the referenced Advice page there - there are going to be some number of editors concerned about exposing younger editors to various things and concerned about younger editors exposing themselves. And of course, various editors and admins are going to have various experiences offline, online and here, which are likely to inform their concerns (not only as children, or as parents, but also as professionals who deal with children, their development or psychological issues, etc.) Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:06, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

I think there are no requirements of being an administrator as long as he/she gets enough experience. However, for some professionals dealing with private data like Checkuser or oversight, 18+ is a requirement to sign the agreement, because of some reasons like Child protection or something like that. But being solely an admin is not likely to be a issue like that. Just a random Wikipedian^(talk) 11:00, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

No one said anything about any requirement. What admins are exposed to varies from admin to admin. And the realty is still as I said. No point in being fooled. It has and will matter, regardless of whether any individual thinks it should. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:48, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

2023 RfAs in review

As of now, we have 12 successful RfAs and (maybe the 13th one) in 31 December, one lower than the last year. However, we have something to consider:

• The new inactivity policy, enacted on 1 January 2023. We don't know if it has some changes to the admin workload, but many legacy admins have been desysopped this year due to the new activity rule.
• This year had two cratchats (MB: 173/80/15, not promoted in the first days of the year and Pppery: 195/71/9 on August), but most RfAs were uncontroversial, with 2 RFX300s (313/1/2) and (315/3/0), however every RfAs have at least 1 opposes.

And we don't know what 2024 will bring in terms of adminship. (If a RfA nominates today, it would end on 1 January 2024) Just a random Wikipedian^(talk) 04:01, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Following the institution of the new inactivity policy, more than half of all admins are now active. That had not been the case for at least several years. The number of inactive admins has also been halved compared to the last few years. Dekimasuよ! 05:33, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the reality is that most admins do very little admin work. Here are the adminstats for the past 3 months. Obviously this table doesn't include items such as closing discussions or Main page tasks, but I still think it provides great insight into the current situation. We've got maybe 100 admins doing 95% of the work. -Fastily 09:14, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

Time to raise it to 50 actions/year. They will have to at least review the latest versions of some of the PAGs to get to the number or risk getting something wrong and end up desysopped. Usedtobecool ☎️ 15:15, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

Further restricting ourselves to fewer and fewer administrators is not going to help. As with the project as a whole, the long tail of users who might do less work one year and more work the next are still a valuable and important part of the community and creating more work for everyone else by removing their ability to help is pointless unless they're causing demonstrable problems. Sam Walton (talk) 11:22, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

It is a little alarming to note that despite only having been an admin for about ⅔ of that time, and taking my time getting used to the tools, I still rank #171 on that list. —Ganesha811 (talk) 04:38, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

It is and it isn't. I was high up on these lists really quick because I deal with deletions. I'd argue I'm not top 10 in terms of active admin contributions, but my count of actions ends up being higher for that reason alone, and I'm right at the 3 month mark as of yesterday. Hey man im josh (talk) 04:42, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Or you are a fantastic new admin that absolutely crushes backlogs and does a ton of the heavy lifting, and we are lucky to have you :) –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:29, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

I would argue that judging the work done by an administrator by the number of admin actions performed is just as useful as judging the work done by an editor by edit count. HouseBlaster^talk 04:57, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Right, but my point is that the vast majority of admins do little to no admin work, and I'd be willing to bet that this is true for other admin-related tasks not tracked by the adminstats tool. But this isn't actually a cause for concern, given that sufficiently large size organizations/companies struggle to outperform the 80/20 rule anyways. I just don't like seeing alarmist posts about the alleged "lack of admins" and impending doom of Wikipedia because that's simply not what's happening here. -Fastily 11:08, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Actually it is, just very slowly. I've cautioned about this before. There's never going to be a moment when everything suddenly breaks, no "Ah ha!" moment, no blowing up of the Death Star moment that will be clear to everyone that we don't have enough admins. But, we are slowly moving towards that point and have been for a number of years. We've lost a net 828 administrators over the last 13 years. That's almost as many lost administrators as we currently have. The pool of administrators is slowly draining. For now, we're fine. But, that won't last forever. --Hammersoft (talk) 17:22, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

To what extent do you think increased automation can slow or mitigate this trend? —Ganesha811 (talk) 23:42, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

I think automation has already been slowing and mitigating this trend and so the easiest to implement for the largest gains have, likely, already been done. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:07, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

That's hard to analyze. Looking at the data used for the subsection below, the number of bot admin functions in the 2018 was 69,042. In the last three months here in 2023, that number was 2,366,857; a whopping 34 times higher. But, the number of human admin functions only decreased by about 9k. I.e., the bot actions aren't having an immediately apparent effect on human admin work load. Though, it's possible to think of it as the bots are doing more than 2 million things humans would have had to do. Bottom line though; human admins are doing about 11% more work in 2023 than they were in 2018. That's the takeaway that worries me. Another one that worries me; the top ten most active admins accounted for 63% of admin actions. We could run this project with 15 highly active admins. But, finding them is a guessing game. Also of note; those top 10 most active admins? Even with Hey man im josh, the average time they've been an admin is more than 12 years. Outside of HMIJ, the shortest time is Liz, at over eight years. I.e., in the last eight years we've found exactly one highly active administrator who has remained on the project out of 119 successful RfAs from 2016 forward. We've lost 2 top 10 highly active admins in the last five years alone. I.e., we're not replacing highly active administrators fast enough either. There's trouble brewing in River City. --Hammersoft (talk) 02:02, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Interesting analysis, thanks for pulling the numbers! One thing to take into account is that some people who are not currently highly active may well become highly active if a current "busy" admin retires. For example, I'm sure I'd be doing more AfD closures if Liz so often hadn't got to them first. Not that it's a problem - but it means we likely have current admins who could step up their activity if needed. —Ganesha811 (talk) 03:37, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

The automation I'm talking about are not just bot actions. But also the way bots and scripts save admins time. So bots clerk noticeboards, so admins don't have to and can, presumably, spend some of that saved time into doing more actions. Same with scripts. And edit filters mean that a lot of stuff that would have required admin action in the past doesn't anymore. I don't see some obvious place where we could automate away admin effort nor any obvious place where there is a lot of admin time and a script could help make them more efficient. The best I can come up with is around AI helping to screen out frivolous requests, CSD, unblocks, etc. Perhaps there could be some work done to automate protection. But I don't see this as some great way to close that gap on its own. At least part, if not all, of the solution is we need more admins. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 05:10, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

I agree fully with this, and I want to add that the places where an admin shortfall does/would have an impact are ones where a single logged action may require hours of reading and unlogged actions; SPI, CCI, AE, and so forth. These are also the venues that deal with our most insidious disruption. I'm not disputing the statistics above; Hammersoft's efforts paint a picture that matches my subjective impressions. I just want to emphasize that the areas not well captured by those statistics are critical ones. Vanamonde93 (talk) 05:38, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Seven years earlier. I'm saying the same things now. Help! I think I'm caught in an infinite loop. Of note; 8 different editos in that discussion from 2016 are now inactive. So, how many of you responding in this thread will not be active in another 7 years? Ganesha? Hey Man I'm Josh? Sam Walton? Fastily? JrandWP? Barkeep? Vanamonde? Several of you, or maybe even all of you, aren't going to be around in 7 years. --Hammersoft (talk) 13:59, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Does investigating/closing noticeboard threads, mediating disputes, opening/commenting at/closing RfCs etc show up in these stats? For that matter, does closing an AfD as "keep" count? It seems somewhat biased towards being triggerhappy (closing an ANI thread with a block counts as "admin work" but closing it with no action needed doesn't, for example). jp×g🗯️ 09:08, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes, statistics can be fickle things. Many admin actions don't show up... not protecting following a request at RFP is another example. Lectonar (talk) 09:15, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

It's hard to count (like the 5 checks rule for Checkusers proposed in April this year, many opposed this because rejecting a Checkuser request does not count as a check). So admin actions should be counted as refusals of requests or other things, however. Just a random Wikipedian^(talk) 11:13, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Nearly all of the most time-consuming admin things I do don't show up as admin actions.

I'm also not all that concerned with someone who only has a few logged admin actions a year but is actually editing consistently enough that they're managing to keep up. When they do need to log an action, they're not doing it according to a fifteen-year-old tape. An admin who even a couple times a year correctly blocks a vandal they stumble across is a net positive. One who is so out of touch that they won't even back down when someone objects to an iffy admin move can cause hours of wasted time for other editors. Valereee (talk) 15:50, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Admins doesn't need to be active with logged admin actions, they would need to get active consistently (maybe have some breaks, but most important of all, they would need to be aware of all new rules and community consensus) to remain accountable. So there are proposals about admin elections because the quality cannot be judged only by some metrics of accountability. Just a random Wikipedian^(talk) 02:39, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Administrator work; 2023 compared to 2018

I took a look at adminstats for the past three months (thanks Fastily!) and compared it with the same time period five years ago. We have just shy of 14% fewer active administrators. Of the top 25 most active administrators from 2018, we lost 6 (24%). In 2018, the top 20% most active admins did 87.6% of the work. In 2023, that's now up to 94.2%. Losing highly active administrators will now hurt more. In 2018, there were 214,915 administrator actions in the time period. In 2023, it declined somewhat to 206,044. Meanwhile, the number of edits made project wide per day has remained essentially static (days to generate 10 million edits changed by one day). It is not logically valid to conclude we are missing ~9k admin actions these last three months. However, the average number of admin actions per admin in 2023 is 11% higher than in 2018. I.e., the administrators we do have are having to do more work to keep up. Projecting forward; in five years we will have approximately 430 active administrators doing 197,000 admin actions (458 per active adminstrator). The top 20% most active administrators (which will number 86 administrators) will be doing well in excess of 95% of the work. Is the sky falling? Of course not. But, the situation is slowly getting worse. --Hammersoft (talk) 17:46, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

I want to say I really appreciate this analysis Hammersoft. Our admin capacity has long felt like a boiling frog situation and this gives some numbers to that concept. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:08, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Bear with me as I try to get at what I'm wondering here...if I'm performing 11% more admin actions, but because of improvements in (process/tech/whatever kind of streamlining), I'm actually spending the same raw amount of time on those actions, how much actual more time am I spending? I still might have the same back-end not-visible work to do in many cases, of course. Valereee (talk) 16:03, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Maybe. But there are other possibilities:

• You may be spending more of your Wikipedia screen time on admin tasks and less on other activities.
• With practice, you may be able to perform admin tasks faster

Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:28, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

2 new RfAs in progress

And right now, there are 3 RfAs in progress, 2 would end in the new year. I hope that 2024 would be a better year in RfA events. Just a random Wikipedian^(talk) 02:40, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Food for thought

Below I will reproduce, in its entirety, a successful RfA, without comment:

Zippy

• 21 Jul 2003 Zippy: I've been contributing as a registered user since August 2002 (and as unregistered since June 2002), including both new entries and edits of existing ones. My net identity goes back for more than a decade, with a record of helpful participation on Slashdot and Usenet. I believe in a light touch in moderation except in the case of obvious vandalism (Goatse, bots). My main interest in adminship is in correcting and contributing to protected pages when I spot problems (typos, errors, unclear language).
  • Solid contributor who I don't recall has ever made a non-NPOV edit or has been the instigator of any edit war. I fully support Zippy as Admin. Do I hear a second so that we can make it so! --mav 19:43 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
  • Seems to be in a weird time zone, so I don't recognize the name, but checked a few random edits, didn't find anything wrong. Is the sole contributor to at least a couple of short, properly wikified, articles. כסיף Cyp 11:59 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Much to think about. jp×g🗯️ 03:26, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Every time I feel inclined to oppose an RfA on grounds of lack of experience, I recall my RfA, where I'd been active for <12 mths, with ~5k edits, knew tbh next to nothing about deletion policy (where I've ended up working), got asked no questions and got next to no opposition. Espresso Addict (talk) 03:49, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

For better or worse, Wikipedia is a different community now. For example, the editor in question created an article with their second edit, and it looked like this. Pretty sparse, and without citations, but of course there was no doubt from anyone familiar with the subject that it met English Wikipedia's standard for having an article. A lot of low-hanging fruit was available. isaacl (talk) 04:16, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Agreed; I'm not sure what we're supposed to take away from this. For example, in 2003, there were ≈8K editors; now there are hundreds of thousands. In 2003, there were around 100-200K articles; now there are over 6 million. The manual of style in 2003 looked like this. What's most fun to me is the idea of Usenet as a character reference; if I could have done that twenty years ago, I'd be the Final Arbiter of Taste and Justice by now. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 05:13, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

The second support was from someone who had checked "a few random edits", I wonder what proportion of current voters actually check the candidate's edits as opposed to just reading the RFA. ϢereSpielChequers 07:25, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

I do look at some of a candidate's edits. I think it'd be unusual for a !voter to not do that, at least on some sort of cursory level? I also look at their talk page for signs of good communication and decent civility. I get that everyone has different opinions on what makes a good admin (this is mine) but I think my thought process has a decent chunk of overlap with the general community. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:08, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

{|TakesOffSillyHat|serious= "I certainly do. I joke about only looking into user's histories for plant articles, but in truth I'm looking into what kind of interactions they have. Especially if they are dealing more or less fairly with the disruptive editing of various types. Dipping in here and there to get an idea of what they have been doing recently. Now back to your regularly scheduled nonsense."|}

After all I only want either true heroes or villains who follow the code. Can't have someone who'll start bricking up the secret escape tunnel on your evil lair before the fight begins or takes unsporting shots at the hero. And we need plenty of new Supers even if they accidentally vaporize a little public property by accident when getting the hang of the vast powers that come with being an newbie editor WikiSuper. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 22:51, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

• While yes, the community has changed a lot, so has the type of work and the overall workload of both the editing and the administrator communities. Back in the day, almost nobody was blocked; then again, there were far fewer vandals. Back then, VPNs and other similar proxy servers didn't exist (or if they did, they couldn't be bothered with Wikipedia), so we didn't have adminbots blocking huge IP ranges associated with them, which we do now. Back then, almost nothing was deleted, and revision deletion didn't exist; today, both of those happen hundreds if not thousands of times a day. Back then, AGF was an absolute cornerstone of the project, to the point that people were considered quirky rather than exhibiting problem behaviour; today, we've had an additional 20 years of the reality of the internet that has made us much more realistic and less tolerant of problem behaviours. Back then, it was perfectly fine to have multiple accounts, and the way that those accounts were used had a lot of variation: some had "real" accounts and joke accounts; some had separate accounts for multiple topic areas; some used one account from home and another from work; and quite often those accounts weren't even linked. Today, people have to list every account they have or have ever had simply to be considered for any advanced permission, including adminship (likely with good reason). Back then, the entire editing community probably knew of any other editor who had more than 1000 edits, and so could make a reasonable RFA vote; today, the community wouldn't even consider a candidate with less than 5000 edits except if they had a very specialized skill that required adminship. It's not just the community that's changed. It is the needs of the project, the internet as a whole, and the world in which we operate. The OP illustrates a perfectly reasonable RFA for the period in which it occurred. It is reality that it couldn't happen that way today; but then again, when that RFA took place, everyone editing here was 20 years younger, and a significant number hadn't even been born yet. There's no such thing as the good old days. Risker (talk) 00:40, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

References