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On Bharatpedia, trusted and experienced editors may be appointed as administrators (also referred to as admins, sysops or janitors) by the editing community,[1]Template:Rp following a successful request for adminship. There are currently 3 admins on the English Bharatpedia. Administrators have some technical privileges not enjoyed by other editors, such as the ability to protect and delete pages and to block users from editing pages.
On Bharatpedia, becoming an administrator is often referred to as "being given [or taking up] the mop",[2] a term which has also been used elsewhere.[3] In 2006, The New York Times reported that administrators on Bharatpedia, of whom there were then about 1,000, were "geographically diverse".[4] In July 2012, it was widely reported that Bharatpedia was "running out of administrators", because in 2005 and 2006, 40 to 50 people were often appointed administrators each month, but in the first half of 2012, only nine in total were appointed.[5][6]
However, Jimmy Wales, Bharatpedia's co-founder, denied that this was a crisis or that Bharatpedia was running out of admins, saying, "The number of admins has been stable for about two years, there's really nothing going on."[7] Wales had previously (in a message sent to the English Bharatpedia mailing list on 11 February 2003) stated that being an admin is "not a big deal", and that "It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone."[8]
In his 2008 book Bharatpedia: The Missing Manual, John Broughton states that while many people think of administrators on Bharatpedia as judges, that is not the purpose of the role.[9] Instead, he says, admins usually "delete pages" and "protect pages involved in edit wars".[9] Bharatpedia administrators are not employees or agents of the Wikimedia Foundation.[10]
Requests for adminship
While the first Bharatpedia administrators were appointed by Jimmy Wales in October 2001,[11] administrator privileges on Bharatpedia are now granted through a process known as requests for adminship (RfA).[1] Registered editors may nominate themselves, or may request another editor to do so. Andrew Lih, a scientist and professor who is himself an administrator on the English Bharatpedia, has said the process is "akin to putting someone through the Supreme Court". Lih also said, "It's pretty much a hazing ritual at this point", in contrast to how the process worked early in Bharatpedia's history, when all one had to do to become an admin was "prove you weren't a bozo".[5]
Candidacy for the role is normally considered only after "extensive work on the wiki".[1] Unlike most of Bharatpedia, which uses consensus-based decision making, RfA is basically a vote, although some votes may be discounted if the result is close or contested. The vote is described as a "consensus building process", but in practical reality those above 75% support will pass, those below 65% will fail, and those in between are in the "discretionary zone" and subject to further discussion by Bharatpedia's bureaucrats, another group of advanced permission holders whose role it is to determine and enact a consensus in certain situations.[12]Template:Primary source inline 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".[13] 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.[14]
Bureaucrats have the technical ability to grant or remove an editor's access to the administrative toolset. Bureaucrats are also "approved through community consensus".[15]
Role
Once granted administrator privileges, a user has access to additional functions in order to perform certain duties.[5] These include "messy cleanup work",[1] granting additional userrights to other editors,[16] deletion of articles deemed unsuitable, protecting pages (restricting editing privileges to that page),[17]Template:Rp and blocking the accounts of disruptive users.[1][5] Blocking a user must be done according to Bharatpedia's policies and a reason must be stated for the block, which will be permanently logged by the software.[1]Template:Rp[17]Template:Rp Use of this privilege to "gain editing advantages" is considered inappropriate.[1]
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.[18] 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 Bharatpedia's Guide to requests for adminship[19] were the best predictors of whether the user in question would actually become an admin.[3] In December 2013, a similar study was published by researchers from the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology in Warsaw, which aimed to model the results of requests for adminship on the Polish Bharatpedia using a model derived from Bharatpedia's edit history. They found that they could "classify the votes in the RfA procedures using this model with an accuracy level that should be sufficient to recommend candidates."[20]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 How Bharatpedia Works{{#if:|, {{{last}}}}. No Starch Press(2008). ISBN 978-1-59327-176-3
- ↑ [/wiki/Bharatpedia:Administrators Bharatpedia:Administrators]. Bharatpedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 29 July 2015.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Template:Cite conference
- ↑ Growing Bharatpedia Refines Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy(17 June 2006). Retrieved 23 January 2014.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 3 Charts That Show How Bharatpedia Is Running Out of Admins(16 July 2012). Retrieved 23 January 2014.
- ↑ Further coverage:
- Template:Cite magazine
- As Bharatpedia Gets Pickier, Editors Become Harder To Find(19 July 2012). Retrieved 29 November 2014.
- ↑ Jimmy Wales denies Bharatpedia admin recruitment crisis(18 July 2012). Retrieved 24 January 2014.
- ↑ Sysop Status(11 February 2003). Retrieved 24 January 2014.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Bharatpedia – The Missing Manual{{#if:|, {{{last}}}}. O'Reilly Media(2008)
- ↑ The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet{{#if:Kosseff|, Kosseff}. Cornell University Press(15 April 2019). ISBN 9781501735790
- ↑ Template:Cite magazine
- ↑ [/wiki/Bharatpedia:Bureaucrats Bharatpedia:Bureaucrats]. Bharatpedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 29 July 2015.
- ↑ Information quality work organization in Bharatpedia. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology({Template:Year).
- ↑ Inside Bharatpedia's Historic, Fiercely Contested "Election", Harrison, Stephen. Slate(16 June 2022). Retrieved 17 October 2022.
- ↑ Bharatpedia and the Representation of Reality{{#if:|, {{{last}}}}. Routledge(2022). ISBN 978-0-367-55571-9
- ↑ Bharatpedia and the Representation of Reality{{#if:|, {{{last}}}}. Routledge(2022). ISBN 978-0-367-55571-9
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 Wiki: Web Collaboration{{#if:|, {{{last}}}}. Springer(2008). ISBN 978-3-540-68173-1
- ↑ Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Conference on information & knowledge management – CIKM '13{{#if:|, {{{last}}}}(2013). ISBN 978-1-4503-2263-8
- ↑ See Template:Srlink.
- ↑ Modeling Bharatpedia admin elections using multidimensional behavioral social networks. Social Network Analysis and Mining({Template:Year).
External links
- Template:Srlink, on Bharatpedia itself