Q: Why add admins?
A: For a long time now, John Vandenberg has not been active in list administration, and has not responded to multiple requests to re-engage. This left list-administration to Shani and Asaf. Asaf is WMF staff, and Shani, though a volunteer when appointed list admin, has since become a WMF Trustee.
Shani and Asaf both feel it would be better if the list management is not dominated by people so closely associated with the Wikimedia Foundation. Although they are both administering the list in their volunteer capacities and are carefully avoiding acting in a conflict of interest, they want to reduce even the potential appearance of such conflict.
Indeed, they have tolerated behaviors on the list that probably shouldn't have been tolerated, only because they coincided with criticism of an action of the Wikimedia Foundation, and they did not want to be suspected of attempting to silence criticism. Both Shani and Asaf strongly believe in criticism, including of the Foundation, and would never seek to silence civil criticism.
Q: What happened to John?
A: We don't know. We trust he is doing okay, and just lost interest in this form of volunteering.
Q: Why now?
A: There's no specific trigger beyond the situation mentioned above, and no urgency. We have been meaning to do this for long months now. But work and other volunteer commitments kept getting priority over figuring out how to recruit new admins. Until one day we finally did, and here we are.
Q: How were the new admins selected?
A: In the same way Wikimedia-l adminships have always been handled, and the way we were appointed ourselves: the current admins reach out to some trusted volunteers seen to have good judgment and an appropriate temperament for administering this list, and offer them to join as co-admins. Some say no; eventually enough people say yes to fill the number of slots we want to recruit, and we proceed.
Q: So it's basically just people Shani and Asaf like?
A: No. It's people Shani and Asaf consider to meet the criteria mentioned in the previous answer. There are people we like who don't. :) And we strove to invite volunteers from different regions of the world, different kinds of volunteer experience, and to preserve a good gender ratio. Some people we sought to recruit have turned the thankless role down.
Q: Still, it's quite a subjective way to pick admins, isn't it?
A: Yes, it definitely is subjective. Again, it has always been so, and it seems to us it has worked fairly well so far. It certainly seems to us to beat potentially exhausting community elections to elect admins, with the well-known weaknesses of the "popularity contest" effect, and the un-guaranteed fitness-to-the-role elections bring. We understand some people would have preferred to see elections despite that.
One way to reduce the personal bias in future rounds might be to curate a public list of interested volunteers. We have just started one, here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia-l#Volunteers_interested_in_administering_the_listFeel free to express interest, and you will be considered next time admins are recruited for the list, probably in a couple of years.
Q: Where's the catch?
A: There is no catch. This is a routine administrative refreshing of the ranks, solving a non-critical but undesirable situation that has been the case for a while, and is an obvious net improvement in our opinion. We hope it is in yours, too.
Q: Are there any changes to list policies?
A: None at this time, no. Any future changes will be discussed among all admins.
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