Thanks very much for the update on the Tamil Wikipedia community and congratulations on resolving a long-standing deadlock with respect to RfA procedures on ta.wiki. Whilst adminship was once considered to be "no big deal" on en.wiki, in reality the process has similarly seen higher and higher standards for passage through the RfA process, making it more and more difficult to promote administrators.  The recent promotion of  RexxS which garnered less than 65% support (generally considered to be below the threshold that allows for bureaucratic discretion) sparked much discussion in the community (see also, bureaucrats' chat), meaning that the norms guiding the decision-making process among bureaucrats might also be shifting.  The Arbitration Committee also refused to entertain a case to discuss the decision taken by the bureaucrats in the case above.

Out of curiosity, can you please clarify further as to what happens after the promoted admin has spent the "probationary period"?  Are they confirmed/reconfirmed as administrators permanently?  Or do they get promoted for a fixed but longer time duration only to go through the reconfirmation process once again?

On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 7:05 PM Ravishankar <ravidreams@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,

Tamil Wikipedia elects 10 sysops at a time after a gap of almost 5 years.

After 2013, we hit a policy deadlock where we couldn't agree on how to elect a new sysop, what are the qualities of an ideal sysop, etc.,

Even after repeated attempts, we could not solve this as the fear of being not able to easily desysop someone made us look for higher and higher bars for a perfect admin.

So, how did we solve?

Recently, MediaWiki allows someone to get sysop access for limited periods of time like 1 month, 3 months, etc., This is how Stewards grants adminship in many small wikis.

We felt when there is the possibility of granting adminships for trial periods and renew them thereafter, we don't need to keep the bar for adminship very high.

We also proposed to start a Wiki Admin School where others can mentor the new admins.

So, after a month long discussion and community consensus, we conducted our sysop elections and elected 10 sysops at a time.

Right now, we have 42 sysops  with one of the highest sysops per users ration among all global Wikis.

We plan to elect 6 new sysops every quarter and are discussing a similar policy for bureaucrat election.

We strongly believe having a diverse pool of sysops makes them feel empowered to serve the Wikimedia movement for a long period of time.

If you are interested in knowing more, take a look at the policy here and the discussion in the related talk page.

Thanks,

Ravi
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