New subject: Fwd: [Wikimediaindia-l] Tamil Wikipedia elects 10 sysops at a time

25 Apr 2019

This is not India-specific, and may be of interest to other communities
struggling with such a question.

   A.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ravishankar &lt;ravidreams(a)gmail.com&gt;
Date: Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 3:05 PM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Tamil Wikipedia elects 10 sysops at a time
To: wikimediaindia-l &lt;wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;

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
<https://ta.wikipedia.org/s/7gmi> and the discussion in the related talk
page.

Thanks,

Ravi
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