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