Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-12-12/Opinion

I was kindly invited to write a debrief of my recent RfA, and thought I'd use this opportunity to give some thoughts on reconfirmation and the requests for adminship process.

I gave up my administrator tools at the beginning of the year, fully expecting I wouldn't have time for Wikipedia again for a few years. Happily my circumstances have changed, and I have free time again. When I handed in my tools, I stated that I would use the RfA process if I wanted the tools back and, inspired by a few reconfirmations of the past (1, 2, 3), decided to carry on and do so.

The process was real. I did not hold the toolset when I requested it, and while I hoped the community supported me as an administrator, I did not know for certain. Happily, there was an outpouring of support over the following few days, and the process was successful. I specifically asked for feedback as part of my nomination statement, and was pleased to get some meaningful feedback from a few individuals.

Whilst I did receive some personal feedback, and a wonderful outpouring of confidence from the community – there was a definite question over whether the RfA was a waste of time, mentioned in approximately 20% of all votes. Interestingly, commentary was evenly split between positive and negative on the topic, on one side, comments about it being admirable and showing accountability; and on the other about how precious a resource our community time is (this side included approximately 80% of the opposition and neutral comments).

Our project has been going for decades, and is still fairly unusual in the way that we handle our volunteers to crowdsource knowledge. We do allow, and indeed encourage, individuals to pop in and make a tweak and disappear into the aether. Last time I checked, the vast majority of the edits were indeed added that way. Equally, on the other end of the spectrum, we have editors who have been around for years, having made tens or hundreds of thousands of edits, if not millions.

How do we give feedback to those editors who do stick around – to let them know that they're doing a good job, or what areas they can work on to improve? Whose responsibility is it to give that feedback? At present, I see the following

• Thanks — quick and easy to add encouragement, but gives little meaningful feedback.
• Talk page notes & awards — this is how our feedback has been given throughout our history, but is ad hoc and may not truly reflect how the community feels about you.
• Peer reviews of work — specific requested feedback of work on an article or in an area; can be used as a tool for the volunteer looking for that feedback.
• Requests for adminship / bureaucratship / arbcom elections – A time intensive way to pull together feedback from the community, with a note added to watchlist and hundreds of people turning up to give an opinion.
• Noticeboard threads — generally raised when behaviour has become an issue – but this puts the subject on the back foot and can be dismissed as bad actors holding a grudge.
• Historically we had WP:RfC/U an area that was used to force feedback upon a person, and led to a very negative experience for individuals.

The benefits of feedback are tremendous though. Positive feedback will allow editors to feel personally valued, acknowledging their strengths. This, in turn, should increase editor retention. Constructive feedback can allow editors to modify their behaviour to improve the editing environment for everyone, again, increasing editor retention. We all know that prevention is far less costly than cure. Feedback is not a waste of time.

Why is this question of feedback relevant now? Our community is currently wrestling with the concept of WP:Administrator recall. The problem with recall is that, by the time we get to the process, it's too late. I find it hard to conceive of a scenario that an administrator's petition meets its requirement for RRfA, and that administrator goes on to be reconfirmed.

That begs the question — should an administrator know that they are acting in a manner that does not meet community expectations? Yes, they may have had noticeboard threads — but as I mention, these may be rationalised away. There's an idea that admins should police their own — but how quickly does that become somebody else's problem or "likely just a one off"?

I will concede that RfA was not the optimal process to get feedback, as too costly. That only goes to show that we do need a process - a process that people should want to participate in. Perhaps not a full reconfirmation RfA, but something. It should happen regularly, perhaps on a regular timescale (every 5 or 10 years), perhaps on editing milestones (10k, 25k, 50k, 100k, 200k... ) - but it should not be something to be scared of, nor shied away from. By burying one's head in the sand - one doesn't know what will bite you on the bottom.

I'd like to conclude by thanking every participant in my RfA — for those who gave feedback, for those who showed up to acknowledge my existence. It may not have been the optimal use of the community's time, but I appreciated it.