{"id":24116,"date":"2022-06-17T08:58:50","date_gmt":"2022-06-17T12:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.technewsday.com\/?p=24116"},"modified":"2022-06-20T10:54:35","modified_gmt":"2022-06-20T14:54:35","slug":"wikipedias-grueling-elections-hotly-contested","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wikipedias-grueling-elections-hotly-contested\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikipedia’s Grueling “Elections” Hotly Contested"},"content":{"rendered":"

Free online encyclopedia site Wikipedia\u2019s screening process for admin privileges has become a hotly contested title among a very exclusive group of prolific writers.<\/span><\/p>\n

English Wikipedia has 1,034 admins or sysops (system operators) for short\u2014but only about 500 admins are active contributors, which means they have made 30 or more edits in the last two months.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite a lack of financial compensation for their work, Wikipedia admins are given\u00a0 special powers, including the power to block and unblock other editors, protect articles from disruptive editing, and delete bad content from the site. Most of the time, admins have these special privileges for life.<\/span><\/p>\n

During RfA or Request for Adminships sessions, editors ask the candidate to answer controversial subjective questions. What criteria would the admin use to block a \u201cbad\u201d user? What is their vision for the Wikipedia project as a whole? These sessions take place in public and in real time. Moreover, candidates could be asked about comments they made several years back on the site.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

RfA candidate Tazmin\u2019s main roadblock during the sessions was question 14 where she was asked to explain a comment she wrote in 2021 during another candidate\u2019s RfA? Her comment wrote: \u201cI would be fine with a rule that we automatically desysop any Trump supporter. I will never vote for an admin candidate who\u2019s right-of-center by American standards (although I wouldn\u2019t vote \u2018<\/span>against<\/span><\/i>\u2019 someone solely on that basis).\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In retrospect, Tamzin admitted that her response to the infamous Q14 was quite hasty. She then proceeded to clarify that she shouldn\u2019t have said that she would <\/span>never <\/span><\/i>vote for a right-of-center admin candidate. Similarly, Tamzin opined that \u201csupport of oppressive regimes should be disqualifying, period,\u201d and that in her view, \u201c<\/span>avowed, continuing <\/span><\/i>support for Donald Trump translates to supporting an oppressive regime.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This statement pushed her detractors to rally in droves. \u201cAnybody who believes that half of the population of the United States can\u2019t be a Wikipedia administrator, shouldn\u2019t be a Wikipedia administrator,\u201d wrote user Noel S. McFerran.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, Tamzin\u2019s supporters rebutted that she was within her rights to consider her personal circumstances. Tamzin describes herself as a \u201cdisabled queer trans leftist Jewish woman.\u201d Her supporters claim that her views were justified because of the Trump administration\u2019s anti-trans positions.<\/span><\/p>\n

The last two hours of the seven-day RfA sessions were cutthroat, with Tamzin just within a few tenths of a percent of the required threshold. But in the end, she prevailed.<\/span><\/p>\n

In her debrief essay about the RfA, Tamzin said that her difficult experience points to the reason why there\u2019s a shortage of Wikipedia admins: Few sane people want to undergo that much scrutiny. Although there have been a number of calls in the past for RfA reforms, Wikipedia editors have not made any real progress.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

For more information, read the original story<\/a> in Slate. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Free online encyclopedia site Wikipedia\u2019s screening process for admin privileges has become a hotly contested title among a very exclusive group of prolific writers. English Wikipedia has 1,034 admins or sysops (system operators) for short\u2014but only about 500 admins are active contributors, which means they have made 30 or more edits in the last two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,359,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-companies","category-not-for-profit","category-people"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24135,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24116\/revisions\/24135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/technewsday.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}