Wikipedia:2015 administrator election reform

Thank you for visiting this project page. In recognition of the widely recognized problems with RfA, this project has been started to move past the disorderly and spontaneous discussion and move forward with a set goal in mind. Below, you can find a brief history of RfA reform projects, a short section describing why this project has been started, and finally a section detailing and linking to the phases which are required to accomplish the reform of our administrator election process.

The current method by which we elect admins, RfA, was founded on 14 June 2003 by Camembert. The first promotion via the system, that of Quercusrobur, occurred on the same day. Before the invention of RfA, admin promotions took place through mailing lists. The first discussion on was started by Tim Starling six days later on 19 June, which was a humorous discussion. Discussions similar to the ones we have today began soon after, with the first apparent one concerning . The first serious complaint about the process appears to have been made by Greenmountainboy on 8 January 2004, in a thread called "", in which he stated that RfA had turned into a place where everyone attacked each other. Most disagreed with the assertion.

Following RFA2011, the next comprehensive reform project was WP:RFA2013 in 2013. It consisted of a series of three RfCs, starting in late January and ending in early April. All proposals which survived to Round 3 failed. There have been no large-scale reform projects since.

Successful reforms to RFA include a number of unbundlings such as of Rollback in early 2008 and more recently the template editor userright.

Many editors agree that there is something wrong with RfA. Some users have explicitly stated that they are afraid of seeking adminship, for one reason or another. Most of the time, it seems to be related to alleged high standards or an unpleasant environment. However, different users have different ideas. Some users emphasize that we must fix the aforementioned high standards and/or hostile environment. Some point out that RfA could be easier to pass if it was not difficult to desysop troublesome admins. Others advocate unbundling the tools. And then comes the issue of finding solutions to these problems. Although there is admittedly very little precedent for success in RfA reform, as evidenced in the above section, the purpose of this project is to identify the problems with RfA and reach a solution as to how those problems can be fixed. Nothing will ever happen if we don't persistently try to fix the process; otherwise, we might as well shut down WT:RFA, since all discussion would be pointless.

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