Research:Wikipedia Administrator Recruitment, Retention, and Attrition/Administrator candidacy requirements
Below is a table summarizing various quantifiable, stated recommendations or requirements for prospective administrator candidates, across wikis with over 20 monthly active admins. This data comes from reading (in the source language, or via machine translation) various pages on advice for administrator candidates.
Wikis that seem to lack formal guidelines should not be understood to be automatically more lenient; they may simply prefer not to have explicit guidelines surrounding aspects such as account age or edit count. Additionally, every single one of these advice pages state that these are more predictors of successful candidates, but are not strictly necessary for a successful RFA. Conversely, a candidate may meet or exceed all of these requirements and still fail for many other reasons.
Among these advice pages, there were two universal factors that were considered necessary for a successful RFA. These are:
- The candidate needed to be known by the general wiki community, or at least the community of eligible voters
- The candidate needed to exhibit a willingness to engage in administrator work, or a history of engaging in administrator-like work, on that wiki
All of these guidelines spend much more time elaborating on important intangible qualities, such as willingness to cooperate, familarity with local policy, and so on, rather than these more concrete figures. Nevertheless, this allows us to make some basic comparative statements about candidacy across different wikis.
| Wiki | Candidate account age | Candidate article namespace edits | Other factors and notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| English Wikipedia | 6 months | 10000 edits | Has email, part of extended-confirmed user group |
| Spanish Wikipedia | 12 months | None stated | Has email |
| German Wikipedia | 24 months | 1000 edits | |
| Japanese Wikipedia | 4 months | 500 edits | At least 18 years old |
| French Wikipedia | 12 months | 3000 edits | |
| Russian Wikipedia | 3 months | 100 edits | |
| Chinese Wikipedia | 12 months | 3000 edits | Membership in patroller or rollbacker user groups, no blocks in the last year |
| Italian Wikipedia | None stated | None stated | Member of autopatrolled group; very few formal requirements |
| Portuguese Wikipedia | 12 months | 2000 edits | |
| Persian Wikipedia | 6 months | 1000 edits | Emphasis on candidates needing to show they've read the whole guide |
| Arabic Wikipedia | 12 months | 300 edits | |
| Polish Wikipedia | 3 months | 500 edits | Has email |
| Indonesian Wikipedia | 3 months | 500 edits | Has email, has a user page over 500 bytes, no blocks in the last 6 months |
| Dutch Wikipedia | 6 months | 1000 edits | Has email |
| Ukranian Wikipedia | 6 months | 2000 edits | At least 200 additional edits in a "service namespace" (e.g. Template, Wikipedia, Help, Module) |
| Hebrew Wikipedia | 9 months | 2000 edits | |
| Czech Wikipedia | 6 months | 250 edits | Has email |
| Swedish Wikipedia | None stated | None stated | |
| Finnish Wikipedia | "A few" months | None stated | |
| Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia | 4 months | 1000 edits | Has email, has a user page |
| Catalan Wikipedia | 9 months | 1000 edits | States that these requirements were explicitly removed, but they remain "as a guideline" |
The median candidate account age recommendation is 6 months. The median recommended article-namespace edit count is 1000 edits.
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