Wikipedia:Administrators

Administrators assume these responsibilities as volunteers after undergoing a community review process. They do not act as employees of the . They are never required to use their tools, and must never use them to gain an advantage in a dispute in which they were involved. Administrators should not be confused with ("sysadmins").

Administrators have the technical ability to perform the following actions:

By convention, administrators normally take responsibility for judging the outcome of certain discussions, such as deletion discussions, move discussions, and move-review discussions, but other editors may close discussions in some cases (see non-admin closures).

In the very early days of , only Bomis employees were administrators, as the server password was required to make any administrative changes. The idea of an administrator role was proposed in late 2001 during the development of the first version of .Jimmy Wales directly appointed the first administrators in February 2002.

I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*.

I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of people who have been around for awhile sysops. I want to dispel the aura of "authority" around the position. It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone.

I don't like that there's the apparent feeling here that being granted sysop status is a really special thing.

Stated simply, while the correct use of the tools and appropriate conduct should be considered important, merely "being an administrator" should not be.

The RfA process allows other editors to get to know the candidate, and explore the candidate's involvement and background as an editor, conduct in discussions, and understanding of the role they are requesting, and to state if they support or oppose the request, along with their reasons and impressions of the candidate. An uninvolved bureaucrat then determines if there is consensus to approve the request. This determination is not based exclusively on the percentage of support, but in practice most RfAs above 75% pass. The community has determined that in general, RfAs between 65–75% support should be subject to the discretion of bureaucrats. (Therefore, it logically follows that almost all RfAs below 65% support will fail.)

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