This is an article about Wikipedia administrators. For Wikipedia's policy page on administrators, see Wikipedia:Administrators.
Icon that typically represents administrators on WikipediaDiscussion with Wikipedia Administrators in the Wiki Indaba 2023 conference in Agadir, Morocco.
On Wikipedia, trusted users may be appointed as administrators (also referred to as admins, sysops or janitors),[1]: 327 following a successful request for adminship. Currently, there are 860 administrators on the English Wikipedia.[2] Administrators have additional technical privileges compared with other editors, such as being able to protect and delete pages and being able to block users from editing pages.
On Wikipedia, becoming an administrator is often referred to as "being given [or taking up] the mop",[2] a term which has also been used elsewhere.[3] In 2006, The New York Times reported that administrators on Wikipedia, of whom there were then about 1,000, were "geographically diverse".[4] In July 2012, it was widely reported that Wikipedia was "running out of administrators", because in 2005 and 2006, 40 to 50 people were often appointed administrators each month, but in the first half of 2012, only nine in total were appointed.[5][6] However, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder, denied that this was a crisis or that Wikipedia was running out of admins, saying, "The number of admins has been stable for about two years, there's really nothing going on."[7] Wales had previously (in a message sent to the English Wikipedia mailing list on February 11, 2003) stated that being an admin is "not a big deal", and that "It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone."[8]
In his 2008 book Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, John Broughton states that while many people think of administrators on Wikipedia as judges, that is not the purpose of the role.[9] Instead, he says, admins usually "delete pages" and "protect pages involved in edit wars".[9] Wikipedia administrators are not employees or agents of the Wikimedia Foundation.[10]
^Ayers, Phoebe; Matthews, Charles; Yates, Ben (2008). How Wikipedia Works. No Starch Press. ISBN 978-1-59327-176-3.
^ ab"Wikipedia:Administrators". Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 29 July 2015.
^Burke, Moira; Kraut, Robert (April 2008). Taking Up the Mop: Identifying Future Wikipedia Administrators. CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 3441–3446. doi:10.1145/1358628.1358871. ISBN 978-1-60558-012-8. S2CID 5868576.
^Hafner, Katie (17 June 2006). "Growing Wikipedia Refines Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 January 2014.
^Cite error: The named reference Atlantic was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Further coverage:
Steadman, Ian (19 July 2012). "Wikipedia might be running out of administrators, figures show". Wired. Archived from the original on October 6, 2014. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
Lo Wang, Hansi (19 July 2012). "As Wikipedia Gets Pickier, Editors Become Harder To Find". NPR. Retrieved 29 November 2014.
^Lee, Dave (18 July 2012). "Jimmy Wales denies Wikipedia admin recruitment crisis". BBC News. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
^Wales, Jimmy (11 February 2003). "Sysop Status". EN-I Wikimedia Mailing List. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
^ abBroughton, John (2008). Wikipedia – The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media. p. 199.
^Kosseff, Jeff (April 15, 2019). The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet. Cornell University Press. ISBN 9781501735790.
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