Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-09-26/News and notes

Encouraging news from the RfA review, including admin elections being set to start trials in October

Soni, the author of this story, was active in drafting the current reform proposals for the Requests for adminship process.

As part of WP:RFA2024, multiple RfA reform attempts have completed trials or are currently under review: you can read previous coverage on the matter by The Signpost in the 16 May issue.

There has already been consensus to add a reminder of RfA civility norms to WP:RFA, as well as limit suffrage to only extended-confirmed voters and formally require all nominees to also be extended-confirmed. All of these proposals were implemented in the last few months.

The "discussion-only period" trial has come to an end this month, having converted five different RfAs (non SNOW-closed) to have "discussion only" for the first two days out of the seven-day period. After this initial trial, Phase II discussions are ongoing to determine if this proposal will become permanent.

As per the outcome of the related Phase II discussion, admins can now designate themselves as monitors for RfAs, subject to minimum expectations for their conduct during the whole process. The full list can be found at WP:MONITOR. This proposal is intended to improve enforcement of civility guidelines during RfAs.

Phase II for the administrator recall proposal has also recently finished, having waited for a closer for several months. It will allow a community-initiated path to de-adminship by requiring certain admins to submit and pass their RfA again. Further discussion is ongoing on the next steps for this process.

Finally, the Admin Elections procedure is expected to trial in October: it will be a one-time trial to allow an alternate path to adminship, parallel to RfA. Candidates can sign up from 8 to 14 October, before entering a discussion period from 22 to 24 October, which will then be followed by a SecurePoll private voting session from 25 to 31 October. – S

U4C elections end with just one new member seated

The special elections for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) concluded earlier this month, with the election of just one candidate. With 613 votes cast between the 18 eligible candidates, only Ajraddatz (for the North America seat) achieved the 60% support-to-support+oppose ratio required. This gives the U4C just enough members (8 out of 16 seats) to establish their quorum, though it remains to be seen how U4C will handle inactive members.

The committee was set up primarily to deal with larger-scale disputes within smaller Wikis and to enforce the Universal Code of Conduct across the various projects; they are expected to begin hearing cases shortly. Further information can be found on the U4C announcements page.

The full results of the U4C elections can be viewed here. This cycle had already been covered in the 22 July issue of The Signpost. – S

The WMF releases two new bulletins for August and September

The Wikimedia Foundation published their bulletins for late August and early September. Among other news, they covered a public survey intended to better understand WikiProjects, the recent disbandment of the MCDC and the WMF Board of Trustees election, which is currently in its scrutiny phase.

It was also mentioned that the WMF will briefly switch the traffic between its data centers for maintenance purposes on 25 September, starting at 15:00 UTC. A banner will be displayed on all Wikis 30 minutes before the start of the operation, during which users will be able to read, but not edit, the sites for up to an hour. More information on the server switch can be found here.

Editors may also be interested in testing for the Charts Extension and the Alt Text experiment on the iOS app, the codified new API policy, or the WMF's newest update on Movement Strategy Grants (Spoilers: it focuses on Hubs). – S, O