Wikipedia:Administrators' best practices

Wikipedia administrators are editors with specific permissions to perform various administrative tasks, sometimes referred to as sysops, the traditional term for computer bulletin board administrators. There are three primary tools that administrators can use to affect the day-to-day editing of non-administrators: preventing user write access to certain pages (page protection), preventing user read access to certain pages (page deletion), and preventing user write access to nearly every page on Wikipedia (blocking).

This best practices guide is a collection of opinions and is not binding. It is based on the perspective of experienced users regarding how administrators can, intentionally or unintentionally, upset users without administrative privileges.

Evolving role
Allowing anyone to edit Wikipedia's pages is a bold idea with obvious security issues. Accordingly, certain access rights are restricted to manage vandalism, trolling, and other types of disruptive editing whether done in good faith or bad. Initially, administrative privileges were granted to Wikipedia editors who had been around long enough to demonstrate they weren't obviously destructive; this philosophy is still recorded in the history of the administrative corps and its development.

As the community grew in size and everyone no longer knew each other, a procedure was developed to formalize ways in which users could convince the community that they were trustworthy. The Request for Adminship process is currently considered by many to be exhausting and aggravating, with a minimum standard of approximately 75 to 80% support required to grant administrative privileges. Having survived the intense scrutiny of this rigorous process, the community often views administrators as more than just holders of administrative tools, but also as authority figures with strong community support. For example, the community typically expects controversial discussions to be evaluated for consensus by an administrator; attempts by non-admins to step in are usually thwarted by discussion participants. (Admins who participate in said discussions may not close them themselves, and their opinions are weighed on the same basis as any other participant.)

As a result, in practice administrators are the face of authority on Wikipedia: they enforce rules, take measures to prevent further disruption (in the form of blocks and bans), declare what the status quo is, and are generally deferred to, giving them a status with more protection than other users. Administrators are less likely to be subject to restrictions on editing, are rarely blocked by fellow administrators (and when they are, it may create WP:DRAMA). There is currently no way for the community to remove administrative rights from a user except by appeal to the arbitration committee, a lengthy and difficult process that often requires the leadership of experienced editors if one hopes to make any headway.

If you are one of the current administrators of the English Wikipedia, you have been elected for life to a position where you can influence the direction of this project through your actions, or lack thereof. Consider, then, how non-admins are affected by how you wield your administrative tools.

Higher standards
Due to the pseudonymity afforded in internet culture and at Wikipedia in particular, mean and nasty behavior can be more pronounced than the common pleasant exchanges of social niceties in real life. In recognition of this issue, Wikipedia policy has tried to incorporate civility as a necessary feature of activity at this website, enshrining it as a foundational principle. Users who engage in personal attacks against other users are considered in violation of this code of ethics, the details of which have caused never-ending controversy. The result of this code is that Wikipedians tend to write commentary about other users in veiled or vague terms, often never coming right out and declaring what they think of their adversaries lest they be accused of violating these core precepts. The price paid for this principle, intended to keep conversations running smoothly, is passive-aggressive behaviour, and, ironically, escalating conflicts.

Administrators are often claimed to be held to a higher standard of civility than other users. Nonetheless, at times administrators succumb to the temptation of plainly describing their adversaries or identifying them based on key characteristics as a means to bring clarity to disputes. Due to the perceived authority they exert, administrators are sometimes more protected from negative consequences (such as community sanction) for behaving this way, compared with non-admins. Accordingly, it is best practice to be aware of this imbalance and to avoid taking advantage of it when possible. In many cases, erring on the side of self-censorship is preferable to reproving non-admins for their shortcomings. Recognize that when others fail to be civil, a milder reproach and a gentle touch may yield a more harmonious result.

Administrator powers most likely to cause frustration
When administrators use the following three tools, they run the risk of upsetting users:


 * Page protection
 * Deleting certain pages
 * Blocks

Additionally, bans imposed by administrators are also a source of frustration.

Page protection
Administrators may use page protection to stop an edit war or prevent unwanted edits (such as vandalism). There are various levels of page protection that are possible, ranging from preventing edits from non-logged in users to preventing all edits from non-administrators (effectively changing the write permissions for a given page). The following scenarios can upset users: WP:WRONGVERSION: When the page is protected in a form that is not preferred by the user. Administrators may do this innocently to stop an ongoing dispute between parties, such as when responding to a formal request for page protection. Nevertheless, it is important to understand that one of the aggrieved parties will not see it that way, as the edit war has been effectively resolved for the period of protection in favour of the last edit, regardless of your intention. Experienced Wikipedians know that this is a good way to achieve a victory in their dispute, and what often occurs is the "winning" side thanks and praises the administrator while the "losing" side decides that they have a new enemy. If you engage with the two sides on these terms, accepting plaudits from one side and aggressively reacting to the other, you open yourself up for future problems with the involved editors. It should be noted that the community-implemented policy on this subject generally prevents admins from choosing one version over the other, so unless that policy is altered by the community this is unlikely to change.

Cutting off discussion: Ironically, sometimes when a page is protected to allow for a consensus to be built, discussion on the talk page ceases. Experienced users know that edit warring without discussion can lead to harsher disciplinary action, and so are motivated to discuss the dispute. Once the page is protected, as there are no longer any edits to defend or oppose, discussion ceases. Thus page protection can simply postpone resolving the conflict, and the page can lurch between one preferred version and another without a clear solution. It is best practice to look for signs of this behaviour. If requests for page protection are being used to game the consensus process, then it may not be a good idea to protect the page. When administrators protect a page, they should include a warning note on the talk page stating if edit warring starts resumes after a protection period, the most likely administrative response is to escalate to blocking the involved accounts.

Indefinite protection: In almost all cases it is not appropriate to indefinitely implement full protection on a content page. Accordingly, if you decide to indefinitely protect a page that has been subject to edit warring, expect quite a bit of pushback, unless there are admins ready to respond in a timely manner to edit requests. Note that imposing a lockdown will result in some unhappy editors who consider that a power hierarchy has been imposed, only allowing a privileged class to make any edits. If you are considering indefinite protection to stop an edit war, it is best practice to have a discussion about it with the people involved and get some outside opinions.

Deletion
Most of the time, deletion happens in the context of well-defined rules such as speedy deletion, proposed deletion, or articles/miscellany/categories deletion discussions. In these scenarios, the administrator's job is just to interpret the apparent consensus of the discussion and act accordingly, keeping or deleting the article as appropriate. In all of these scenarios there are appeals processes, starting with just asking the admin, which is usually in the case of proposed deletion as they are usually required to simply restore it, file a request at WP:REFUND for many types of speedy deletion, or proceed to deletion review if it is believed the admin incorrectly gauged consensus in a deletion discussion.

Blocks
No-one likes to be blocked. For the user used to being able to interact with the "encyclopedia that anybody can edit", it is an extremely disempowering feeling to realize that almost any other person in the world has the permissions to change the content on Wikipedia, but you do not.

The first impulse for many users who have been used to using Wikipedia freely upon being blocked is to look for a way around it. Users who are unaware how blocking works may try logging out and find that they are also auto-blocked on their IP to prevent exactly that, which can also be unsettling. Trying to get unblocked through the methods outlined at the page dedicated to that sort of thing can be very confusing for users not intimately familiar with Wikipedia policy, its internal culture, and template markup used to make on-wiki requests.

Blocking should be considered a last resort for any user. The problem is that in normal vandal patrol and in many cases of so-called "unambiguous" disruption, revert, block, ignore is the standard operating procedure. It is important to note that this techniques is only intended to be used on vandals and trolls, and never applied to a good-faith user who is just making some questionable, but not malicious edits. From the perspective of the poor sap being blocked, you've been accused, tried, convicted, and sentenced for a violation of some rule on Wikipedia and the most straightforward avenue of appeal, discussing the situation with the administrator who blocked you, is simply not happening: you can't just hop over to the administrator's user talk page and leave a message. All that is left is a cry for help from your own user talk page, and hopefully the administrator is listening and has a heart, but this is often not the case. It should be noted that the blocking policy actually encourages review of block appeals by a second admin and not the one who placed the block. (Forget IRC appeals, they might as well be scrapped from the instruction page and UTRS really only works for special long-term indefinite block situations and will take a long time to work through the system in most cases). It is startling how often a blocking administrator will block and then sign-off for a time leaving other administrators to deal with the unblock request and try to figure out what went on without, hopefully, starting some sort of wheel war.

An administrator, starting a discussion on a user talk page that says, "Hey, I'm going to block you if you keep doing this or that" is a technique that seems to be rarely employed on Wikipedia. That's something that should change. At the very least, you have given the user a chance to alter their behavior, or explain why they do not believe they are violating the rule you think they are violating. Although convenient, simply templating the users talk with any of those catch-all templates can be significantly less effective at opening a useful discussion if you're planning to block them. Any user can slap a template on another user's talk page, and this is often done as a means to escalate disputes. It is not at all clear from the perspective of a normal user when a template is meant to indicate simply a barb and when it is a serious threat. It's a lot easier to understand what's going on if an administrator who has the power to block says that they will block if a certain action continues to happen.

At the end of the day, the whole point of blocks is to stop problematic editor behavior. It's not to show the user that they were wrong. It's not to get them to change their minds. It's not to force them to change their personality. A user should only be blocked when they've been explicitly told not to do something and they continue to do it. Please don't make the assumption, written or unwritten, that because the user has been around for a long time, they should "know better". Such commentary is demeaning and assumes that your interpretation of Wikipedia's rules is the only one that is correct. It is possible that you are wrong, or that the user was genuinely unaware of the rule or policy being violated. There are an awful lot of them after all, so exercise a little humility and acknowledge that your use of admin tools may not be infallible. If the user agrees to stop the behavior for which they were blocked, and you have no reason to believe that they are being untruthful in their agreement, please unblock them. Dispense with the extended lectures, it's bad enough being blocked without having to read some treatise on right and proper behavior from the pseudonymity of another Wikipedia account.

It would be instructive for administrators to experience what it is like to be blocked before becoming administrators, in much the same way that it is a good idea for police officers to experience what it is like to be tased before being issued a taser.

Bans
One of the more authoritative (non-tool-based) techniques employed by the Wikipedia power structure is the use of bans from certain Wikipedia pages or activities. (Note that this is different from complete bans from the site). These come in many forms, and typically administrators are only allowed to impose them in the instance of discretionary sanctions. Imposition of these bans, however, tend to be done rather haphazardly. For example, topic bans have been enacted as "broadly construed", but this requires a kind of judgment as what exactly is meant by "broadly construed". Ideally, a ban would be enacted in such a way so that a list of banned articles would be given, but, of course, typically the ban is being enacted against an editor who is close to an expert in the peculiar ins-and-outs of the particular subject while the banning authority is likely a person or a group of people uninvolved in the problem. Thus, the banned person will skirt around the edges of the topic ban while the banned person's adversaries are likely to cry foul to the powers that be, and it is difficult to figure out when this behavior is due to subject-matter interest or malice. Interaction bans are even worse and, when enacted, tend to cause ridiculous turf wars between the two users affected. Thus, bans tend to act as a kind of honeypot for encouraging bad behavior on pages that appear to many to be unrelated but become ever-growing extensions of the dispute. Why shouldn't that be the case, after all? Most of the time, these bans are enacted because the user is passionately involved in a subject. Telling them to "stop" is about as effective as telling a junkie to "Just Say No", but the unfortunate fact is that some users simply can't stay away from areas where they have repeatedly had or caused trouble. Nobody enjoys having to pull two users apart as if they were children on a playground.

As is hinted at above, these interaction or topic bans are usually instituted by the community, and admins are expected to interpret and enforce them. The problem is that they are often a bit vague, leaving considerable leeway in interpreting the limits. And they can also be quite broad, so in case like "articles related to politics in the United States" compiling a list of all affected articles is simply not helpful or feasible. Nevertheless, the enforcing admin should endeavor in good faith to work with the banned user and the community that imposed it to make the limitations as clear as possible, and to accept that the banned user may make an honest mistake and cross the line without realizing it.

Alternatives to using admin power
Hopefully, you've come to terms with the idea that as an administrator, you are in a position of authority here at Wikipedia. As a person in authority, the temptation is to act like an authoritarian. Please consider some of the following techniques instead:

De-escalation. Typically at Wikipedia conflicts tend to escalate and become more and more heated and anger-inducing until regrettable incidents occur. Recognizing that this is occurring is certainly a useful administrator skill, but, more than this, seeing what responses may calm such situations is an undervalued trait at Wikipedia. The typical appeals to the dispute resolution processes are discussed elsewhere (and are not without their own critiques), so rather than appeal to those canards, here are a few resources about de-escalation from outside sources that, at least in part, address personal interactions specifically: NASW, AAEP, SJSU

Discussion. Startlingly, many administrators do not start discussions with users against whom they act as administrators. Even when there is attempted engagement, too often typical administrator response on a user talk page is a litany of didactic prose (often using a template) with almost no questions. Understand that you were put in the position of administrator because you were perceived to have good judgement, not because you are an infallible reader of a persons intentions drawn just from words on a screen. Asking questions about what the user is doing and why is a good way to get the user to explain what they were doing and find out if they understand the concerns you have. If you want a user to do something, try explicitly asking them to do it before using any tools.

Ask for outside opinions. Unsure about an action? Feeling a little upset? Don't like it that a user has questioned your judgement? Take a step back and see if maybe there are other administrators who can help you out. There are plenty of noticeboards you can post to if something seems problematic.

Periodic voluntary reconfirmation. Maybe you hated your WP:RfA and don't want to go through anything like it again. From the perspective of non-admin users, however, the admin-for-life system on Wikipedia can seem problematic. Why not start an administrative review discussion, which is a non-binding way to solicit feedback on your overall performance as an admin.