Admin activity review

In a request for comments from April–June 2013 it was decided to establish, for administrators and other advanced right holders, a maximum inactivity time without community review of two years.

Explanation

A steward-conducted review of the activity of bureaucrats and administrators on all wikis (concerning both editing and administrative actions) had shown that there are significant numbers of bureaucrats and administrators

• who have never used their rights,
• who may have used their rights in the past, but are no longer active on the wiki where they maintain such rights.

Policy

1. The maximum time period of inactivity without community review for holders of advanced administrative rights should be two years.
   For clarity, holders of advanced administrative rights in this document are defined as

   • administrators
   • interface administrators
   • bureaucrats
   • oversight
   • checkusers
   • stewards
2. Inactivity for this case is defined as zero edits and zero administrative actions on the wiki where the rights are maintained.
3. Stewards will undertake a regular audit of the activity levels of advanced permissions holders.
   The audit will either be an annual or semi-annual process, according to the decisions of each current set of stewards.
   This review process will examine all public wikis. However, wikis where stewards will not perform notifications nor removal actions include:

   • wikis with an active Arbitration Committee, e.g. English Wikipedia, as such projects can decide about their inactivity removals;
   • wikis with currently active review processes, such as Commons Wiki;
   • special wikis designated by the Wikimedia Foundation, including private wikis, fishbowl wikis and wikis operated by Wikimedia chapters.
4. The following outlines the procedure for contacting inactive rights holders, the expected response from these rights holders on their respective wikis, and the process for removal of rights.
   On wikis where no formal advanced rights review process exists locally, the stewards or their delegates will:

   1. notify those advanced rights holders who have exceeded the maximum allowed time period for inactivity. Such a notification (notice of maximum inactivity) will be sent as a message to the user's talk page on the wiki where they hold their respective rights.
   2. The notified users should then post information to the local community about the notice of maximum inactivity they received from the stewards in order to discuss the matter. If the community then decides to manage these inactive advanced administrative rights holders on their own, they should contact the stewards at the stewards' noticeboard, where the messaged user could provide evidence to the stewards about the local community's decision.
   3. If the stewards do not receive a suitable reply as outlined above after approximately one month, they will evaluate the responses and decide whether to refer the management decisions back to the local communities for comment and review, or to remove the advanced administrative rights from the inactive user. The aim of this process is ultimately to leave each decision to local communities if there are any, which will be upheld and supported by the stewards.

Please note

1. Some WMF communities already have processes to review holders of advanced administrative rights. Examples of such processes currently in use are:
   • minimum activity levels by number of edits or administrative actions;
   • maximum inactivity by time period;
   • a recall process;
   • a confirmation process.
2. Most of these wikis with such processes also use an approximately twelve-month time period as part of the processes for reviewing activity levels of advanced administrative rights holders.
3. This policy does not override the authority of any currently existing review processes of any communities, including any such more restrictive systems currently used by the communities. For example, stewards are currently confirmed on an annual basis by the global Wikimedia Foundation community; whereas checkusers and oversighters are currently subject to a higher standard of inactivity policies.