In October 2024, the firstadministrator elections were held as a trial process. The community voted on 32 candidates, 11 of whom were successful.

• October 8–14 –Call for candidates
• October 15–21 –SecurePoll setup phase
• October 22–24 –Discussion phase
• October 25–31 –SecurePoll voting phase
• November 1–5 – Scrutineering phase
• Results
• Debrief phase - to collect feedback
• Workshop phase - to draft mini RFCs
• Mini-RFC phase - many little RFCs to improve the process for a hypothetical next election
• Renewal RFC phase - one RFC to get permission to do additional election(s)

The trial election used theArbitration Committee Election suffrage requirements. To vote, an editor must have met the following criteria:

• created their account over 2 months before the election
• have 150 mainspace edits by 1 month before the election
• have 10 live edits in the year running up to 1 month before the election
• not be sitewide blocked during the election
• not be vanished
• not be a bot
• not have already voted with this or another account

The overall process lasted 10 days: an initial 3-day period for discussion and questions, and a 7-day period for a secret ballot vote. Election cycles were advertised in advance, including watchlist notices.Novem Linguae performed thetodo list.

Candidates signed up by a specified date prior to the discussion and questions period. Just like RFA, candidates could be nominated by other editors. During this phase and the SecurePoll setup phase, candidates and nominators could adjust their candidate subpage as they saw fit.

During this 3-day period, the community asked questions and raised issues, as well as providing positive feedback. Candidates were encouraged to participate in the discussion period, answering questions and responding to feedback.

During this discussion-only time, participants were discouraged from posting messages of support/opposition that lack points for discussion. This phase was for sharing thoughts on the candidate or any other topic that may relate to the candidate's applicability – not for indicating personal voting intentions.

Themonitors for this phase wereTheleekycauldron andPickersgill-Cunliffe. Discussion for all candidates can be found atWikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Discussion phase.

Once the discussion period is complete, a secret ballot was held for 7 days, usingSecurePoll. During this period, discussion was closed. The ballot contained multiple candidates; however, this was not a competitive election. Voters were asked to evaluate each candidate individually, and all candidates who met the pass threshold were selected to become administrators. Thus all, some, or even no candidates could have been selected.

After voting has ended, the election was scrutinised by three stewards whose home wiki isnot the English Wikipedia. They checked for any duplicate, ineligible, orsockpuppeteer votes, and struck them as necessary. Once scrutineering was complete, votes were tallied, results were announced, and new admins were granted administrative privileges. The pass threshold was 70% or greater. The vote tally was calculated by Support / (Support + Oppose) for each candidate. The scrutineers for the October 2024 election wereJohannnes89,EPIC, andYahya. The SecurePoll election clerk wasJSutherland (WMF). In the October 2024 administrator elections, scrutineering took 4 days.

The results of the October 2024 Administrator Elections are as follows:

659 votes were cast, of which 43 were determined to be duplicates, leading to a total of 616 valid votes.^{[note 1]}

1. EPIC (talk)19:23, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
2. —Yahya (talk •contribs.)19:25, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
3. --Johannnes89 (talk)22:50, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thenumber of requests for adminship (RFA) has declined from a peak of 920 in 2007 to just 36 in 2016, and has since averaged around 23 per year. This suggests problems with the RFA process, which might be mitigated with a different process, such as administrator elections. Ways that administrator elections might help include:

• Reducing contention via secret voting - Reduces the opportunity for contentious discussion amongst participants. For example, voters do not have to disclose their vote, nor give an explanation for it. This avoids unnecessary direct confrontation of opposers, or of the candidate.
• Shorter discussion period - The discussion period is limited to three days, instead of seven.
• No possibility of abureaucrat chat
• Many candidates - So less pressure on individual candidates.

The result of therequest for comment discussion regarding running a trial election wasThe community supports trying this proposal for 1 election, after which it will be reviewed in Phase II.While there are concerns regarding the implementation details of this proposal, given this is a trial run, there is sufficient support to run the election as written.

Accordingly, the trial election was held, with implementation details (such as scrutineering) worked out based on discussions on theAdmin Election talk page.

After the trial, further request for comment discussions were held to discuss how to proceed, thus allowing the community to alter the process if desired, or choose not to continue.

The trial election differed fromWP:RFA in several ways. Some of these aspects were unique to the trial, and werelater revised at RFC.

If you'd like to receive a user talk message about administrator election milestones, pleaseadd yourself to the mailing list.

Afterthe October 2024 trial election, a series ofRFCs wereworkshopped and thenopened for comment to gather community opinions on how the process should be fine-tuned in the future, if administrator elections are to happen again. The results from these RFCs were used as the basis for a proposal for running more admin elections. From the RFCs, the following conclusions were drawn:

• Pass percentages should remain at 70%.
• There should be no limit to the number of candidates in an election.
• Elections should be scrutineered by 3 English WikipediaCheckUsers.
• The main election page will link to acategory containing unofficial voter guides, and other election pages and talk pages may include direct links to voter guides. There will not be an "official" voter guide.
• Suffrage requirements will be the same as at RfA (ie. voters must beextended-confirmed, not blocked, and not a bot).
• Candidates will require a 20-support minimum in order to be successful.
• Candidates may nominate themselves only during a specified window of time.
• Candidates will be ordered alphabetically on the candidates page and in SecurePoll.
• The discussion phase will be 5 days long, prior to the voting phase.
• Unsuccessful candidates may reapply in future elections without restriction.
• Ideally, elections are to be held every 5 months, without a required minimum number of candidates.

Further details can be found on theRFC page.

• Proposals and RFCs
  • Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2021 review/Proposals/Admin elections – detailed proposal
  • Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2021 review/Proposals § Closed: 8B Admin elections – no consensus for admin elections
  • Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2024 review/Phase I § Proposal 13: Admin elections – consensus for a trial admin election
• October 2024 election
  • phab:T371454 – ticket to coordinate with WMF Trust & Safety to set up SecurePoll
  • meta:Steward requests/Miscellaneous § Scrutineering of enwiki admin election in late October – ticket to coordinate with stewards for scrutineering
  • Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Subpages
  • Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Detailed schedule

• Wikipedia administrator elections