Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-10-03/Features and admins

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< Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost | 2005-10-03

Technical glitch delays admin promotions

By Zscout370 and Michael Snow, 3 October 2005

The creation of new Wikipedia administrators was delayed last week as technical problems left bureaucrats unable to promote new candidates. The Special:Makesysop function, which is used to make the change, was deactivated for a few days. Ultimately, ten new admins were promoted after this was corrected. Meanwhile, six articles, one list and three pictures gained featured status.

Makesysop glitch

Tim Starling reported on Thursday that developer Domas Mituzas had disabled the function temporarily to deal with a technical issue. When it was restored, the software reverted to a default setting in which bureaucrats have unrestricted ability to change user rights (currently they only handle the creation of admins as well as username change requests). Thus it had to be disabled again until this could be corrected.

Because this left bureaucrats unable to act on new requests for adminship, the possibility of suspending nominations was discussed. However, Starling restored the feature to normal operations on Saturday. Once this was confirmed by the bureaucrats, Nichalp took care of the backlog by promoting nine new administrators en masse.

Meanwhile, the adminship process continues to be tweaked, as the instructions for nominations have been changed. The instructions now call for the candidate, if nominated by someone else to accept the nomination and answer the standard questions before any discussion starts. This is done by having the nomination subpage created first, but not adding it to the Requests for adminship page until the initial steps are completed.