Wikipedia:Administrator elections/July 2025
Current status
- The discussion phase is now open for 5 days. Community members are welcome to ask questions and discuss the candidates on their own subpages.
- Next up: Discussion will close, and the July 2025 elections will open for voting on 00:00, 23 July 2025 (UTC).
- Call for candidates (July 9–15)
- Discussion phase (July 18–22)
- Voting phase (July 23–29)
The second English Wikipedia administrator elections are currently being held in July 2025. For more general information on administrator elections, visit Wikipedia:Administrator elections.
Schedule
[edit]All times are in UTC. Start and end dates below include the entire day. So for example, if the Call for Candidates ends on July 15, then you have until July 15 at 23:59:59 UTC to sign up to be a candidate.
- Create electionclerk user group on English Wikipedia
- Election prep: pick election clerk(s), pick scrutineers, run some test elections, set dates, copy subpages.
- July 9–15 – Call for candidates
- July 16–17 – Housekeeping phase
- July 18–22 – Discussion phase (we are here)
- July 23–29 – SecurePoll voting phase
- July 30–c. Aug 3 – Scrutineering phase
- Results
- Debrief phase
- RFC workshop phase
- RFC phase
- 5 months after voting phase - Third election
Eligibility
[edit]Candidate eligibility
[edit]The only formal prerequisite for adminship is having an extended confirmed account on Wikipedia (which typically means 500 edits and 30 days of experience).[1] To learn about community expectations for RfA candidates, please review past successful and unsuccessful RfAs. You may also review past optional RfA candidate polls or initiate one if you are interested.
Voter eligibility
[edit]Administrator elections use the RfA suffrage requirements. To vote, an editor must:
- have an extended confirmed account (which typically means 500 edits and 30 days of experience)
- not be sitewide blocked
- not be a bot
These criteria will be programmed into the SecurePoll software and automatically checked. Additionally, scrutineers will manually remove any duplicate votes, sockpuppet votes, and vanished account votes.
Procedure
[edit]Administrator elections will be held approximately every 5 months. Excluding the pre-election windows for candidate nominations and ballot setup, the process lasts 12 days: a 5-day period for discussion and questions, followed by a 7-day period for a secret ballot vote. Election cycles and the timeframes for each window and period will be advertised in advance, including by watchlist notices.
Call for candidates
[edit]Candidates may only sign up during a nominations window to be specified for each election. Just like RfA, candidates may either self-nominate or be nominated by other editors with the candidate's consent. Only candidates who accept their nomination will proceed to the next period. Before the discussion period begins, candidates and nominators may adjust their candidate subpage as they see fit. Candidates will be listed in alphabetical order on election pages.
Discussion phase
[edit]During the 5-day discussion period, the community can ask questions, raise issues, and provide positive feedback. Candidates are encouraged to participate in the discussion period by answering questions.
Participants are discouraged from posting messages of support/opposition that lack points for discussion. This phase is for sharing thoughts on the candidate or any other topic that may relate to the candidate's suitability for adminship – not for indicating personal voting intentions.
Similar to RfA, the discussion phase will have monitors who are administrators who will moderate any comments that are too rude, and may refactor and reorganize comments if they get disorganized. The monitors for this election are ThadeusOfNazereth and Risker.
Voting phase
[edit]Once the discussion period ends, voting is open for 7 days by secret ballot (SecurePoll). During this period, discussion is closed, and the page will be marked with a template indicating that discussion is closed. Candidates may be asked direct questions on their user talk pages, but they are not expected to watch their discussion page, nor the election page for the full period, to allow them a respite from community vetting.
The ballot may contain multiple candidates; however, this is not a competitive election. Voters are asked to evaluate each candidate individually, and all candidates who meet the pass threshold are selected to become administrators. Thus all, some, or even no candidates may be selected. Candidates will be listed in alphabetical order.
For the first time, SecurePoll will be set up locally on English Wikipedia rather than asking the Wikimedia Foundation to set it up on vote.wikimedia.org. This will enable more elections per year. A few election clerks will be appointed to handle configuring the election in SecurePoll. The main election clerk for this election is Novem Linguae, and the backup clerk Robertsky will also be granted access and a copy of the encryption key.
What data does SecurePoll collect?
[edit]To prevent sockpuppetry, SecurePoll logs each voter's IP address, user agent, and X-Forwarded-For header. This data is only viewable by this particular election's 3 scrutineers and 2 backup scrutineers (see next section), who are English Wikipedia CheckUsers. CheckUsers are trusted by the English Wikipedia community to keep editor personal information private, have been vetted by the Arbitration Committee, and have signed a legally binding non-disclosure agreement that is on file with the Wikimedia Foundation. Voter personal data is retained until 60 days after the election ends, when it is automatically deleted. The fact that you voted and what date and time you voted will be displayed publicly. Who you voted for is encrypted and the software keeps it completely confidential, even to election clerks and scrutineers. The software will decrypt the votes and add them together in one of the final steps, and only these aggregated results will ever be displayed to anyone or posted publicly. No one can view the totals during the election, only at the very end once the "tally" button is pressed and decryption occurs.
Tallying and results
[edit]After voting has ended, the election will be scrutinised by three English Wikipedia CheckUsers.[2] Stewards are also allowed to scrutineer,[2] but require special permission from the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, so for this reason and to not impose on their time, English Wikipedia CheckUsers are preferred.
Scrutineers will check for any duplicate, ineligible, or sockpuppeteer votes, and strike them as necessary. Once scrutineering is complete, votes are tallied, results are announced, and new admins are granted administrative privileges. To be successful, a candidate must receive a support percentage of 70% or more and a quorum of at least 20 support votes. The vote tally is calculated by Support / (Support + Oppose) for each candidate.
Scrutineering takes a few days or weeks. In the October 2024 administrator elections, scrutineering took 4 days. Successful candidates will be given the administrator permission by a bureaucrat. Unsuccessful candidates may run in a future administrator election or request for adminship – there are no restrictions on the number of times you can run.
The 3 scrutineers for this election are RoySmith, Zzuuzz, and Dreamy Jazz. If any scrutineers are unavailable and drop out, Barkeep49 has volunteered as an alternate. Alternates will be granted full access to SecurePoll.
Please watchlist the page Wikipedia:Administrator elections/July 2025/Results to see when the results are posted.
Withdrawing
[edit]If a candidate wants to withdraw from the election before the discussion period, they should remove themselves from the candidate list (without adding themselves to the withdrawn list) and nominate their candidate subpage for speedy deletion. They will not be listed as a candidate during the SecurePoll vote.
If a candidate wishes to withdraw during the discussion period or voting period, they should edit the list of candidates to move themselves to the withdrawn section. For transparency, their candidate subpage shall not be deleted and will remain transcluded on the discussion period page. The candidate subpage will be closed using a template such as {{Archive top}} to stop further discussion. An attempt will be made to remove the candidate from the SecurePoll ballot, but this is not guaranteed. If the candidate ends up on the SecurePoll ballot, whatever result they achieve will be considered invalid, and election organizers will attempt to keep the result unpublished.
Voter guides
[edit]A list of unofficial voter guides may be found at Category:Wikipedia administrator elections July 2025 voter guides. Voter guides may be mentioned in passing and directly linked from candidate pages and talk pages. There will be no official voter guide.
Newsletter
[edit]If you'd like to receive a user talk message when important administrator election events occur, such as when a date is chosen and when the Call for Candidates phase opens, please add yourself to the mailing list.