Admin milestones reached, process debated
New requests for adminship resulted in two landmarks last week, as Wikipedia reached a total of 500 administrators and one old/new admin set a record for the number of people supporting his nomination. Meanwhile, an ongoing discussion on the wikiEN-l mailing list debated whether the process was working adequately.
A record was broken on 27 June, when Ta bu shi da yu became an administrator. He received 111 support votes, beating the previous record of 109 support votes held by User:Bishonen (see archived story).
This was his third request for adminship, and he also joins the small number of admins who have voluntarily surrendered their admin privileges and later reapplied. His initial nomination in October 2004 succeeded with the substantial achievement of 57 support votes. However, Ta bu shi da yu left Wikipedia for a while in March and asked for his admin status to be removed, although he still found it difficult to stay away.
Upon returning to greater activity, Ta bu shi da yu requested adminship again, and appeared to be on the way to smashing the record already on that occasion. However, a prank on Dalek, the featured article appearing on the Main Page, turned a number of people to oppose and Ta bu shi da yu chose to withdraw that request.
Not counting the Election Officials, who were temporarily made administrators for the purposes of the Board of Trustees election, Wikipedia picked up its 500th admin on Sunday when Hedley was promoted. Other users receiving administrator status during the past week included Willmcw, Y0u, FCYTravis, Bratsche, Allen3, R3m0t, Mzajac and Spangineer.