User:Shalom Yechiel/Drafts and archives/Gazimoff's RFA Review

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A Review of the Requests for Adminship Process
Overview Question Phase Reflect Recommend Collate Present
The Review Process
Methodology - Discussion Requests for Adminship

[edit] Questions

When thinking about the adminship process, what are your thoughts and opinions about the following areas:

1. Candidate selection (inviting someone to stand as a candidate)

   I look for candidates with experience both editing the encyclopedia and doing admin tasks. I just left a note for User:Steve Crossin offering to nominate him, but someone else has already offered. I have nominated a few other users: Haemo, Fabrictramp, Bearian, and Nat. I also wrote a co-nom for Soumyasch. See my draft subpages.

2. Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)

   I won't penalize a good candidate for doing admin coaching, but I think it is mostly a waste of effort. The way to learn how to do admin tasks is to do them: WP:AFD, WP:AFC, recent-changes patrol, new-page patrol, noticeboards, etc. I guess some people who wish to become admins don't know where to begin, so a brief overview of the admin universe can help them begin. After that, from my experience, I learned what to do mostly by trial and error.

3. Nomination, co-nomination and self-nomination (introducing the candidate)

   Nominations should emphasize the candidate's strengths and qualifications. No matter how well-known a candidate may be in the community, some people won't know him or her, and everyone won't know some of the articles they work on behind the scenes. In one to three paragraphs, a summary of highlights is extremely valuable, and if done properly it can save me the trouble of reading further, though I may decide to investigate anyway. I think self-noms are a bad idea, though I won't oppose solely for that reason. First, many self-noms are WP:NOTNOW cases that could be prevented from taking flight, though obviously an equally uninformed newbie might nominate his friend and produce a premature RFA. Second, the opposition to self-noms has itself become a distraction, one which could be avoided if self-noms simply stopped happening. Third, it is advisable for a candidate to seek a nomination just as a sanity check to ensure that someone else supports their candidacy. Of course, even three nominations will not prevent an RFA from going haywire, but with no nominations a bad result is more likely.

4. Advertising and canvassing

   The current system works fine: put up the RFA template on your userpage but don't go further. Canvassing to oppose RFAs is a touchy issue. Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Number 57 raised the ambiguities in policy. I don't think DLand did anything wrong, but I understand why people perceived his messages to Wikiproject colleagues as trying to sink Number 57's RFA. My rule of thumb is: one or two messages to friends is okay; three or more is problematic. In a sense, letting a clearly interested person know about an RFA is no worse than if that person preemptively watchlisted the RFA page, as long as it's a personal message and not widespread spamming of talk pages or email inboxes.

5. Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)

   Keep the questions relevant to that specific candidate. I do not support asking "What is the difference between a block and a ban" to every candidate. Most admins really don't need to know that, and for situations where it arises, they can look up the policy. There are so many policies it is impossible for every admin to know the current version of all of them. I do miss the days where admins were encouraged to read the how-to guide: this is a valuable resource that has fallen into disuse. Questions about the candidate's past conduct are entirely acceptable, and questions about hypothetical situations ("How would you close this AFD?") are tolerable within reason.

6. Election (including providing reasons for support/oppose)

   This is working. Support votes don't need a reason; oppose votes do. This makes all the sense in the world to me. The result is that most discussion about possible problems takes place in the oppose section. If I arrive at an RFA vote where there are many opposes, and I wish to support, I will usually say why the oppose rationales don't bother me.

7. Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)

   What about it? Candidate withdrawals are fine. I withdrew from my first two RFAs. The third was withdrawn by a bureaucrat when it was clearly failing, and bureaucrat intervention in similar situations is appropriate though not necessary.

8. Declaration (the bureaucrat closing the application. Also includes WP:NOTNOW closes)

   The current system is working. Asking the bureaucrat to explain every single RFA decision is wasting time. Asking them to explain a particular controversial decision is entirely expected.

9. Training (use of New Admin School, other post-election training)

   Not being an admin, I have no opinion. I assume that these resources are not used much; any admin who needs help on a particular issue posts to the appropriate noticeboard and receives help.

10. Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)

    I've read some of the "accountability" pages by Lar, Alison, Sarcasticidealist and others. I think admin recall should be mandatory for all new admins as soon as the Community can agree on a viable mechanism. Admin recall criteria of the type "If X users in good standing ask me to resign, I will resign" are problematic because people with a vendetta against a particular admin can game the system. Admin recall should be based on discussions. The first step should be an RFC or something similar. In practice the first step would usually be an ANI thread raising concerns about that admin's conduct, but if the ANI thread didn't resolve the matter, an RFC is the next step. From an RFC, people should have the option of starting a recall vote, either as a section within the RFC or on a separate page. The purpose is to keep ArbCom out of this process for two reasons: ArbCom is overworked with other matters, and members of the Community become very frustrated when a recalcitrant admin cannot be sanctioned for bad behavior. Witness the Archtransit RFC: people were begging for admin recall, and Archtransit had offered at his RFA to be open to recall, but there was nothing anyone could do except yell at ArbCom and wait for them to respond at their own pace. Archtransit exploited a serious loophole in policy. We as a community give admin access, so we as a community should have the power to revoke it. As much drama as an admin recall RFC might cause, the ArbCom cases involving desysoppings are not exactly free of drama either. Ideally, I would prefer that all the various admins who are open to recall could standardize their proposals to be similar to one another: I think Lar's has inspired many of the others. That would be a good first step to create one of the few policies that is truly needed but absent.

When thinking about adminship in general, what are your thoughts and opinions about the following areas:

1. How do you view the role of an administrator?

   An administrator maintains the website, as opposed to an editor who maintains the encyclopedia. There is some overlap between the two roles. I consider myself to be an administrator in my role at Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets even though I do not have sysop access. You see, the main part of being an admin is the decision making process of dealing with a problem, be it a vandal, a malformed page, or a dispute, or any other issue. The deletion, blocking, protection, history merging, granting of rollback, or other log action is a manifestation of a sound thought process. An administrator is someone I trust to carry out this thought process and take appropriate action under a wide variety of circumstances and scenarios. I think the caricature of a mop and bucket is somewhat misleading: administrators are not janitors who work for five dollars an hour. They work for free, but more to the point, they must often make difficult decisions that require minutes or even hours of forethought and reconsideration. I acknowledge that there are different types of admins: some are backlog whackers, while others handle the complicated noticeboard work. We need both types.

2. What attributes do you feel an administrator should possess?

   Good judgment and maturity. I should be willing to trust this person hypothetically to borrow my computer and return it to me without stealing or breaking it. All the fine points about edit count, months of experience, namespace distribution and so forth are subsets of the trust issue, though for the record, I will rarely if ever support a candidate who does not meet these minimum criteria: three months experience, 1000 edits, significant addition of content to 5 articles, and 100 edits in the Wikipedia namespace. Almost all candidates meet these criteria with room to spare, so I don't actually check for these, but it serves as a rule of thumb. Civility is paramount: see my first few paragraphs at User:Shalom Yechiel/Drafts and archives/SlimVirgin arbitration evidence/Additional comments.

Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:

1. Have you ever voted in a request for Adminship? If so what was your experience?

   I have voted in more than a hundred RFAs. I consider my opinion to be valued by others, and I reciprocally value the opinions expressed by others.

2. Have you ever stood as a candidate under the Request for Adminship process? If so what was your experience?

   Yes, three times. Please see my subpage. I withdrew failing requests in March and June 2007 under the username YechielMan, and Deskana withdrew a third request under the username Shalom in November 2007. Because of the vehement opposition against allowing a former vandal to become an administrator, and the stress of having my entire wiki-career scrutinized by dozens of colleagues, I proclaimed to the community that I would not request adminship again for the next five years after November 2007. I regret that statement, but I made it after careful consideration, so I will find it difficult to retract it in order to submit another RFA even though I really do need the tools for what I do at WP:SSP and elsewhere. It can be said that the stress of RFA really does drive some people away from becoming candidates. I wish I were more tolerant of stress, but failing that, I simply avoid the process for now. If the process becomes less stressful through some substantive change in policy - for example, the introduction of admin recall, which would make voters less hesitant to give access to borderline candidates - I would definitely give it another try.

3. Do you have any further thoughts or opinions on the Request for Adminship process?

   To resolve the dilemma I stated in the previous question, I considered the possibility of requesting a limited adminship to do only blocks, unblocks, protections and unprotections, and viewing deleted revisions. Here's why I would want that: my work at SSP requires an administrator to block sockpuppets and in some cases to protect or semiprotect the pages they edit. Obviously if I can protect and block I need the ability to reverse these actions by unprotecting and unblocking. In order to keep things simple I would ask for ability to use blocking and protecting across the board, including at WP:RFPP, WP:AN3RR, WP:AIV, WP:UAA, and noticeboards in addition to WP:SSP. This would exclude me from deleting pages in the entire deletion universe: CAT:CSD, CAT:PROD and all the XFDs. Adminship comes with a number of fringe benefits that I don't especially need: for example, the ability to grant rollback and the right for articles I create to be whitelisted on Special:Newpages are not things I really need, though I would prefer to have the latter permission to prevent bad CSD tags on articles I create. (This generally should be given to prolific article creators without sysop access.) Anyway, I think deletion and undeletion are separate from the other two major categories of admin work because there are far more deletions than all other admin actions combined. (I checked the last 50 deletions, last 50 blocks and last 50 protections at a random time last week: it's not even close.) Deletion access requires an added level of trust because once a page is deleted, non-admins don't know what was there and cannot evaluate the reason for deletion for themselves. Conversely, blocking access requires an added level of trust because, although the user contrib logs that motivate a block are usually preserved for posterity, the consequences of hurt feelings from a bad block are potentially more severe than from a bad deletion. Protection requires no special trust, but it's needed infrequently enough to justify limiting it to sysops. Since the page history justifies a protection, it's more similar to blocking in that respect. For this reason I would consider asking the community for permission to use sysop tools for blocking and protecting, and if I need a page to be deleted, I'll slap on a deletion tag and someone else can execute the deletion. (That's the other difference: you can't slap on a template to say "protect this page" or "block this user": you actually have to ask an individual or post to a noticeboard, which is really annoying sometimes.)

   Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Badlydrawnjeff 2 showed that, as of April 2007, the Community was not ready to elect someone who proposed to act in limited circumstances: some people didn't trust him, period. I wonder if it's time to reconsider the opposition to this concept: if an RFA candidate offers to limit their use of tools, on pain of revocation for overstepping their self-imposed boundaries, they should not be penalized for doing so. That said, on a software level, I don't think separation of userrights is wise: we have enough user access levels already. But, if there's one thing this RFA review should get across to anyone who's read what I've written up to this point: just because a proposal is perenially rejected, doesn't mean it's a bad proposal. We really need to approach this process from an open mind. Note that I summarized some issues with the RFA process in my closing comments to WP:RFCRFA. As a final note: I wish candidates with painful histories, including former administrators who have fallen from grace, could be given second chances. I certainly committed some very serious violations of policy (see User:Shalom Yechiel/Drafts and archives/Revelations), but now more than a year later, I hope people have moved forward from that. That's another lesson from Badlydrawnjeff's second RFA: even more than a year after he quit Encyclopedia Dramatica, people were still opposing for aligning with a BADSITE. That kind of closed-mindedness is shameful and gives the RFA process a bad name. It is never too late for a wayward editor to return to morality, nor is it ever too late for a problematic RFA process to be fixed with mandatory admin recall and reducing the stress on candidates. Let us try to be optimistic. Yechiel (Shalom) 03:13, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Once you're finished...

Thank you again for taking part in this review of the Request for Adminship process. Now that you've completed the questionnaire, don't forget to add the following line of code to the bottom of the Response page by clicking this link and copying the following to the BOTTOM of the list.

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Again, on behalf of the project, thank you for your participation. This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 20:56, 12 June 2008 (UTC).