User:Bugghost/Admin election notes

Note 14/10/2024: this page does not contain any info on the 26 WP:AELECT candidates. When created, it was intended to be notes on the candidates, for my own benefit / the benefit of anyone who wanted a quick unofficial set of notes. However, seeing as the concept of voter guides in general is more controversial than I initially presumed, I've decided to leave my candidate notes to be locally stored, off-wiki, and will just bring up relevant topics during the discussion period instead. What follows is just what was intended to be the public intro to my notes - there's nothing specifically useful here for potential voters.

Update 17/10/24 - Consensus looks like it's moving away from discouraging voter guides. Notes on candidates at the bottom. For now, please don't link to this page from official admin election pages, only from userspace.

This page tries to give some thoughts on the candidates for this admin election trial. Take all of this with a pinch of salt - this is one random person's opinion. Please do your own research on candidates.

Why I am doing this

I have been fascinated by the range of different ways admins take the reigns on areas and situations, and realised quite quickly that personal conduct and attitudes of admins can really affect Wikipedia at large. I have seen admins act appallingly in ways that can drive off users, and I have seen other admins genuinely care about new users, sometimes to extents I genuinely couldn't wrap my head around. Because of this, getting involved in the admin selection process is important to me, which is why I am writing these notes and making them public.

I am also going to be very busy in real life during the discussion stages of this election, and so am writing these notes as my own jumping off point for the discussion phase.

Priorities

Things I think are important qualities for admins:

• Highly knowledgeable in the areas that they work in
• Work in areas that require the tools
• Ability to concisely and accurately communicate thoughts and opinions
• Ability to admit mistakes or problems honestly and openly
• Empathy for editors, especially new ones
• Haven't had any big lapses in judgement (including being rude and/or weird)

Things I don't think are that important (that often come up as reason to support/oppose on RFA):

• Content creation - I don't think you need to have 35 Good Articles, 150 DYKs and a featured picture to be a good admin. Admin work is normally "back of house" - good writers don't necessarily make good admins, and vice versa.
• Being knowledgable in all areas - eg. if an admin is going to work exclusively in ANI/3RR then they don't need to have extensive AFD stats, or know historic category deletion precedents, or whatever

Candidates

There are other user pages that detail stats, I'm not going to duplicate that effort (see User:Novem Linguae/Essays/2024 administrator election notes and User:Femke/2024 admin election notes).

These will be rough subjective notes, and will not cover everything important. Please use your own judgement and due dilligence on the candidates. Reading my notes is not a replacement for research - please don't vote on candidates you have not done your own full research on - it wouldn't be fair to them. These notes are largely intended to be fuel for things I think should be brought up discussed in the discussion phase - they are not final value judgements.

I have a lot of respect for all candidates for putting their name forward, and wish them all good luck.

Due to the quantity of candidates I may not be able to write notes on all of them or cover them equally. I'm trying to do this in a semi-random ordering.

SWinxy

Seem competent and a good content creator, but doesn't seem to edit in admin-needed areas.

Their Q1 answer (Why are you interested in becoming an administrator) focuses a lot on how admin tools could help them personally do more content work. The tools I desire out of the admin toolbox are to protect and unprotect pages, view and restore deleted pages, and editing fully-protected articles. but also I don't think I've ever made a fully-protected edit request and I don't really want to have the mop so I have the ability to block users or delete pages—that's not my thing, but maybe later as the site's needs change?.

SheriffIsInTown

In 2016, edited Donald Trump so that his name was "Donald Trumped" (diff). I found this because on their current userpage they have a section called "Fun edits" where they listed this edit. Other "fun edits" include this change which added a lot of incorrect information.

The Squirrel Conspiracy

Admin on Wikidata and Commons.

Had an RFA under an old username Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Sven_Manguard that they withdrew from. They say that the RFA failed because at the time I was uncomfortable disclosing the Nezzadar account because it was too easy to get from that to my real identity. Now I don't really care about that. Looking at the old RFA (from 2012), there were 20 supports and 10 opposes, with 5 of the opposes being based on the non-disclosure of the second account, the rest seem to be discussions of temperament, but I didn't dig into those too much.

Works largely in Commons, work on en.wiki is largely antivandal/cleanup.

SilverLocust

Got 2 good noms (ExtraordinaryWrit and HouseBlaster) who speak very highly of them.

Clerks for arbcom, made lua modules to count arb votes. Works in areas that would benefit from more admins (mainly stuff to do with page moves).

Frost

Largely antivandal work. Personally I can vouch that they do a lot of it - there have been a lot of times where they revert vandalism a few seconds before I can. In my view they have good judgement and knowledge of procedure in anti-vandal areas.

They signed up in 2017, and up to around summer 2024 they had about 2,000 edits. In the second half of 2024 they have made 38,000 edits (comma is in correct position) averaging 7,600 edits a month. Nearly all of these are reverts, user warning templating, reporting to AIV, UAA, etc.

Seem adverse to conflict - their Q3 (conflict/stress question) has this example for conflict resolution, which only contains three short comments from them. Didn't do an optional RFA candidate poll due to "agoraphobia" - User_talk:Frost#RFA.

Starship.paint

Largely focused on content work, especially contentious topics. Answer to Q1 is very short and seems be be a bit vague - If elected, I’ll start by hanging around AE (but I will not administrate in involved topics), AN and ANI. I may dabble in ITN and branch out to other areas as I go along. I want to help Wikipedia become a more conducive place for editors to work on content..

Indeff blocked for one day in 2019 for (as far as I can tell) posting a link to a twitter account of a WMF member that they (the WMF member) had not formally disclosed as theirs. If my understanding is correct, they were blocked by one admin, unblocked by another, then the blocking admin urged the unblocking admin to resign over it. The history of that situation feels like it might be difficult to unpick and figure out what happened actually and to see whether this is actually anything relevant to starship's candidacy today or if it is just old irrelevant wikidrama. I'm not going to leave a value comment on this topic. Relevant links for anyone who wants to figure it out themselves: the original block, and a declined ARBCOM case request about the blocked/unblock.

Hawkeye7

Ex-admin - desyssopped by ARBCOM in 2012. Decision that Hawkeye7 "wheel warred" was agreed 7-3. Decision that they made a personal attack agreed 10-0. Decision that they were "previously admonished" 10-0. On their AELECT nom page, Hawkeye indicates that their reasoning behind the block they made during of the wheel warring "ultimately proved to be the case". This all happened 12 years ago.

Original RFA (2009, successful, 76%). After 2012 desyssopping, second RFA (2016, unsuccessful, 66%, went to crat chat); third RFA (2019, unsuccessful, 52%).

Seem to be mainly content focused - interested in becoming an admin to help out with DYK and reduce backlogs. Has various other userrights, like autopatroller, file mover, new page reviewer, mass message sender and template editor.

NoobThreePointOh

Mainly anti-vandal work, which they do a lot of (recent changes, AIV, UAA, etc). Content area is lacking (but this I don't think is a big deal).

Made a optional RfA candidate poll back in Feburary.

Q3 answer openly discusses edit warring on a previous account and on current account earlier this year (around same time as the ORCP - Feb 2024) and what they learned from that experience.

SD0001

Two very good noms (Novem Linguae and Hey man im josh) who speak very highly of them.

Very back-of-house technical editor. Noms are saying they do a lot of creating/maintaining gadgets and tools. Got a GA (which isn't a given for this group of candidates, especially techy ones) - Dairy in India, which they wrote 47% of. Wikimedia described them as "deeply valued by the community for his work on scripts, bots and gadgets, and appreciated for his contribution around Gadget and Echo extensions. Siddharth has been in the Wikimedia movement for a decade, and today we celebrate him as the 2024 Tech Contributor of the Year." - [1] (link is from josh's nom).

Have said that they intend to use mop for tech edits only. Haven't found anything problematic on ANI or in user talk spaces.

Self-requested a 2 year block in April 2015 [2], but then evaded it by making a new account and editing through IP addresses - the admin lifted the block [3]. The account they used while blocked did mainly gnoming things, but they did try to move a userpage of an admin to their own user page, which is a bit odd.

Pbritti

Interested in vandalism, page protections and unblock requests, "considering" working around deletion processes. Content-focused - 8 successful GA noms [4].

Seems to be pretty good at mediating disputes, cooling off tense discussions - eg. this [5] on a talk page about a quarrel about Chinese medicine; this (from, as I write this, earlier today) [6] bit of advice to a new blocked user who was attempting to add well meaning (but apparently unhelpful) external links to a library that they run; this [7] advice to a new editor who got reverted. (Diffs found by just randomly clicking on some User Talk diffs in their contribs). In 2022 logged an ANI which ended up with a new user throwing personal attacks at them repeatedly while no admins intervened - became understandably annoyed but remained calm and referencing sources. These diffs aren't objective stats and should be taken lightly, but they anecdotally line up with areas they want to work in and my "soft" priorities listed above.

As they said they want to work in deletion, their AFD stats are relevant - 81.1% matching consensus of the last 200 AfD's.

Knightoftheswords281

Lowest edit count of the candidates (6,900ish). Nom indicates that they are content-focused - includes list of articles created, and want the mop for WP:In the news - nom statement doesn't mention other admin areas that they wish to work in. The articles listed in nom statement aren't GA or FA, and haven't had any successful GA noms.

Q3 says "I've had firey spats with editors early on (I recall this particular exchange)", but there is no link, so I can't evaluate that.

Peaceray

Self nom is largely a set of steps of how to look at a watchlist (?) has a signature halfway through it for some reason - doesn't give a lot of background for themselves.

Q1 indicates they want to work in antivandal areas. Hard to tell if they want to branch out to other areas, based on this answer - I also know that there are a myriad of admin tasks that do not involve blocking & protecting. I know several administrators whose focus is elsewhere. - does this indicate they want to work in those areas, or just that they are aware they exist? Should be asked at discussion time.

MarcGarver

Steward for 10 years, checkuser on Wikibooks "for longer". Had a failed RFA in 2012 (69.67% support), which from what I can tell the opposes were mainly based on whether they closely paraphrased sources when citing sentence by sentence. After RFA, they checked articles they contributed to to see if they followed the sources too closely [8]. They now want to work on promotional content and spam, undisclosed paid editing, and the extensive copyright violation that turns up at AFC and NPP.

Going through contribs, lots of AFC reviews and smaller edits. Last edit to a mainspace talk page was July - seem focused more on reviewing articles and gnoming.

Sable232

Joined in 2006, Answers are relatively short so hard to get concrete background from nom page - My editing varies and I don't specialize in anything.

July this year, logged an ANI about a (at the time) new user [9] which was pretty pointy, got no responses, and then made another ANI about the same user [10], where it was questioned as to whether there was even a problem. Also left a pointy edit summary when notifying the user. Nothing damning here but a good view of their style of dispute resolution.

Rsjaffe

Wants to work doing SPI, antivandal, UPE. Most non-mainspace edits recently are CSD nominations, user warnings, UAA/AIV reports, etc and indicate a good level of knowledge around those areas (certainly more than I have).

Q3 answer focuses on having avoiding conflict and being level headed and to the point; diffs given seem to back that up.

17% authorship on featured article Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Never successfully nominated a GA. Wrote for signpost about AI generated articles.

Technically had a block on a second account, but it's all above board and fine (admin apologised and unblocked after 20 mins).

Zippybonzo

Back-of-house editor - "I’m primarily interested because I don’t do a lot of content work, so really I want to be handling background tasks". Wants to work in deletions (CSD/PROD specifically) and AIV/UAA.

AFD stats: 80.0% with consensus, but only 44 AFD's. [11]

Recent talk page topics imply that they are learning CCI but are making mistakes User_talk:Zippybonzo/Archive_5#Please_be_careful. They were also given a reminder to not "gravedance".

It also looks like before the election process started, they had not created a mainspace article and were given advice to do this soon to improve their candidacy, but they haven't yet.