Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Candidates/Sohom Datta

Nomination

Sohom Datta (talk · contribs · they/them) – Colleagues, it is my pleasure to present Sohom Datta for your consideration. In the wider movement, Sohom is a fantastic software engineer, who is a trusted maintainer of multiple MediaWiki extensions including ProofreadPage, Wikisource, and PageTriage. On English Wikipedia, Sohom has guided 10 articles through the good article process, and has done considerable content creation related to cybersecurity articles such as cross-site leaks and cookie stuffing. Sohom is also a new page patroller and an NPP coordinator. Sohom is personable and pleasant to interact with, and I enjoyed working with him writing software patches at Wikimania 2023. Sohom has 7,583 edits, a tad below what candidates who have recently passed RFA tend to have. But I feel this edit count is close enough. I firmly believe that Sohom has the experience and the temperament to become a very helpful technical admin, and it would be my pleasure if you would join me in supporting his candidacy. –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:45, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Co-nomination

I reached out to Sohom months ago when I was looking for experienced editors with potential to ask about running for RfA. I'm happy he has finally decided to go for it. While his edit count is a bit low for a typical RfA candidate, I implore people to give him a chance. He has spent thousands of hours working on the technical side of mediawiki and that's something an edit count doesn't reflect. Sohom is kind, knowledgable, and I trust him to not do anything horrible, which is what I look for in an admin. I think he'll do a great job learning on the job. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 16:20, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here: I accept the nomination. A list of accounts I use can be found at User:Sohom Datta/Accounts. -- Sohom (talk) 20:56, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Please disclose whether you have ever edited Wikipedia for pay: I have never been paid (nor will I ever accept payment) to make content edits on English Wikipedia. -- Sohom (talk) 20:56, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia as an administrator. Please answer these questions to provide guidance for participants:

1. Why are you interested in becoming an administrator?

A: Since joining Wikipedia in 2019 as a Google Summer of Code intern, I have focused primarily on technical contributions to Wikimedia, writing frontend JavaScript performing tasks similar to gadgets and userscripts on-wiki. I have contributed around 240 patches to various Wikimedia extensions, fixing bugs and implementing new features. I believe I can best serve the community as a (int-)administrator by helping to maintain enwiki's aging and under-maintained system of gadgets and userscripts, like Navigation popups, which are in need of attention. Additionally, I would also like to assist with fulfilling edit requests for fully protected pages, editing fully protected Lua modules, system messages, and potentially running admin bots.

In addition to my technical work, I have experience with Did You Know nominations and would be interested in helping other admins in that area as well. I do recognize that I have less experience in this area compared to some contributors, I will approach the work carefully, ensuring that I read all relevant instructions and seek guidance when needed.

2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?

A: As Clovermoss and Novem hint in their nomination statement, most of my contributions don't show up in my edit count. A lot of my time is spent debugging Wikipedia issues on my local computer, or on Phabricator and Gerrit. I've made 56+ patches to the PageTriage extension (240 patches overall to Wikimedia extensions). Some of my most complex patches include redesigning the NewPagesFeed to use Codex, fixing two security issues in the PageTriage extension, and helping clean up the tagging and deletion module in PageTriage. I've also spent a significant amount of time working with new contributors to add features to the PageTriage extension, over the course of this summer, I coordinated (and am still coordinating) T360848, a project to make the NewPagesFeed more searchable and user-friendly. This required meeting weekly with the new contributor(s), helping them understand the codebase, and guiding them through the process of submitting patches. Outside of enwiki, I've also contributed to the ProofreadPage extension, where I've helped introduce a new zooming and panning library into Wikisources, and taken over maintainership of phetools, a set of tools that operated a cross-wiki bot (the responsibilities of which was taken over by SodiumBot) that was essential for some Wikisource workflows. During the toolforge grid deprecation, I also contributed to the CropTool, helping the tool migrate to the new toolforge architecture.

Coming back to things I've done on-wiki, besides tech, my biggest contribution to the wiki is my content work, especially the good articles that I helped write. Privacy and computer security are two areas that I am extremely passionate about. In fact, I dream of a day when Wikipedia's coverage of the cybersecurity and privacy topic area will rival that of established academic textbooks and courses. I am particularly proud of my contributions to Cross-site leaks, which is probably the most comprehensive one-page overview on the topic on the internet (barring maybe the XS-Leaks Wiki). I am also proud of my work on History sniffing, an obscure but important privacy-compromising attack that can leak your browsing history to a malicious website, and Site isolation which explains the technical reason behind why Google Chrome is a memory hog. Besides these serious topics, I've also written articles about lighter topics, like Boroline, a popular antiseptic cream in India, and Hindu Mela, a fair in pre-independence India. If the community chooses to trust me with administratorship, I intend to still keep contributing to the encyclopedia in a similar manner in the future, by writing more articles on these topics.

3. Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or have other users caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?

A: Conflicts are unavoidable in a environment like Wikipedia, I have had my fair share of disagreements especially on technical fronts including times when I was overly dismissive of certain opinions and/or did not consider others perspectives. I have since learnt from those experiences, my current approach to disagreements and conflicts is much more measured, I tend to first try and understand the "why" behind a person's opinions before trying to provide counter arguments. In cases where there are irreconcilable differences, I have found that disengaging with the conversation and coming back after a while with a clearer mind has helped me prevent those differences from spiraling out of hand or in some cases even resolve those differences.

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Discussion

• Links for Sohom Datta: Sohom Datta (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)
• Edit summary usage for Sohom Datta can be found here.

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Please keep discussion constructive and civil. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review their contributions before commenting.