User:BecauseWhy?/RfA review

Welcome to the Question phase of RfA Review. We hope you'll take the time to respond to your questions in order to give us further understanding of what you think of the RfA process. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers here. Also, feel free to answer as many questions as you like. Don't feel you have to tackle everything if you don't want to.

In a departure from the normal support and oppose responses, this review will focus on your thoughts, opinions and concerns. Where possible, you are encouraged to provide examples, references, diffs and so on in order to support your viewpoint. Please note that at this point we are not asking you to recommend possible remedies or solutions for any problems you describe, as that will come later in the review.

If you prefer, you can submit your responses anonymously by emailing them to gazimoff (at) o2.co.uk. Anonymous responses will be posted as subpages and linked to from the responses section, but will have the contributor's details removed. If you have any questions, please use the talk page.

Once you've provided your responses, please encourage other editors to take part in the review. More responses will improve the quality of research, as well as increasing the likelihood of producing meaningful results.

Once again, thank you for taking part!

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)

   Candidate selection is certainly a nice thing. It's a good sign of community trust to be invited by another rather than to attempt to force oneself in.

2. Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)

   As a non-admin who does not know the tools, I am not entirely sure what technical knowledge admin must learn that a regular user must not. Whatever that necessary knowledge is, it should be taught to prospective admins, rather than waiting until they make a mistake.

   Policy is even more important than technical knowledge. For admins, it is even more important. Any user can learn the protocols and behavioral guidelines of Wikipedia, and any prospective admin should be very familiar with these before even considering a nomination.

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

   I am unimpressed with the idea of pure self-nomination. The point of the RfA process is to determine who the community wants as an admin. It is a much better sign if a prospective admin is nominated or co-nominated by another user or users, as a show of community trust.

4. Advertising and canvassing

   I have not seen any problems as it is. Limited and regulated canvassing is the way to go, and that's what there is now.

5. Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)

   Debate is an excellent part of the RfA process, as it allows a deeper measure of the candidate's suitability for adminship. They allow community members to see more of the candidate's views and policy knowledge than just looking through the edit summaries. Debate questions should be greatly encouraged.

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

   Elections are primarily useful for the reasons that user provide to support and oppose. Many of the important points for or against the candidate are only brought to light in this part of the process.

   However, it is necessary to take care that this does not turn into a popularity contest. It should at least be necessary to provide the reasoning behind a vote, which all good editors already do. I think it's important to take into account that this should be reasoned decision, not mob rule.

7. Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)

   Umm, I'm not sure what exactly I'm supposed to be discussing here. Is there some problem with the withdrawal process? I can't seem to find what that might be.

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

   WP:NOTNOW is important. If someone clearly doesn't have the necessary experience, it's better for everyone to close the nomination. It spares them the possible humiliation by others, and spares everyone else the time.

   As long as the bureaucrat is taking all important information into account, I don't see a problem with the declaration process.

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

   New Admin School is awesome. I think education like this for incoming admins is essential. Other pages such as these are important also:

   Everything in Wikipedia:Administrators'_reading_list

   Wikipedia:Administrators'_how-to_guide

10. Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)

    This is very important. It would be useful if there were an organized process for reconfirmation of any admin, if it were necessary. Lar has a very thoroughly fleshed-out process. EVula, SirFozzie, Singularity, and other admins have other versions. Many of these are similar to or derived from one another, so I think it wouldn't be hard to find a minimum common ground between these plans. I would advocate that such a plan should be standard for admins, to give a bit of accountability.

I must address another issue. It may seem like all of these suggestions I've listed would make it harder to become an admin, and simpler to have that status taken away. Don't we already have too few admins already?
I want to encourage a review process that guarantees qualified admins, and a review process that would encourage accountability. But I don't want people to be discouraged from trying to become an admin. I am really not sure what one would do about this, though.

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 is meant to perform Wikipedia's maintenance/administrative duties. These include dealing with vandalism and spam, overseeing community processes such as AfD, and maintenance duties such as moving, reverting, protecting, and deleting.

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

   It is absolutely essential that an administrator can be even-handed and rational. He can hold whatever personal views he wants, but upon stepping into those Admin Shoes, he must put personal quarrels aside entirely if he is going to perform his duty calmly well. This is the primary virtue that an admin needs. Intelligence and patience are also useful. Finally, this might be a weird one, but a sense of humor is useful too. The ability to step back and not take everything so seriously is helpful to almost anyone.

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 not. I have some reasons for that. The primary one is that I haven't been editing for very long, so I don't think my vote would be given much weight. The second reason is wikidrama.

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

   I've never stood as a candidate, for rather obvious reasons.

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

   I hope I've mentioned everything already.

   I hope that this response was appropriate for the review.

   I thank the people who are organizing this review process. Hopefully the process will have positive and useful results.

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 04:30 on 22 June 2008.