Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Fæ

Fæ

Voice your opinion on this candidate (talk page) (0/0/0); Scheduled to end 22:00, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Nomination

Fæ (talk · contribs) – Fæ is a highly active and experienced contributor (for those who like stats: 50,000 edits over 12 months) in a variety of areas in which having the tools would benefit the project. I highlight the following reasons why Fæ should be given the tools:

• Fæ is an OTRS volunteer and has been since August 2010. The fact of being an OTRS volunteer already demonstrates a high degree of trustworthiness. But also, having the administrative tools will help Fæ to carry out important OTRS-related functions, like dealing with copyright and BLP violations that get reported via email.
• Fæ has a demonstrated commitment to, and proficiency in, content work, with three good articles and one featured article.
• Fæ's one featured article, Hoxne Hoard, demonstrates exactly the qualities the project needs in an administrator. The article passed FA as the result of an organised collaboration between multiple editors on- and off-wiki. It's one thing to write an FA yourself; it's another thing entirely to demonstrate the people skills, teamwork and leadership needed to get a large collaboration across the line. I'd also suggest having a look at WP:GLAM/BM and WP:GLAM/BL for Fæ's ongoing collaborative work in GLAM projects.
• Fæ is very competent in deletion policy and practice. Fæ makes well-reasoned nominations (eg Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/St. Francis Xavier Montmorency and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Irena Lipienė) and arguments.
• Fæ is a proficient vandal fighter.
• Fæ deals with complaints well - one of the most important parts of being an admin. A review of Fæ's talk page articles reveals that editors do disagree with Fæ from time to time: but the disagreements and complaints are dealt with courteously and constructively. Mkativerata (talk) 19:39, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here:

I accept. For reasons of disclosure it should be noted that after an RFC/U which caused me to refocus and improve my Wikipedia editing I took the option of a clean start, though I have never been blocked. Prior to this nomination I spoke privately with one of the critical contributors to the discussion, who knows both account names and we have resolved our concerns. I will recuse myself of admin requests related to editors who gave an opinion in that discussion. This is the first time I have had an RFA nomination. Fæ (talk) 22:00, 14 March 2011 (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. What administrative work do you intend to take part in?

A: My focus over the last 6 months in helping with GLAM related collaborations means that I am more likely to be one of the go-to-guys for related admin needs around these areas when I am uninvolved (this may include helping during an edit-a-thon or workshops). I have experience raising notices at RPP, UND, AIV, UAA and SPI and, at a minimum after working through NAS, if I am considered competent for the admin task I may offer to help when help is needed with backlogs or where specific issues arise. I would tend to be conservative around deletions and would be likely to only take on cases where I am fully confident of correctly and unambiguously interpreting policy. As can be seen from my contributions I tend to move about rather than sticking to one process (6 weeks of a backlog purge on OTRS, a couple of months clearing out unsourced BLP queues, a month of welcoming new users (that one resulted in a peak in my edit history and skewed my balance of contributions to userspace), various periods of patrol on IGLOO which highlights a variety of problems or hanging out on the IRC help channel for random requests) and would hope to focus on areas that would gain the most immediate benefit from involvement and where I can commit to giving sufficient time in reading policy, guidelines, past cases and then ask for help and feedback if there are things I am unsure of. I already use a number of browser-based scripts to help with routine tasks (such as checking the licences of uploaded Flickr images or formatting a citation based on a GNewspaper image, see User:Fæ/Geek) and may eventually create non-controversial scripts to help with some admin backlog work.

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

A: My involvement in the GLAM/BM, GLAM/BL and GLAM/DER collaborations along with their associated articles (for example Hoxne Hoard (FA), British Library Philatelic Collections (GA) and Vindolanda tablets (GA)) have been my best contributions (and eaten most of my recent wiki-time) with the benefits of working as a team and a chance to meet with curators and museum staff who have devoted their lives to making knowledge freely available to the public (an aspiration that will sound familiar to any committed Wikipedian). More gnomicly, my OTRS work has resulted in some important images and text being verified and made available and sometimes undeleted for articles (often outside my normal sphere of interest, such as all photos owned by the Iowa House of Representatives and an etched metal plate negative thought to be a youthful Abraham Lincoln). I have enjoyed giving friendly personal help for a wide variety of people and in the process have learned a lot about the practical interpretation of international copyright whilst remaining a strict layman on the subject and staying open to sometimes finding out that what I thought was intuitively right and fair, turns out to have a legal case stating the exact opposite.

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: I can think of no conflicts over the last few months, only polite discussion (if persistent from time to time) and sometimes abuse from vandals (being called things like idiot, fat assed street walker or murderer seem more bizarre rather than stressful). Going further back to October last year the discussion here sticks in my mind as a debate about something insignificant that went on too long (making it an embarrassment for all parties, including me) where I felt that a citation for a photo I had uploaded helped article verifiability and others thought it was not needed consequently deleting the citation repeatedly. I felt strongly that standard policy was unambiguously in support of my opinion but instead of arguing with an evolving local consensus I preferred to take the article off my watch list and walk away to avoid becoming disruptive when this might have been a case of IAR anyway. Looking at the article now, I am delighted to see it has recently achieved GA status with most of my original contributions intact and the photo I uploaded is still the lead image, though the claim of the image caption remains unsupported by a citation. The lesson learned was that if the discussion is stuck then walk away early rather than when it gets embarrassing; there are plenty of other articles needing attention and I can always come back to check up on progress in a few months time (if I still remember what the disagreement was about by then). Though I do not seek conflict situations, I have experience of helping with conflict resolution and Talk:Israel Shamir and Talk:Enthiran are both illustrative examples of articles where I have been heavily involved in resolving conflict and received a bit of flak in the process (the latter example started some deletion discussions which resulted with a new copyright essay on lists being proposed by Moonriddengirl).

General comments

• Links for Fæ: Fæ (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)
• Edit summary usage for Fæ 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.