Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Abd 2

Abd

Voice your opinion (talk page) (2/2/0); Scheduled to end 13:37, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Abd is a very objective user and one smart fellow. He has a lot of knowledge and experience with Wikipedia. Sarsaparilla (talk) 18:40, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia as an administrator. It is recommended that you answer these optional questions to provide guidance for participants:

1. What admin work do you intend to take part in?

A: I did not request or expect this nomination, and have seriously considered declining it. Most of the work that I do for the project, or plan to do, does not require the privileged tools, and possessing them could even be a distraction. However, I also respect the intentions of the nominator, and have a general belief that I should serve when asked or I become aware of a need that I can meet. Nevertheless, due to the burden of many responsibilities, I do not expect that I could perform much of the ordinary mop work. There are, however, certain tasks that I'm sure I could and would help with, that come to mind because I've needed them myself, such as recovering copies of deleted pages, as appropriate, for review by users who have requested them. Ultimately, I'd like to make this an unnecessary task, but wishes aren't horses. I would be an extra hand when extra hands are needed, and how often that would occur is something I cannot predict. I saw the granting of the rollback tool to non-admins as a step toward creating what I have called a penumbra of chosen support around administrators; while administrators may not have seen it this way, I considered that any administrator who granted the rollback tool to a user would be responsible for that user's actions with it; thus I would not grant that tool to a user merely upon request, and, indeed, I might look at a request from an unknown user with a jaundiced eye. Not so a user who had been steadily working to remove vandalism already, or had otherwise shown responsibility. I might work toward setting up rapid-response systems to deal with vandalism and disruptive editing more efficiently, more intelligently, and more fairly. As an ordinary user, I can suggest such systems, as an administrator I could be the active agent for one (but it would be a drop in the bucket unless other administrators followed suit).

My interest in Wikipedia comes from a long consideration and study of decision-making systems in peer associations quite like Wikipedia; I anticipated the rise of such, and recognized Wikipedia, as soon as I became seriously involved in editing, as quite analogous to what I'd seen, studied, and facilitated elsewhere. Many of the policies and guidelines are quite what I'd expected they would be. My major focus, however, and I am known for this outside Wikipedia, is how to handle the communications problem when the scale becomes very large; I have theoretical solutions, but they have never been tried on anything even approaching the Wikipedia scale. However, on the other hand, they are fail-safe, they are efficient and are designed to require very little effort; indeed, to be scalable, they must be extremely efficient and extremely easy to use. I will be working on this regardless of whether or not this RfA succeeds, and I do not need the admin bit to do it, but there may be a few places where being an administrator might help.

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

A: They are yet to come. I've been learning my way around, as situations come up, reading the guidelines and policies and essays where the community has expressed or has attempted to find consensus, and discussing them. I've followed Arbitrations and contributed to one, and a comment I wrote to place on the Talk page of an administrator who was, sadly, about to lose his bit and was bitter about it, received some positive comment from at least one other editor; for the comment, see [1] It was written December 1, and my understanding of Wikipedia continues to grow rapidly, but it should give an idea of how I think about this place and, also, about administrator conduct.

I have only become extensively involved with a few articles, most notably Instant-runoff voting, which is an article which continues to be in flux; a major participant, the source of a lot of editing conflict, was just exposed as another James Salsman sock. The article did get, at one point, almost to where the POV tag could be removed, but it has slid back a bit. I have recently taken an interest in Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: controversies; there was continued conflict there long before I arrived, and it may be that my participation has helped to start the process to find a consensus; but, as is common, doing what I see needs to be done is a bit destabilizing for some. SPA editors who have been heavily controlling an article for a year often don't take kindly to being confronted about it, no matter how civilly it's done; but these people drive away newcomers, experts, and anyone who disagrees with them; most of these people don't have the patience or time to persist when rudely reverted. Newcomers often edit contrary to guidelines and policy; a POV editor will use this to simply reject their work, instead of assisting them to find the proper way to do what they want to do, at least as far as what they want to do has some value, and it usually does. In this case, even though there had been found reliable, peer-reviewed sources explicitly noting controversy over the diagnosis, nearly all mention of the controversy had been gradually excluded from the article; it's a familiar story, actually, repeated over many different articles, this is just one that I have some connection with. I have ADHD, not marginal, so I understand the topic from the inside. In order to uncover what had happened, which involved, among other things, misrepresentation of sources, I had to actually, I know this seems excessive, go to a ... physical library and find an article that wasn't on the internet! (Misrepresentation of sources is actually a common problem with certain kinds of articles, particularly where a peer-reviewed journal that is cited may not be available to most editors. I have ideas about how to remedy the situation, and I expect to be implementing them in short order. Again, I don't need admin tools for this....

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: Well, I've sometimes said that if a user has never been blocked, they have not beenworking hard enough for the project. That's an exaggeration, of course, and most work for the project does not involve the kinds of actions that could result in a block. But then there are what might be called battleground articles, where there are constituencies in the outside world, with great resources, attempting to control the spin of the article. Having administrative tools is often useless for dealing with this, for if one has sufficient knowledge to recognize what is happening, one is quite likely to have sufficient conflict of interest to be unable to use the tools (and, in fact, this has tripped up more than one administrator). (It can take having knowledge in the field to understand the implications, which is commonly associated with the formation of a POV, to be able to recognize the subtle spin involved in balance issues, for spinmasters will use carefully selected and framed fact to create impressions, they get paid for that.) Having found myself in that position, I have confronted a series of James Salsman socks (at least four), three of them before they came to administrative attention, an anonymous IP editor (whom I identified from the IP as having a major conflict of interest,and who was blocked), and single-purpose accounts, and was once, as a result, blocked (perhaps properly as a precaution) and then immediately unblocked (also properly) when the administrator realized what I had actually been doing. My understanding is that generally users have the same rights as administrators; and the same responsibilities (i.e., being an administrator is no protection against 3RR violation when the administrator is involved with the article) and being temporarily blocked as a precaution -- in error -- is no harm for an experienced user. (But it can be very harmful for a newcomer, indeed, fatal for their relationship with Wikipedia.) I'll be happy to answer any questions here, or on my Talk page. No, it has not caused me stress. I was a single parent with five teenagers at one time, I was a moderator for the Usenet group soc.religion.islam, attacked by fanatics on all sides, yet able to maintain my balance; Wikipedia is a piece of cake. Only once did the obsession button get pushed here, and it was when I tried to file my first 3RR report, screwed it up, and the report was rejected and my pleas for assistance went unheeded -- and, as a result, damage continued for quite some time. It's an old button of mine, and I quickly recognized it, and that was that. So one of the things I might to is to patrol WP:ANI/3RR and assist. But not with articles and editors I've been involved with! (and, yes, I did eventually figure out how to put up diffs properly. I'm 63, but I'm not dead yet.)--Abd (talk) 03:52, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Questions from Avruch

4. What is the difference between a ban and a block?

5. If another administrator removes material from an article and cites a BLP concern as the reason - but you believe the material does not violate BLP policy and should be included- what do you do?

6. What is your opinion on administrator recall and do you plan to add yourself to the category?

7. What are the policies most crucial to your role as an administrator?

General comments

• See Abd's edit summary usage with mathbot's tool. For the edit count, see the talk page.

• Links for Abd: Abd (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)

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Please keep discussion constructive and civil. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review Special:Contributions/Abd before commenting.

Discussion

• 1400 edits and 500 mainspace edits is usually too few to pass an RfA. You might want to speak to whether your particular experience or background should make you an exception to this (unwritten) rule. Avruchtalk 04:14, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Support

1. The fact that he was tempted to decline is prima facie evidence of a lack of power hunger! Support wholeheartedly! Sarsaparilla (talk) 04:08, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
2. Support per these intelligent posts: 02:40, 25 December 2007, 02:02, 29 December 2007, and 05:12, 30 December 2007. Sincerely, --Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles^Tally-ho! 04:16, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
3. Contrary to the opposes, I feel his responses to questions and Le Grand's diffs above demonstrates enough knowledge of policy. — Dark ^(talk) 06:07, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Oppose I'm sorry, but I don't believe you have enough overall experience as of yet. Jmlk17 06:02, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
2. Oppose Per Jmlk17 - This was my major concern while doing my analysis. I'm sure in 4-5 months my username would be in the support list. Wisdom89 (talk) 06:03, 10 February 2008 (UTC)