Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/HouseBlaster

HouseBlaster

Voice your opinion on this candidate (talk page) (0/0/0); Scheduled to end 00:50, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Nomination

HouseBlaster (talk · contribs) – HouseBlaster has been one of the bright new faces of the 2020s, and I believe he will make a great addition to the admin class of 2024. HouseBlaster has displayed responsibility and good judgment with his work on the maintenance side of the site, which includes work at requested moves and on categories, files, and templates. With all the Categories for deletion closes he does, House might as well already be an admin; see the long history of Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/Working for examples, where House has helped tame a backlog at for the last several months. Working in these areas can result in queries about closes and certain decisions, and House’s comments in discussions and on his talk page show level-headed and precise responses. Outside of this, House has an established record when it comes to patrolling pages, and can do some real article writing, too. I believe House will be an excellent admin, and that the guy who created the page documenting the Admin Baton can now have it passed to him. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 23:57, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Co-nomination statement

I'm absolutely delighted to introduce y'all to HouseBlaster – that is, if you haven't met him already! I first met him a few months ago when launching the 2024 RfA review, and I found him to be incredibly competent, easygoing, and hardworking. A dive through his contributions honestly blew me away: he does huge amounts of needed work through categories for discussion, new pages patrol, speedy deletion, proposed deletion, and technical requested moves. With a mop, he could do even more. On top of that, he's level-headed, reasonable, and civil. He's also helped make needed change in RFA2024 and to CSD, deprecating two CSD categories and semi-boldly deprecating a third. All in all, a truly remarkable editor who has more than earned consideration for the mop. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 00:14, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here: I accept, with gratitude to Moneytrees and theleekycauldron! I have never edited for pay, and I have three alt accounts: Houseblaster (talk · contribs), BlasterOfHouses (talk · contribs), and User toolbox (talk · contribs). HouseBlaster (talk · he/they) 00:38, 16 June 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: I would like to help out primarily at CFD and secondarily at REFUND. At CFD, admins are needed to instruct JJMC89 bot III on how to action the results of CFDs, which they do by listing items at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working. To prevent abuse, that page is fully protected; non-admin closures are listed on the talk page, and an admin checks before adding them to the project page. Currently, this task has a bus factor of two: Pppery and Fayenatic london. As an admin, I would be able to process CFD closes on my own and, in turn, process the kind of non-admin closures I have been making.

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

A: I am currently one of two primary closers at CfD (for those of you keeping score at home, the other is Qwerfjkl). Besides helping to keep the outstanding discussion backlog as low as it can be, I am happy with the work I did purging Category:Songs written for films of songs that were not written for films – which had been sitting at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working/Manual since a 2016(!) discussion. I also am happy with the work I did to get on implementing Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2022 November 17#Category:Citizens through descent from, which had also been on the list at CFDWM for a while since 2022. (Currently, In part because of these actions, the oldest outstanding discussion at CFDWM is from October 2023.)

Content-wise, I would say 1934 German head of state referendum is my best writing. I am also proud of shepherding Daniel McCaffery – an AP2 BLP – through DYK (nomination). I will let my writing speak for itself.

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 in life are unavoidable, and Wikipedia is no exception. My general rule is that I go for a walk when I need to take a second to calm down. Wikipedia will be there when I come back, and I certainly plan to continue doing so when I need to take a minute in the future. When I am interacting with others, I do my best to disagree without being disagreeable and focus on what will improve the encyclopedia. Asking for outside perspectives can be useful, whether that is at a noticeboard or a WikiProject (of course, while avoiding canvassing).

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You may ask optional questions below. There is a limit of two questions per editor. Multi-part questions disguised as one question, with the intention of evading the limit, are disallowed. Follow-up questions relevant to questions you have already asked are allowed.

Optional question from Starship.paint

4. Hello HouseBlaster, can you explain your user name? Thanks.

A:. A long time ago at school (remembering the school I was attending, I was about eight years old) I needed a pseudonym for something (I have long since forgotten what that thing was). "HouseBlaster" is what I came up with, and I have used it since.

Optional question from Let'srun

5. When, if ever, is is inappropriate for a WikiProject to be notified about a RfD under WP:CANVASS?

A:. There is not really anything specific to RfD which makes notifications any more or less appropriate than in any other venue. In general – and this extends to RfD – notifications that are partisan, secret, or non-neutral fall afoul of WP:CANVASS; disclosing that you have made a notification to a WikiProject at the original discussion never hurts.

Optional question from Conyo14

6. Greetings. Do you have an area of this encyclopedia you prefer to edit over others (i.e. sports, science, politics, history, etc.)?

A: If you made me pick one area, political history. Though my favorite edits are the "spontaneous" ones – regardless of topic – such as fixing a typo or replacing a ‹The template Fake citation needed is being considered for merging.›  with a in an article I was reading for other reasons.

Optional question from GTrang

7. Given your username, it looks like you will be "blasting" categories away (yes, this is a joke). But how are you going to judge whether a category is to be deleted (or jokingly, "blasted")?

A: There are two parts to this answer, as a !voter and as a closer. As a !voter, categories which are unhelpful for navigation should be merged to parents (and yes, this is broad); categories which are overcategorization should also be merged/deleted. And categories for non-defining characteristics of article subjects are also a no-no. There is no "formulaic" answer to this question – like most things on Wikipedia, CfD is more an art than a science.

As a closer, I judge consensus in the way you judge consensus in any area on Wikipedia: evaluating the strength of the arguments presented through the lens of our PAGs, though headcount is not entirely irrelevant.

Optional question from DandelionAndBurdock

8. Are you planning to do much adminning outside of CFD and coversely are there any areas of adminning where you don't think you'll have much involvement?

A: I do plan to work at WP:REFUND, and I was recently appointed a trainee clerk at ArbCom. Implementing its decisions – e.g. blocking a user who was sitebanned after a case – does require the toolset, and I would use it in the course of those duties. I have no plans to do anything outside of these three areas. One particular area I have no plans to work is AE: a non-insignificant number of AE cases end up at ArbCom, and given that the clerk team is understaffed I would avoid that potential source of reasons to recuse.

Optional question from Idoghor Melody

9. Have you ever made any decision or taken any action in the wiki community that you later regretted after much consideration?

A: Oh, plenty. If you want an example, I would say one of my most egregious actions was "reviewing" Thank You (Meghan Trainor album) for GA. It was a month into the COVID lockdown, and I was not even extended confirmed yet. I don't think I read the entire article... A few years later I remembered I had done that review, I went to check on the article only to discover it is now a featured article. It has a happy ending, but that was a major blunder on my part.

Optional question from CanonNi

10. It looks like you haven't participated in AfD in a while. Are you planning to become more active in that area?

A: I have no plans to get active in AfD, and if I were to become active it would be as a !voter, not a closer.

Optional questions from Renerpho

11. There are a lot of neglected areas on Wikipedia. What is it about CFD specifically that you find interesting to work on? Let's say you wanted to convince me to help out at CFD.

A: I think I enjoy CFD because I enjoy organizing things. It is, at its most basic level, a massive venue where you get to discuss the optimal way to organize things. And as a closer, CFD is great because most discussions are really easy to close, so it is easy to get started. You don't need much experience at all to close a sane proposal with four support per nom !votes and no opposition. There are discussions ranging from that easy to sitting-and-waiting-for-weeks-for-closure-because-it-is-a-behemoth – and everything in between – so you can move from easy closes on up at your own pace. After all, there are ~30 new discussions which need closing every day. And if CFD is not for you, that is completely okay! I am a massive believer that people should edit in ways they find enjoyable (of course, provided that those ways are productive / not disruptive). There are countless other tasks which you might find enjoyable.

12. In relation to my first question, and (jokingly?) to your username: Would you consider yourself a deletionist?

A: The labels deletionist and inclusionist are some of the least helpful things on Wikipedia. They encourage tribalism and are inherently comments on the person, which are both objectively bad things. Calling someone else a deletionist/inclusionist/mergist/etc. has literally never helped any discussion, ever. So I don't consider myself anything, though I would add that I dislike making broad judgements about types of pages and firmly believe ATDs are great. And my username (see Q4) just has to do with the fact that eight-year-olds think explosions are the coolest things in the world, not anything regarding the worthiness of articles (or houses) :D

Optional questions from Aszx5000

13. You seem a very promising candidate and heavily involved in admin-type work on Wikipedia. If you "owned" Wikipedia and had complete power like Elon Musk has with Twitter/X, what would you change?

A: I will start by acknowledging that I wouldn't want to be a dictator of Wikipedia. With that out of the way, I guess there are two ways to interpret this question, and because both are interesting I will answer both (and for those of you keeping score at home, I still count this as one question). If I were in charge of the WMF, I would look into better supporting the editor base, especially engaging new editors. We all started somewhere, better support for newbies really helps the 'pedia grow. If I were in charge of Wikipedia's policies, my current least favorite rule is "links outside of mainspace must be treated as external links" (part of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Self-references to avoid). I got started editing by clicking the "Learn how and when to remove this message" button on a banner, so this is an issue I find important. (I promptly removed a banner while neither addressing the issue nor leaving an edit summary, but I did mark the edit as minor – in other words, not my best edit. But I still think that the point remains we should encourage more people to contribute, even if their initial contributions require cleaning up. I know this sounds crazy, but I got a template message and actually heeded its advice!)

Optional question from The Night Watch

14. Hi there. Wikipedia has an interesting culture with people of various backgrounds, ideologies, dispositions, and hobbies. While collaboration with others can be fun, Wikipedia is also going to suck sometimes, especially with the conflict innate to admin areas. If you had the power to change anything about our culture, what would you change? Feel free to ignore this question if you would like, it's just some philosophical musing.

A: The Wiki Way is to change things, and yet we have this intense opposition to changing rules/procedures/etc. Sure, many of our current processes are not broken, but they could be better. I would make us more open to just trying different ways of doing things – like, for instance, the current 48 hour discussion period of RfA. The change might stink. But it might be better, and we don't know until we try.

Optional question from Daniel Case

15. To turn the last couple of questions around, what change, possibly controversial in its time, has been the most beneficial to Wikipedia in the long term?

A:

Optional question from Codename Noreste

16. Do you have any technical and/or anti-vandalism experience? Examples include reverting vandalism, helping with edit filters or technical issues on the English Wikipedia, etc.

A:

Optional questions from 60.241.125.170

17. This question does not imply any issues with your previous edits, it is due to the unrelated Nihonjoe situation. Do you agree to follow the WP:COI guideline?

A:

18. And would you avoid admin actions for articles where you have a COI?

A:

Discussion

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

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

General comments

• I'm incredibly happy to see this. :) HouseBlaster is pretty much the reason I'm even an admin. Their shove was the last one I needed. [1] I've also seen them doing loads of good work across the project and they often go above and beyond when interacting with newbies. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 00:55, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
• An out-loud "Nice!!" in reaction to seeing this. Major net benefit to the project. Dylan620 (he/him • talk • edits) 00:59, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
• Good candidate and good nominators. I think they'd do fine. Hey man im josh (talk) 01:05, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
• Responsible for an improvement to RFA. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 01:06, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  A short summary for people who weren't around almost two years ago: RfAs still lasted 7 days but people could still !vote until a bureaucrat got around to closing or starting a crat chat. This could sometimes take hours and this change fixed this arbitrary deadline. I was an enthusiastic support at the time although it was not a SNOW discussion, plenty of people opposed for various reasons. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:48, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  that RfC was almost two years ago? gosh, I'm old Queen of Hearts (🏳️‍⚧️ • 🏳️‍🌈) 04:38, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  I started editing in 2018 and I feel this way too often when reading old discussions. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 04:59, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  Meh, that's nothing. I've been editing since 500 BC. Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 18:28, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

• Given the nominators and the fact that CFD is chronically backlogged (and coupled with Blaster's experience in the area), I don't see a reason against this. Best wishes with the RfA, @HouseBlaster:! (Also: great username.) --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 01:49, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
• Only ever had positive experiences with the candidate. I do hope they do more content creation; I enjoyed reviewing 1934 German head of state referendum for GA status. Elli (talk | contribs) 02:15, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
• Don't always agree with their actions at CfD but have found the candidate to be fairly well reasoned all things considered. Barring something unexpected coming up here, I believe they'd do well with the tools. Let'srun (talk) 02:41, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
• This is not a !vote. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 02:53, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  Is it a !!vote then? –FlyingAce^✈hello 03:45, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  A ¬vote, perhaps? Cremastra (talk) 11:44, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  Ceci n'est pas une !vote. – Hilst [talk] 11:45, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  That's not a !vote, This is a !vote Conyo14 (talk) 22:55, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  I see you've played knifey-spoony before! NekoKatsun (nyaa) 15:09, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

• Undoubtable asset to the CfD team. Queen of Hearts (🏳️‍⚧️ • 🏳️‍🌈) 04:18, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  +1 HB has been very helpful to me in CfD and made things run efficiently and productively. Aszx5000 (talk) 12:59, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

• I'm not familiar with the candidate or their work as our areas of focus don't have a lot of overlap, but from a cursorary look at their user page, I don't see a lot of content creation experience, which is totally okay. The candidate has clarified what area of the project's back end they do the most at and that area needs more admins. I fully support a trend where admins may run and be successful without content creation experience but a large focus on the neglected stuff. I look forward to hearing from the candidate and their answers to the questions! Thanks for running! microbiologyMarcus ^{[petri dish·growths]} 13:23, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
• I am concerned about the lack of content creation simply because admins do get dragged into that area no matter what their initial intentions might be. This is an area of activity that's relatively easy to fix, but it is nice to see how a potential admin behaves "under fire" (so to speak) when dealing with content creation (and related areas like AfD, where at least they have been active in the past).Intothatdarkness 13:56, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  I share your concern about minimal main space participation (28%). Articles started are two stubs, a start and a D-page. And they are active in AfD. Lightburst (talk) 15:05, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  @Intothatdarkness: They have a GA: 1934 German head of state referendum. Does that resolve your concerns? Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 15:16, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  One GA is not enough. Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 18:20, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  You're free to have that opinion, even if it's in the minority. Most people have varying definitions of what "counts" as content creation and I'd say HouseBlaster easily meets what most people like to see at a minimum. One example would be my RfA. I also had one GA. Our situations are slightly different because I had a higher mainspace percentage and I have also created a larger total number of articles. But I also didn't have what most people see as a substantial "need for the tools", which is an area I think HouseBlaster is stronger in. I don't think mainspace percentage is everything. Serious content editing usually takes more time per edit than other activities. For example, I recently nominated one article for AfD. It's not an area I often frequent so it doesn't really reflect on my pie chart. But that one AfD gave me 5 Wikipedia namespace edits just for creating the page and adding it to the appropriate deletion sorting lists as well as a user talk page notification. A lot of admin candidates aren't going to have super high mainspace percentages because they're also doing these other maintenance activities. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 22:58, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  I had no GAs and I had over 300 supports. There are various ways to assess a person's knowledge and experience with content. Counting GAs isn't the best when there's no explicit guidelines as to how many someone should have to satisfy the masses. Hey man im josh (talk) 01:39, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

  @Clovermoss I took that into account when making the comment. Admins get dragged into mainspace discussions as part of the job (no matter their plans prior to a successful run), so I look for prior behavior (or lack thereof) there. I don't rely on GA alone for that, although it is helpful. Intothatdarkness 11:35, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

fish, chips, mushy peas and tartare sauce for the candidate and other wikipedians

• While we're waiting for the voting to start, here's some fish, chips, mushy peas and tartare sauce for the candidate and the other Wikipedians in this room to enjoy... I don't see any issues myself at the present time, I see the content query above which is often a red line for me, but probably between their GA and other contributions such as 2014 Northern Cape provincial election - a stub but an adequately cited stub - I'd give them the weak nod on that score that they know what they're doing, given the attestation of good work elsewhere. We'll see how this pans out though.  — Amakuru (talk) 17:25, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
• Back a few months House Blaster took the time from their work at contributing to the Encyclopedia to nominate a fellow editor for the Editor of the Week award. To me it displays a hint into his social awareness. An important trait to have if one wants to administrate. Buster Seven Talk (UTC) 18:34, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
• Be sure to rest well tonight. Watch some movies with friends or gaze up at the stars. That helped me on the final few days at least. Good luck. The Night Watch (talk) 20:42, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
• This pre-!vote period of the trial RfA process is partly for bringing up potential issues, so that's what I'm going to do here. I've interacted a lot with the candidate, and have always found him to be collegial, even when we have differing views, and I appreciate that. But I've also noted some instances where he shows what I perceive as a rigid approach to doing things, along with difficulty in recognizing how other editors might react to what he says. First, there is this entirely well-meaning, but cringeworthy, post: [2]. Second, there is the very lengthy discussion here: [3]. By the end of that second discussion, I actually came around to accepting HouseBlaster's approach, so I don't think that he was technically wrong. But it seemed to me that he was operating under a rigid definition of The Rules^TM, rather than showing deference to what other editors might prefer. I want to make clear that he wasn't, strictly speaking, wrong in either of these two examples. But I note that some other editors have commented above about there not being much content experience, and when I take that along with the two instances I link to here, I think there could be a potential issue in this RfA, of not having the right kind of attentiveness to interpersonal nuance that many editors want to see demonstrated in an RfA. Feel free to reply to my comment. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:51, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  I don't know if I'm missing something, but I see nothing objectionable in the second discussion, which seems to be respectful and constructive on all sides. The first comment is the kind of thing many of us might say and then later feel a bit embarrassed about; again, I don't see any concerns here. Others may have different views, of course. Chocmilk03 (talk) 21:41, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

  I agree with you that HouseBlaster was respectful in the discussion, and thank you for saying the same for "all sides". (And like isaacl, below, I found the discussion instructive.) But the reason I wanted to bring this issue up early is that the disputed edit to the policy page changed some very familiar and commonplace markup ('''bold''', for example), into some markup that, on the face of it, was considerably more complex when viewed in the edit window, and that I, for one, had never even seen before in almost two decades of editing here. And it felt, to me, like HouseBlaster was surprised at the pushback, because this was supposedly a question of only one way of doing the markup being "right", and everyone else just needed to follow the rules. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:57, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

  I've been thinking a lot about how people have been addressing and changing their approach towards interpersonal conflicts. Some of that might come with maturity. We care a lot about communication, "playing well with others" for lack of a better word, but what does the community suggest people with those problems do to help address that? Sorry if this is an odd statement, I've been a little more contemplative than usual lately. The Night Watch (talk) 03:11, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

  Regarding the second discussion (in which I participated), which was about replacing presentational markup of bold and italics with semantic markup, personally I don't think it's an issue of deference, but appreciating there can be differing opinions on what best reflects the semantics of a sentence, and that the cost-benefit ratio for some discussions increases rapidly as the thread continues. I hope that all participants in the second discussion found value in it that will help future collaborative efforts (personally, I found it instructive). isaacl (talk) 21:58, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

• It's nice to see a very clear, specific and well articulated Need For The Tools. It sounds like perhaps they are not interested in using all of the tools, but I think that's alright in this case. -- D'n'B-t -- 06:55, 17 June 2024 (UTC)