Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/West.andrew.g

West.andrew.g

Voice your opinion on this candidate (talk page) (5/0/0); Scheduled to end 18:15, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Nomination

West.andrew.g (talk · contribs) – I'm pleased to nominate User:West.andrew.g for administrator. Andrew is a University of Pennsylvania PhD candidate in his final year, writing his thesis on security in collaborative online environments. In other words, he builds computer tools that scale to protect Wikipedia and other wikis. He has demonstrated his ability in this area by developing the anti-vandal tool WP:STiki, which to date has been used to revert over 250,000 instances of vandalism. STiki uses a metadata algorithm to identify and prioritize likely vandalism, including 'subtle' vandalism'; presents an interface for human review of lower confidence but still suspect ClueBot findings (that cannot be reverted automatically); reviews external link spam; and engages STiki users through regular recognition and statistical tracking of participation. Andrew has also been a rollbacker since 2010 and used that capability to manually classify 67,000 instances of suspected vandalism himself.

Andrew has been with us since 2008, but he came onto my radar in 2010 when he conducted a rigorous but ill-conceived breaching experiment which involved using multiple accounts to test Wikipedia's security and response to spam. Andrew was blocked and negotiated his return to good standing with ArbCom shortly thereafter. Since the breaching experiment Andrew has shown himself to be willing to work within our community rules and to advance the interests of Wikipedia, not putting his own research priorities above those of our project. He has built tools that permit others to carry on valuable work at a massive scale. Moreover, he has added some of the most authoritative and useful scholarship about vandalism detection on wikis of any researcher in the field.

Andrew's scope of research is vast and includes not only vandalism and spam but also suspicious editing by IPs, copyright-violation detection, category organization, deleted content, and article popularity (see here and here). Andrew needs the Administrator tools to continue his research and tool-building, part of which involves analyzing revision-deleted content in statistical detail, as well as other aspects of site operations. While he could pursue the Researcher userright, to date this has never been granted to volunteers, only WMF staff. A successful RfA will permit him the access he requires while also demonstrating community support. In all, I believe he's not only someone we want on our side, he has shown that he is on our side, and we should keep him around by enabling him to continue and expand the innovative and compelling work he has undertaken. Ocaasi ^{t | c} 21:27, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Co-nomination

I'm gratified to be able to co-nominate User:West.andrew.g for adminship. My reason for doing so is simple: I believe that having Andrew as an administrator will be a net positive for the project. I have reviewed his work and his methods and I think they speak for themselves; I say this even of the spam research that he conducted in August 2010. The paper it engendered is a fascinating treatise on research ethics. It's clear throughout the paper that Andrew did everything possible to minimize harm to Wikipedia and its contributors, and what harm there was was justified by the knowledge he was able to share with the community. This knowledge directly and indirectly contributed to improvement of the Edit filter and RevisionDelete, now some of our most effective tools against malicious spam attacks.

Andrew is of course not the typical adminship candidate and he's not going to be the typical administrator. I don't think we're going to see him closing too many deletion discussions, editing many protected pages, or performing too many history merges. And that's okay, because that's not how he can best serve Wikipedia. Data analysis and tool-building are what he does best, and they are skills of which the community is always in need. I'm pleased to see him approach the community directly for the permission to keep on doing what he's doing, and I have the utmost confidence in his ability to use those permissions wisely and always within the scope of our processes. — madman 04:02, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here:

I thank User:Ocaasi and User:Madman for this nomination and it is one I accept. They have well summarized my contributions on the project and I would like to expand on just a few main points before the community's discussion/questioning (West.andrew.g (talk) 18:55, 20 February 2013 (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: The catalyst behind this RfA is to obtain access to the administrative toolkit for purposes of data analysis and tool-building, not so I can use it for my personal editing. My 2010 attempt to get the researcher user-right dissolved in a philosophical debate, and a more recent request via WMF research/legal contacts suggested this RfA was the most appropriate venue to secure the needed permissions. My previous inability to secure the user-rights made my analysis of oversight/deleted revisions a far more challenging process than it needed to be. Regardless, that research showed copyright violations were perhaps the project's biggest vulnerability (understandably, they are not surface-level damage like vandalism). An autonomous means to discover copyright violations would be very exciting, and indeed, my participation with WP:Turnitin (and the need to view RD1 deleted content) is a catalyst for this request. However, the opportunities do not end there. I hope to analyze article deletion and page protection actions (among others) and hopefully bring machine-learning to bear by creating tools that can autonomously perform/suggest some fraction of these tasks and prioritize the remainder for human review.

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

A: I think my community involvement here is not one best reflected by my contribution history alone. I am an researcher/developer, and I am confident my tools (e.g., WP:STiki, WP:WikiAudit, work-in-progress) and reports (e.g., WP:5000) have enabled others to efficiently perform a magnitude of work that I could never approach as an individual. Countless researchers have used Wikipedia as a dataset, but I feel I distinguish myself by practically implementing my findings for the benefit of the community and continuing to improve and support these tools long after they have fulfilled their research role. Virtually all of my edits are (a) vandalism/spam reverts or (b) on talk pages in support of my tools/reports. I don't arrive with diverse experience regarding dispute resolution (though I've had to ask some users to stop using my tools, and dealt with a few angry vandals), edit warring, or many of the other oft-discussed topics here. While I may not edit in these spaces, I do understand the processes by which they operate. I follow along at WP:VPT, WP:AIV, WP:ANI, and WP:BRFA -- and subscribe to a number of related mailing lists. I've also attended the past three Wikimania events (Gdansk, Haifa, Washington D.C.). Finally, I've contributed a great deal of wiki and Wikipedia relevant academic research, which can be accessed via my website, C.V., or WikiPapers.

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: Without question, my link spam experiments were contrary to WP:DWIP, WP:BEANS, and other community policies. To this end, all I can offer is (a) apologies, (b) evidence of good-faith intentions, and (c) to note how the events shaped my future/ongoing interaction with the project. My goal was to obtain data on human damage responses that could be used to prevent future -- actually malicious -- incidents of the same type. My findings have since been shared internally, externally, and integrated into my classifiers/tools. The experiments were rigorously planned to minimize harm to human subjects, have IRB approval, and vague details were published only months after the WMF was offered code/consultation on the vulnerability (more details). Regardless of one's stance on such practices, my conditions with ArbCom make clear that no further such experiments should take place; conditions I have now honored for several years. Please consider that I am transparent about my real-life identity, and I consider many long-standing community members among my professional colleagues. For anyone concerned that my career and wiki-work are in conflict-of-interest, very soon I will be taking a research position unrelated to wikis/Wikipedia/collaboration. So, this RfA and the subsequent work that would result from it are done on purely personal/volunteer terms.

Outside such incidents, even ordinary wiki-work can sometimes cause stress in a community member. Indeed, with the data and tools I maintain, these requests can sometimes become taxing on my schedule. I have always sought to be honest with users regarding the prioritization of their suggestions. In places like WT:STiki they have become explicit parts of the organizational process (i.e., a bug and feature request tracking table). I've always sought to prioritize my actions based on community impact, and I've always been responsive to talk page and email queries even when I cannot pursue them further.

General comments

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

  Note that the seemingly bizarrely high proportion of userspace edits is due to regular technical reporting which West.andrew.g conducts en masse in his userspace.

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

Discussion

Support

1. Support as nom. — madman 18:26, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
2. Support Hell, yes! Valuable contributor, just not in the usual manner. No sign he might misuse tools. DocTree (ʞlɐʇ·cont) Join WER 18:30, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
3. Support as nom. A great asset to our community in a unique capacity. Ocaasi ^{t | c} 18:32, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
4. Support No concerns, very competent contributor. Mark Arsten (talk) 19:16, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
5. Support I rarely edit these days, but West has my trust from very positive interactions in the past. Ottawa4ever (talk) 19:17, 20 February 2013 (UTC)