| Candidate
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Thoughts
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Verdict
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| Coren |
TLDR — The four points below indicate, to me, that the candidate has so far distanced himself from the community that it renders him an ineffective Arb. He is largely inactive except for ArbCom duties, and dosen't seem to recognize controversy (perhaps because if all you ever do is work in ArbCom, all you ever see is controversy.) In short, I believe that it's time for him to be replaced by someone more connect with, and grounded in, the community he or she will serve as an Arb.
- I really don't like the candidate's answer to general question #5, which as I noted above, is one of the ones I'm paying special attention to. That Coren didn't see this motion, topic banning Delta from NFCC edits, as being controversial is indicative, to me, of an inadequate ability on the candidate's part to detect controversy. Just looking at the length of the discussion, you can tell that the motion didn't run smoothly. That the motion factors into a current ArbCom case should also be an indication that there was a noticeable amount of controversy resulting from the motion.
- As NW pointed out, this candidate's last 500 article edits go back to 2007. Additionally, his last 500 edits overall go back to May of this year. It's worth noting that several arbs have similar numbers, however not all of them do. Becoming an Arb should not mean that users stop being involved elsewhere in the project.
- Similarly, in his statement Coren said "I cannot claim to have been an arbitrator that stood especially out". I feel this is an understatement; in the past few years Coren hasn't been a user that especially stood out. I don't see a pattern of involvement in discussions outside of the Arbspace, or any other real sign of involvement in the project as a whole. Since becoming an Arb, he's just been an Arb. That's far from ideal, as it indicates that he's removed himself, for one reason or another, from the community he holds tremendous power over.
- There was a motion put forward in August, one I found particularly disgusting, that would have forced new editors to jump through hoops in order to be able to participate in certain portions of the public side of the case process. Coren supported it, and although he did so with caveats, I think that he was completely and inexcusably in the wrong by doing so, and that his support demonstrated that he holds a philosophy on Wikipedia that is incomparable with my my own. 'Disruptive until proven otherwise' has not, and should never be, a philosophy adopted towards new users.
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Oppose
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| Kirill Lokshin |
TLDR — I'm still awaiting the answers to questions 5c and 8, but from what I've seen so far I'm a definite "on the fence". On the one hand, the candidate clearly has experience, and the questions that he has answered have been good. On the other hand, the candidate went from being a prolific article worker averaging 2000 edits a month to someone with almost no work in the mainspace and averaging 200 edits a month, upon joining the committee. That's a disturbing drop. The point about the steering committee also gives me pause. I'm not quite convinced that it would be terrible to see Kirill re-elected, but I don't think that I'll be voting for him personally.
- Reading over the questions that the candidate has answered thus far, it is clear that a good deal of thought and experience has been put into them. Mind you, he's been awfully slow in getting to them, but I am liking the end product that I am seeing.
- Yet again, credit for bringing a good point to light goes to NuclearWarfare. Personally I think that the idea of an advisory board that would have no formal powers and would discuss pressing issues facing the project and them make recommendations is a damn good idea. The problem, however, is that by keeping so much of the process secret, Kirill formed a cabal, not a committee. I'm not familiar with the affair, it's before my time, but in the absence of convincing evidence that this was going to morph into a transparent, elected body (remember that even ArbCom was at one time an appointed body), I have to take this as a worrying sign.
- The candidate's last 500 article space edits go back to early 2008. The candidate is on the lower end of the average contributions per month among sitting arbs scale. It is important to me that Arbs spend time being involved in the community, and doing regular work, as it keeps them grounded. I'd be more comfortable with the candidate if I saw more evidence of this.
- While not a bad argument, I believe that the "longest-serving arbitrator in the history of the Committee" argument that he made in his nomination statement isn't a particularly strong argument. As long as we have a few users that have been around a few years, there's no special need for one who's been around for five. The argument is a net positive for me, but a small one.
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No Vote
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| AGK |
Forthcoming. |
Undecided; preliminary research indicates Support
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| Hersfold |
TLDR — With some reservations, I'm changing from "No Vote" to "Support". It's not because I'm disappointed with the field of candidates (which I am), but because Hersfold's answers to the questions blew me away. Yes, I'm still concerned that the candidate really hasn't been that active, or active consistently, but the candidate knows what the job he's going into entails, and as I said, the answers to the questions are setting a high bar for the candidates.
- Hersfold has produced what is, in my opinion, the best set of answers to come forth in this election. Not only that, but he's answered the questions faster than pretty much anyone else. To me, this is a good sign. The candidate handled my optional questions very well, as well as NW questions 3 and 4, and Rschen7754 question 2, which struck what I see as an appropriate balance. As for the general questions, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 10 were all very well done. The only answer that I took objection with was Rschen7754 question 4; Simple Wikipedia is not for duping unsatisfactory users, we need to kill off that idea.
- I have to be completely honest; I'm worried about his low and sporadic history of activity in recent years, and by his resignation as an Arb before. This makes me hesitant to vote him into a position where a premium is placed on being consistently available and one that consumes large amounts of time. However, Hersfold just went through back to back requests for Bureaucratship and Bot Approvals Group membership in July and August of this year, and a quick check of his Wikipedia namespace edits shows that while he isn't the most active member of either group, he's... well... doing stuff for both roles.
- On a related note, the candidate's monthly edit count is so low that I fear that Hersfold will all but stop editing the rest of the project if he becomes an Arb; ArbCom has knocked quadruple digit a month editors down to the low hundreds, and Hersfold is already at the low hundreds now.
- Outside of his user talk page, the page the candidate has made the most edits to is the Help desk. However, as far as I can tell, he hasn't made an edit there since October 2009. Whatever happens in this ACE, I encourage the candidate to pick back up what was a very good habit of theirs.
- My interactions with the candidate, most of which have been in the #Wikipedia-en-SPI IRC channel, have been positive.
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Support
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| Geni |
- My interactions with the candidate, most of which have been in the #Wikipedia-en IRC channel, have been positive.
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Undecided; preliminary research indicates No Vote
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| Courcelles |
- My interactions with the candidate, most of which have been in the #Wikipedia-en-SPI and #Wikipedia-en IRC channels, have been positive.
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Undecided; preliminary research indicates Support
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| Risker |
TLDR — This is perhaps the hardest recommendation for other people to accept, because my reasoning is based off of personal experience on the one hand, and an incident which most people are unaware of, or don't know the details of, on the other. I suppose that all I can say is that if you trust me at all, even a little bit, that you should accept that I'm giving Risker my highest possible recommendation.
- Risker is on the lower end of the spectrum for monthly contributions by sitting Arbs, although they are consistently in the triple digits. A survey of the edits that the candidate has made in recent months shows a mix of noticeboards, the article space, and talk pages, an indication that she has not separated herself too much from the community, which is important.
- The incident that really crystallized for me just how valuable Risker was as an Arb was the 'Sophie incident' which happened almost a year ago. I don't know all the details, as all of ArbCom's internal dealings were kept private, but almost all of the noteworthy components of the incident happened off Wikipedia, by IRC and email, and I was there personally for a good deal of it. Without going into too much detail, I firmly believe that the block "Sophie" was a good block, and that allowing that user to remain on the project would have put Wikipedia users at an unacceptable risk. From what I witnessed, Risker performed admirably, taking a leading role in the affair. A number of factors, including several Wikipedia users feeding "Sophie" answers in one IRC channel while Risker was trying to clear up the situation in an interview "Sophie" in another channel, made the situation incredibly, and needlessly, complicated; Risker demonstrated great skill in investigating and handling difficult situations, and that's a core requirement I want to see in Arbs.
- The only black mark that comes to mind is that, by her own admission, the candidate has never been the lead drafter for an ArbCom case. I find it curious that the candidate has been on the committee for three years and never done a single one.
- Questions were answered well.
- To say that my interactions with the candidate have been positive is an understatement. I've had better interactions with Risker than I have had with any other Arb (mostly on IRC), and have found her to be very well grounded. Most of my interactions with the candidate were when I was a very new user, and I credit her, along with two other people (neither of them candidates or Arbs at this time), as being the ones that convinced me to stick around.
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Strong Support
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| Hot Stop |
TLDR — Severely unqualified, with both a lack of experience and an apparent lack of maturity.
- Inevitably someone runs in each election that's horribly underqualified. This year it's Hot Stop. As far as I can tell, Hot Stop has no experience in dealing with problem users, save possibally for nine edits to AN/I. How can I be expected to trust this candidate to be able to handle extremely complex behavioral disputes when there is no evidence that he has dealt with even petty disputes? At 831 edits to 214 pages, Hot Soup has made less edits in his seven month tenure here than I make in a month. That's not to say that I want to see massive edit counts, but I want to see a good deal of experience, and exposure to a larger swath of the project, before I'm willing to consider supporting a candidate, or even remaining neutral.
- Unless there are some deleted contributions that I didn't see, I'm not sure I totally agree with the block that this user received. That being said, his unblock rationale, essentially a blame the victim tactic, and of course the behavior that lead to the block, leaves me with very little confidence that the user has the maturity required for this role. The candidate's summary
- It's apparent to me that very little forethought went into the candidate's answering of the general questions.
- Refactoring other people's comments is indefensible.
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Strong Oppose
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| Jclemens |
Forthcoming. |
Undecided
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| Worm That Turned
|
- My interactions with the candidate, most of which have been in the #Wikipedia-en IRC channel, have been positive.
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Undecided; preliminary research indicates Support
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| NWA.Rep
|
TLDR — I'm not entirely sure if this candidate really wants a seat, or if the whole thing is just a giant POINT parade. Either way, the candidate has 24 edits in 2011, and dosen't seem to be here for any purpose other than to rant. The candidate's answers to the questions are almost laughably bad, and show that he not only didn't put any effort into them, but isn't at all up to date on a variety of issues.
- At the time of this writing, the candidate had 24 edits to Wikipedia in 2011, and 118 in 2010 (most of which were made on one day).
- The candidate's userpage takes the form of an autobiography filled with inappropriate comments, POV that dances ever-so-carefully on the line between barely acceptable and hate speech, a personal attack against another Wikipedian.
- This personal attack is from 2008, yes, but that's within his last 500 contributions, and he keeps it on his userpage. Being proud of that, while seeking election to the body that oversees civility violations, among other things, dosen't sit well with me.
- The further down the list of questions, the worse the answers become. His answer to 6e is wrong, and I was unaware until then that a question could actually be answered wrong. In answers 5c, 6d, and 9, the candidate, who has been inactive for three years by his own admission, has two choices; He could either read up on the recent history of the body he is proposing to join and present an answer to the questions, or he could just say he hasn't been around and not actually answer the questions. NWA.Rep chose the second option. For the rest of the questions, as well as the statement, most of the candidate's energies are being put into using the election as a platform to campaign for a specific issue which is only mildly related to ArbCom itself. Question 2 is the only one that I feel that he actually put effort into answering.
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Strong Oppose
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| Eluchil404 |
- The first thing that came to mind when I was reading this candidate's statement is "who?". I've never heard of this person before, and while that's not a reason to oppose an RfA, it's a worrying sign here; this is because I watchlist all of the village pump pages, the more important noticeboards, several featured process pages, Signpost talk pages, anything that hits CENT, and a number of other pages and processes, and I can't remember ever seeing this user. All of those things I listed are places where there is significant community involvement. The candidate's Wikipedia namespace contributions show that all the candidate does is AfD and deletion reviews. A few edits to ArbCom enforcement, one to a village pump, and a minute number of other edits are sprinkled through, but its not much. Don't get me wrong, the candidate is doing valuable work, and I don't doubt that there is some level of conflict resolution and community involvement in AfD and deletion reviews, but that's not the kind of pedigree that I'm looking for in an Arb.
- The candidate rarely breaks 100 edits a month. As said above, ArbCom has knocked quadruple digit a month editors down to the low hundreds, and this editor is starting below where many Arbs have reduced to.
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Undecided
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| DeltaQuad |
TLDR — I will personally vote "Oppose" for this candidate, however I am doing so for reasons that are largely personal and somewhat private, and therefore would especially caution users about accepting this recommendation without seeking other prospective. Because of the sensitive nature of the issues involved, I spent the last hour preparing this statement, and that is all that I will say on the matter, unless a member of the Arbitration Committee or the Wikimedia Foundation staff, acting in official capacity, asks me for additional information.
Prepared statement
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- The candidate is a member of the staff of TechEssentials. Long before they became known to the larger Wikipedia community when they became the host for the Wikinews fork OpenGlobe, DeltaQuad, as well as several other leaders of the TechEssentials organization and a handful of other Wikipedians, were involved in an incident in which several parties, while not acting with malicious intent towards Wikipedia, knowingly interfered with an ArbCom investigation. The interference took place in DeltaQuad's private, invite only IRC channel. While there were a number of other people in that room whom I can point to and say 'that user did wrong', DeltaQuad was largely silent while I was in the room, and many of the people in that room were not engaged in anything questionable, they were either watching the conversation in silence or were simply not at their keyboards. Making things even more complicated, everyone in that room, including myself, was genuinely trying to do what they believed was the right thing, going off the information that they had at the time. I'm not sure exactly what Delta's involvement ultimately was, but I do know that bad decisions were made there, and it's left my trust in DeltaQuad permanently shaken.
- I have since brought up this incident, and TE staff memebers' connections to it, on Wikipedia. After two of those mentions, I was threatened over the IRC by members of the TechEssentils staff. One of those incidents was little more than a long, angry rant. The other involved the staff member threatening that either I stop mentioning the incident, or he would take me to ArbCom and try to have them force me to stop talking about it. Neither of the two conversations were with DeltaQuad, but I bring them up because between the incident above and the harassment from other staff members, I am extremely uncomfortable with any leader of TE being a Wikipedia Arb, as it creates an unacceptable conflict of interest. I most certainly would not want anyone even remotely connect to an organization whose leadership has harassed me to have access to the private information about me that comes with the user rights given to Arbs, and I very much do not trust anyone connected with that organization in any meaningful way. This might seem like guilt by association, but at the end of the day, DeltaQuad has chosen to remain a leader of an organization whose other leaders have acted inexcusably. That's not acceptable to me.
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Oppose
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