User:Samir/Pete.Hurd RfA

Pete.Hurd

Voice your opinion (talk page) (0/0/0); Scheduled to end 05:58, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Pete.Hurd (talk · contribs) - I'm pleased to nominate Pete.Hurd for adminship. Pete has been editing with us since April 2005. He has contributed extensively to articles in game theory, principles of evolution, and genetic determinants of behaviour and personality. Pete's extensive knowledge base in these fields (his eclectic research interest is brutally interesting) has helped develop articles into fine general synopses of specialized areas: digit ratio, Coolidge effect, and best response are some examples. He's active on ANI where his knowledge of policy and his common sense shine through. He is a valued contributor to deletion discussions. He's always civil, and a pleasure to work with on articles. I see him focusing on content based disputes as an administrator, where I think his extensive mainspace experience and levelheadedness will service him well. In short, I think he'd be a great (and overdue) addition as an administrator here -- Samir 05:58, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here:

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 expect to begin with simple tasks appearing CAT:AB -such as CSD-, and in closing AfDs. One admin tool I'd find really handy is viewing deleted articles; I'd like not to have to bother admins with requests to provide me with information from deleted articles. I browse AN/I several times a day, and don't think being given the mop will change the frequency of that...

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

A: I think Best response and Evolutionarily stable strategy are probably the ones I'm happiest with. Best response mappings are an important aspect of game theory that (at least within my professional discipline of behavioural ecology, and biological game theory) really don't get taught to students, but ought to be. I once started writing a textbook for teaching game theory to evolutionary biologists, and the previously existing article on Best response was the natural home for much of it. Other articles I think I've made substantive contributions to but don't consider as close to be being "done" include: Handicap principle, Chicken (game). Other examples of my contributions to articles are mentioned on my user page.

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'll talk (at the risk of exhausting your patience about a couple of very old conflicts, because early events seem more stressful, and more formative experiences.

For me, the stress inducing editing conflicts have been the ones where honestly well intentioned editors, who really know what they are talking about, get into protracted disagreements with each other, such as was the case with Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Marcosantezana. In addition to 2c worth at the RFAR, I tried to moderate the heat, both on wiki, but mostly off-wiki, with those participants I had some degree of rapport with. In the end, the RFAR process worked pretty much as it ought to, and the outcome was pretty much as I anticipated. The lesson was to view the dispute as a marathon event rather than a sprint, and to keep in regular contact with fellow wikipedians, actively seek out sanity-checks for one's gut responses before shooting back. Eventually I had the sense to remove Natural selection from one's watchlist *before* I become embittered (it's back now, FWIW)...

Another form of frustration came early on in my involvement with the project over content in Human height. I was looking for a source for data comparing average height of members of different nationalities or ethnic groups, and that article had table of such data, along with a bunch of really poor sourcing^*. This led to three discrete sources of frustration 1) vandals (many of whom were apparently offended by the fact that people from X were taller than people from Y, and regularly changed the data to be more flattering), 2) people who feel the need to assert that differences in height are due to "nature, not nurture" or "nurture, not nature" on the basis of their personal experience, common sense, or something they once read somewhere but can't quite remember now and 3) editors who want to delete the data, rather than verifying, or replacing with well sourced data. The lessons I learned were 1) treat vandalism as if it were the weather, if one views the snowballs thrown at an article as a hailstorm with no real rational intent, then there's no need to get upset. Revert, warn if appropriate, move on. 2) The failure to understand that nature versus nurture is a non-sensical debate may be attributed to the need for improvements to be made to articles such as Nature versus nurture and Gene-environment interaction. One unit of effort put into improving those articles is worth many many many put into to Talk:Human height. Psychological research has shown that engaging in constructive distractor tasks is more effective at dissipating anger than "catharsis" (which really doesn't work at all). 3) AGF quite properly reads "Assume good faith", not "behave publicly as if you believed that you are assuming good faith". Those who felt it more constructive to delete the material were as right (or more) as I was in wanting to fix it. Making an honest attempt to see the point from the vantage point of the opposing side is a not just part of intellectual honesty, it's a good mental health practice. Katefan0 was my go-to admin around this time (she did a partial page protect, on the page IIRC) and dealing with people like her is such a pleasure, well it's a large part of my motivation to work on the project.

* In the end I found a good academic text with the data I was seeking, and published the idea I was seeking the data for here

Edit "conflicts" involving more malicious actions (meaning incidents like this, him/this, him, him) aren't really stress inducing, so much as time wasting, but it helps a *lot* to have wiki-colleagues like Bwithh and Kzollman around. Editing conflicts, vandalism, etc are problems that emerge from the social nature of the wiki, and it's been my experience that dealing with them as a society turns what could be a solitary trial of patience into something like a team win. For every instance in which I felt some transient frustration at someone on the Wiki, there's been one or more corresponding sane and reasonable Wikipedians there that's made the whole process worthwhile.

On that note, the single most frustrating experience I've had on Wikipedia followed from an interation with Betacommand-bot, or more precisely with the difficulty I've experience trying to figure out what the policy was it was enforcing. After I could not find a clear statement of what was required to satisfy the image policy it was enforcing, I tried to quit - but wikiholism's claws seem to have sunk deeper than I'd thought. It's my impression that a clearer statement of policy has been crafted since then. It would have been nice to have it available before my run-in with Betacommand-bot. I think I fully understand the need to manage the projects legal exposure to the possible consequences of distributing non-free images. My frustration wasn't the result of wanting to flaunt the rules, but of running against the current of various Rule Enforcers in a vacuum of Rule Explainers, or Rule Compliance HOWTOs.

General comments

RfAs for this user:

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

---

Please keep criticism constructive and polite. Remain civil at all times. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review Special:Contributions/Pete.Hurd before commenting.

Discussion

Support

1. I support this nomination. futurebird 13:22, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
2. Whilst I am not a very active editor, I see the fruits of Pete's work through the Academics and Educators AfD and support his nomination. Jon Hobynx 17:52, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Oppose

Neutral