User:Keeper76/RfA review

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A Review of the

Requests for Adminship Process
Overview

Question Phase

Reflect

Recommend

Collate

Present
The Review Process
Methodology - Discussion

Requests for Adminship

Welcome to the Question phase of RfA Review. We hope you'll take the time to respond to your questions in order to give us further understanding of what you think of the RfA process. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers here. Also, feel free to answer as many questions as you like. Don't feel you have to tackle everything if you don't want to.

In a departure from the normal support and oppose responses, this review will focus on your thoughts, opinions and concerns. Where possible, you are encouraged to provide examples, references, diffs and so on in order to support your viewpoint. Please note that at this point we are not asking you to recommend possible remedies or solutions for any problems you describe, as that will come later in the review.

If you prefer, you can submit your responses anonymously by emailing them to gazimoff (at) o2.co.uk. Anonymous responses will be posted as subpages and linked to from the responses section, but will have the contributor's details removed. If you have any questions, please use the talk page.

Once you've provided your responses, please encourage other editors to take part in the review. More responses will improve the quality of research, as well as increasing the likelihood of producing meaningful results.

Once again, thank you for taking part!

[edit] Questions

When thinking about the adminship process, what are your thoughts and opinions about the following areas:

  1. Candidate selection (inviting someone to stand as a candidate)
    ...I think nominator's have a very careful role in determining a candidate's merits. They are expected, by essentially being the first "strong supporter" to have thoroughly vetted the candidate's merits/contributions/style/dedication/and tenure. It's also imperative that the candidate is made aware that the RFA arena can become heated, and feel very personal. An analogy to me is it's an "extreme editor review", or a "deletion discussion" about an editor instead of an article.
  2. Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)
    ...I was an ADCO coach for a couple of editors. I'm no longer a fan of the "formal" coaching, but for personal ideologies, not for the program itself. I'm not formal. I don't want the stress of a "formal relationship" (I have too many of those IRL:-)
  3. Nomination, co-nomination and self-nomination (introducing the candidate)
    ...All irrelevant to me. Has little to no bearing in my mind to the quality of the candidate whether they've been nominated, coached, self-nommed, or sought out.
  4. Advertising and canvassing
    ...I do not have email enabled, nor do I use IRC for chatting. I'm a strict believer in "Wikipedia is Wikipedia, talk about it here, not there". Transparency and accountability are huge for me. I'll never fault someone else for using those venues though, but I do believe that they are used frequently to the detriment of finding consensus.
  5. Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)
    ...I rarely read the questions or the answers, and if I do, it's in passing and generally will not affect my stance on a candidate. Anyone can say the right answers to questions and behave when under a spotlight. I look at contribs, demeanor, and the user's talkpage.
  6. Election (including providing reasons for support/oppose)
    ...I strongly believe "support" should be the default, and therefore adding "support" is merely agreeing with the candidate/nominator that admin tools are needed/wanted. Unless something strongly tells you or leads you to believe that a candidate is not a qualified candidate, you should support. Therefore, I have no problem with a short "support" position, but I do tend to have a problem with an unreasoned, unreasonable, or unexplained "oppose" position. I expect them to explain why an editor shouldn't get the extra tools, and I expect of myself that I will always do the same when opposing.
  7. Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)
    ...No opinion on this. I've asked candidates to withdraw before, but I don't find it necessary for a candidate to withdraw, or controversial if they do/don't. I do like Pedro's essay for those that do withdraw because of the likelihood of not succeeding.
  8. Declaration (the bureaucrat closing the application. Also includes WP:NOTNOW closes)
    ...No opinion on this.
  9. Training (use of New Admin School, other post-election training)
    ...No opinion on this other than it should not be required. I've heard wind of adding a "probationary" period to new admins. If you strongly feel they'll mess up with the tools and need "training", don't support their RFA. If they can pass an RFA, they can certainly decide on their own whether or not to delete something in CSD. That said, new admin school is an excellent reference point that I access often, and should be linked to all admins' pages in some form as a quick reference tool for lesser used tools and complicated procedures.
  10. Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)
    ...Until it's mandatory, centralized, and standardized, I won't be in it, and I'm not even a legalist or formalist. Because recall "criteria" can be changed at any time by the editor that has essentially created their own judge and selected their own jury, AOR doesn't seem to be an effective way to desysop. If an admin has recall criteria while they're a "good admin", and then they go rogue and get other editor's to ask for their recall, why would I believe that they'll honor their recall pledge that they made when they were "good"? It's gonna end up at ArbComm anyway, recall pledge or not.

When thinking about adminship in general, what are your thoughts and opinions about the following areas:

  1. How do you view the role of an administrator?
    ...Mediator, janitor, secretary, mentor
  2. What attributes do you feel an administrator should possess?
    ...See User:Keeper76/RfA


Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:

  1. Have you ever voted in a request for Adminship? If so what was your experience?
    ...All the freeking time. Probably too much. I'm comfortable in that arena though, and rather fascinated by watching the level of human, fallible intereaction that happens there while no one is actually even talking (but typing).
  2. Have you ever stood as a candidate under the Request for Adminship process? If so what was your experience?
    ...Yes. It was successful, but stressful.
  3. Do you have any further thoughts or opinions on the Request for Adminship process?
    ...Yes I do, but I don't wanna overload the servers....

[edit] Once you're finished...

Thank you again for taking part in this review of the Request for Adminship process. Now that you've completed the questionnaire, don't forget to add the following line of code to the bottom of the Response page by clicking this link and copying the following to the BOTTOM of the list.

* [[User:Keeper76/RfA review]] added by ~~~ at ~~~~~

Again, on behalf of the project, thank you for your participation.

This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 20:56, 12 June 2008 (UTC).