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Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Candidates/Ahecht

< Wikipedia:Administrator elections | October 2024 | Candidates
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The following discussion is preserved as an archive of a successful administrator election candidacy. Please do not modify it.

Final (303/94/219); See official results (non-admin closure) – DreamRimmer (talk) 16:05, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination

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Ahecht (talk · contribs · they/them) – Hi, I'm Ahecht, and I've been a registered editor here for 18 years (and I was editing as an IP for at least a year before I registered for an account). Over that time I've focused on several areas of the project. I started out mostly doing copyediting and then moved on to anti-vandalism work. After spending a fair amount of time at WP:New pages patrol and WP:Recent changes patrol, I decided that I wanted to spend more time helping with content creation, as opposed to removal, and became involved with WP:Articles for creation and WP:Articles for creation/Redirects. At the latter, I created {{Request redirect}} to automate much of the review process, which led me down a rabbit hole to the technical side of Wikipedia. Since then, in addition to WP:GNOMEish work, I've created or improved hundreds of templates and modules, written widely used userscripts and external tools, and run bots that affects tens of thousands of pages. If you've seen my name around recently, it's likely either through a template or module I created, my work cleaning up pages that are broken because they exceed the post-expand include size limit, or as a page mover at Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests. When I was marked as an administrator without tools back in April I said I would consider running if elections were held, so here I am.

I have never edited for pay, and will never do so. I have a bot account, Ahechtbot, and an unused doppleganger account, Ahect. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:19, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Co-nomination statement

This is my third RFA nomination. Ahecht has made over 58,000 edits and is setting a personal record for activity levels in 2024. I've found their module work to be helpful and barnstar-worthy. They're active at Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests where we have a critical need for more administrators who can move pages by deleting redirects rather than by non-optimal page swaps, so this should be a long-overdue promotion from page-mover. Clean block log; no noticeboard drama; 'nuff said. – wbm1058 (talk) 22:20, 9 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Questions for the candidate

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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: A lot of the work I've done already has been on the "administration" side of Wikipedia, and my work in New Page Patrol, Articles for Creation, and answering edit and move requests as a template editor and page mover has given me a lot of experience with determining consensus and working in "customer service", helping newer users and answering their questions and complaints. Since there have been several technically-minded administrators who have recently resigned or gone on indefinite wikibreaks, I'd like to be able to use this experience to help with administrator backlogs, which would initially be edit and move requests for fully protected pages. I don't have any plans to get involved with deletion outside of WP:G6, but I could see myself branching out into other underserved areas of Wikipedia.
2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?
A: I have a lot of edit history since 2006 but much of it is WP:GNOMEish, so while I know there are plenty of articles that I've rewritten or made large contributions to over the years, it's hard to remember most of them. Among the highlights, I've spent a lot of time updating and maintaining articles on cruise ships, including getting List of largest cruise ships promoted to featured list, I've rewritten large sections of movie articles, including Toy Story and Tough Guys Don't Dance (film), and, although I prefer editing existing articles, I have created a handful from scratch such as Spaceflight, Inc., Bill Sherman, Hollywood United Methodist Church, and Rival (consumer products company).
My most significant work has been on templates that impact a large percentage of Wikipedia pages. In addition to {{Request redirect}}, I updated {{High-use}} to automatically show transclusion counts tabulated by my bot Ahechtbot, I converted {{Reply to}} (aka {{ping}}) to Lua to allow more people to be mentioned at once, created Module:Gridiron color to consolidate 10 different color templates, created Module:Science redirect to consolidate 5 different redirect templates, and made significant contributions to Module:Taxonbar. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I rewrote {{Medical cases chart}} and {{COVID-19 pandemic}} to be native Lua, saving hundreds of pages from exceeding the post-expand inclusion size limit. In my efforts to further fix pages that exceed the inclusion size limit, I created Module:Flag, created Module:English Heritage listed building, created Module:Country2nationality/Module:Iso2nationality, and reworked Module:Navbox (and I'm sandboxing another revision that will consolidate {{Navbox}}, {{Navbox with columns}}, and {{Navbox with collapsible groups}}).
I've created several widely used userscripts, including Pageswap GUI (which I've used to help move almost 1000 articles), Picture of the Day Helper (which I've used to create over 60 Picture of the Day templates), Watchlist cleaner, TemplateSearch, Refresh, and Mass Move. I also have created several tools hosted at toolforge, including toolforge:ircredirect (which powers WP:IRC help disclaimer), toolforge:excel2wiki, and toolforge:randomincategory, and am a maintainer of toolforge:afdstats.
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: It's impossible to completely avoid conflicts over an 18-year tenure. I deal with them by assuming good faith, and, as long as the other party isn't actively harming Wikipedia, just reminding myself that this is just a website I volunteer for, and it's not worth getting overly worked up about. If it's clear that my position doesn't match the consensus, I back down and continue on with my life. When I've upset people by denying an edit request, reverting an unproductive edit, or declining a draft, calmly explaining the policies and giving them next steps to follow has usually been able to diffuse the situation. In the rare cases that it isn't, I seek out help from the appropriate venues. Similarly, I know that some of my more technical edits have caused confusion, especially when I've screwed up and accidentally broken a page. I just try to be responsive, quick to self-revert if needed, and treat the other party the way I would want to be treated if the situation were reversed.

You may ask optional questions below. There is a limit of two questions per editor. Multi-part questions are disallowed, but you are allowed to ask follow-up questions related to previous questions.

Optional question from Z1720

4. In your response to question 3, you have given some information about the process you take in response to a conflict. Can you please give a specific example of a recent conflict or disagreement you have been involved with and describe either how you successfully managed the conflict or what you would have done differently? Thanks, Z1720 (talk) 00:17, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A: The most recent thing to come to mind that could be called a "conflict" was with a well-meaning editor who was inappropriately changing english varieties across a series of articles on Italian food. I saw the changes on my watchlist and checked that there was already a discussion in place on their talk page explaining our guidelines, so I set to work unwinding the changes where appropriate. During this process they came to my talk page concerned about some of the reverts, and Valereee and I worked with them here and here to help them understand which changes were being undone and why. In the one or cases where they were correct that I had missed an english variant being established, I was quick to self-revert.

Optional question from Thryduulf

5. Why did you choose to seek adminship via election rather than via a standard RFA?
A:That's a good question. I had always been nervous about the time commitment required for a regular RfA, and honestly the thought of a full week of watching !votes trickle in to determine my fate seemed very stressful. While a few editors had suggested that I run in the past I never really had much motivation to. However, when an administrator without tools banner was dropped on my talk page about a week after the Administrator Election RfC closed, it got me to really consider running since the proposal was still fresh in my mind. The election format where there are a limited number of days for questions and discussion was appealing, as was the fact that I wouldn't be able to agonize over each !vote as it came in. What pushed me over the edge was when several administrators that I respect either resigned or went inactive in the intervening months, including technically-focused administrators like Pppery and Trialpears, so the timing seemed right.

Optional question from Ganesha811

6. Are there any areas of adminship you do not plan to participate in, due to unfamiliarity or lack of technical knowledge? If you later decided you wanted to help in these areas, what would be your plan to become an effective admin in those areas?
A: As I mentioned in Q1 above, I don't really have plans to get involved with deletion beyond some of the more obvious technical speedy deletions, although that's more due to a lack of interest at this time than familiarity or technical knowledge. There are other areas where I don't have a ton of experience, such as WP:UAA, WP:DYK, WP:ITN, and WP:PERM, and others where I haven't had the opportunity to learn the tools, such as actually protecting pages, working with edit filters, or performing history merges. If I did want to get involved somewhere I was unfamiliar with I would do so first as an editor, performing non-administrator tasks where possible. Before taking any administrative actions I would read all appropriate documentation, practice the actions in a sandbox or in my own userspace, and, most importantly, talk to an administrator who frequently works in that area to get advice and see where my efforts would be the most useful.

Optional question from Vanamonde93

7. Looking at an example of your creations from below, when you finished your initial edits on Rival (consumer products company), it looked like this. Admittedly that was a long time ago - so knowing what you know today, would you make any changes to that page? I'd appreciate some specifics, though I'm not asking for an entire rewrite of course.
A: I think the main thing I would change if I were writing that article today would be to find a wider variety of sources, rather than cite the same two over and over again (I also would've re-used the citations rather than list them separately). I would've directly cited the "International Directory of Company Histories" instead of the webpage that excerpted it, especially since it's available on the Internet Archive (or at least was before the hack). Also, now that I have access to Newspapers.com, I would've looked up the 10 articles cited by the "International Directory" listing and cited those directly as well.


Discussion

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

AfD record: 88.70% match rate, n of 291. 30 keep !votes to 256 delete !votes. Mildly subjective comment: these are good numbers, especially for someone who says they aren't particularly interested in working in deletion. The high proportion of deletes in the total is overwhelmingly due to nominations (214 in total). Stats are somewhat stale, with only 4 AfDs in the past year; no red flags in the recent ones. -- asilvering (talk) 03:29, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Food for thought: Ahecht would have passed under the tradiitional RfA. SerialNumber54129 13:04, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • To follow up asilvering's stats, I want to highlight that Ahecht one of the maintainers of the AFD Stats tool that provides this data and is linked from every single candidacy page. Ahecht is who rescued the tool when it needed to be migrated over to a new system and is largely responsible for it continuing to run smoothly today. Legoktm (talk) 15:25, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

GAN & FAC notes. No activity at GAN or FAC. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:27, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

While I don't have activity there, I do have activity at FLC. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:03, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • One thing that stands out to me is the sourcing of the created articles. Here's what they looked like when Ahect created them: Spaceflight, Inc., Bill Sherman, Hollywood United Methodist Church, Rival (consumer products company). They almost consistently use tier 3 and tier 4 sources on the tiers of reliability page (which everyone should give a read), including a lot of press releases. In the older articles, the sources are bare links. I would accept the excuse that these are very old contributions, but that raises an even bigger concern as to why the candidate has chosen these edits as some of their "best contributions". The main source they used for Rival is blacklisted and still in the article today, after Ahect has chosen it as a "best contribution". Now, I don't believe that this affects the candidacy too severely insofar as a desire to work in technical areas, but all admins are going to be frequently brushing against things involving mainspace, content, and sourcing, and I'd need to be convinced that they've quickly acquired a massive amount of expertise on this subject in the last few years and that the selection of these articles was an oversight. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:22, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Declined speedies

Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 11:09, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for compiling this list. I know replies here can be a faux-pas during a traditional RfA, but due to the number of candidates and the low level of discussion activity, I thought I'd chime in with some details: seven of those were self reverts, not declines, the two userspace ones were accepted and then REFUNDed, and the two WP:G6s that weren't self reverts were tagged to make way for a move but the admin opted to perform a HISTMERGE instead. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:51, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The above adminship discussion is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the talk page of the nominated user). No further edits should be made to this page.
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