User:Sdkb/RfA debrief

My RfA was closed as successful (265/2/0) on February 16, 2024, a little over three months ago. However, while the dust around it has settled, the round of RfA review it spawned is ongoing, and while the current RfA drought may hopefully end soon I have not yet been able to pass on the baton. I'd like to offer some reflections that I hope may be useful for other editors considering running and for the community more broadly as it considers reforms.

I became gradually more active from 2018 through 2020 as I ventured down the Wikipedia editing rabbit hole, and while there was never a single impetus that pushed me toward adminship, over time it became clearer that it would be the next step in my Wikipedia journey. While I have always been one to speak my mind and have never skirted controversial areas, the awareness that any hot water I got into might someday affect my RfA I think helped me to mature as an editor. I also found that my exploration of different tasks led me to naturally acquire the editing prerequisites many RfA participants look for in candidates.

I started hearing casual encouragement to run in places like the Wikimedia Discord around 2021, and in early 2022 I consulted via email with several admins active in RfA nominations about the possibility of running. By that point, most of my novice mistakes were behind me. The feedback I got was, for the most part, very positive. However, one identified a potential issue in that I had, on occasion, cited my own (non-commercial) work when it was the only or best source I could find. They discussed it with other functionaries, and I ultimately decided not to run at that point to avoid the complexity of navigating potential questions around it without outing myself. I received another nomination offer from a well-respected editor in early 2023 and touched base with several others, but ultimately life got in the way and we never finalized a date to run.

Then, this past November, I attended WikiConference North America 2023, travelling and rooming with L235. I received much encouragement and several nomination offers, and a month later he and I began making plans for my RfA, bringing on board The Earwig (who also attended the conference) to help highlight my technical work and Theleekycauldron to help highlight my content work, each of whom did independent vets of my contribution history. I received additional encouragement to run on my talk page around that time.

To prepare for the RfA, we updated and refined my answers to the standard questions, as well as several others I expected to receive, including what became Q5 and the self-citing question.^[a] After an initial video call with L235, we communicated mostly over Signal and Google Docs.

The morning we planned to launch the RfA, an admin left a note on my talk page indicating that they intended to oppose over a philosophical disagreement with my views on how the non-free content policy should be reformed. While a little startling, it did not affect much, as we just proceeded with the launch and they ultimately sat out the RfA.

I was surprised by how quickly everything moved once the RfA launched. Around half of the RfA's !votes, as well as 16 of its 24 questions (including most of the substantive ones), were posted in the first 24 hours. I went through them, passing most of my answers by my nominators before posting them out of an abundance of caution, and caught up by day 3.

The level of scrutiny felt at turns deep and shallow. On the one hand, there were many insightful questions and meaningful comments that reflected familiarity with my editing history. On the other, pageview data shows that comparatively few editors examined my contributions. No one ever asked about the self-citing I disclosed on my user page. The overall impression I was left with is that Wikipedians have diverse approaches to vetting candidates, and that (similar to other editing tasks) the collective sum somehow coheres into a generally sufficiently thorough process.

An editor with whom I had had a past content dispute cast an oppose !vote accusing me of meatpuppetry; it was moved to talk on day 5 in a non-crat clerking action and partially redacted by a 'crat shortly after. Two editors then cast symbolic opposes in protest of the action. While I think it's clear in hindsight that earlier 'crat action might have lessened the regrettable disruption, I did not find it to make the RfA more stressful overall — if anything, following it was a welcome distraction from worries that more substantive opposition might arise.

Throughout the RfA, I opened Wikipedia as frequently as I could to check for anything to which I might need to respond. As it progressed and its outcome became more assured, I began to let myself relax more. Overall, there were both stressful and enjoyable aspects of the process, and I was glad to have the opportunity to share my wikiphilosophy with the community.

Some takeaways:

To pre-RfA editors: Think about how anything you do might be perceived at a future RfA, even if you have no current plans to run. It could make your life easier down the road, and even if you never run, it'll make you a better editor.
To candidates: RfA is an inherently erratic process. Ensure that your nominators have a sense of any skeletons in your closet, as they are staking their reputation on your candidacy, and prepare as much as you can, but ultimately it is very hard to predict which issues will or won't come up. Ensure that you are particularly available for the first day or two after launch.
Conferences and meetups are important breeding grounds for RfAs. Adminship is ultimately about trust, and it is exponentially easier to build trust in person than pseudonymously online. If we want to nurture more future admins, we should be sending more editors to conferences. I find it deeply unfortunate that the WMF provides so little funding to conference scholarships and allocates them using a rubric better-suited to affiliate/outreach work than on-wiki editing, and urge everyone to advocate for that to change.
We should do a better job using correct pronouns at RfA. On-wiki, I do not disclose my gender and use gender-neutral pronouns as a facet of my support for gender-neutral language. Many participants in the RfA, starting with the oppose !vote, used male pronouns, and while that's not something I particularly minded, someone else in that position might have. There is an option in the RfA submission template to use {{User and pronouns}} at the top of the nomination.
It is hard to say whether I waited too long to run or not. Given how the RfA ultimately went, I probably could have run much sooner and still been successful. However, had I done so I might not have been able to enjoy an RfA without meaningful opposition, which would have made the experience more stressful.

I do not believe that there is any perfect solution for RfA, as applying the necessary level of scrutiny will always create stress for the candidate. However, there are certainly ways we can make the process at least marginally better without compromising its integrity, and I hope that the 2024 reform effort will lead to at least incremental improvements. I am always happy to chat about RfA when my perspective may be useful, and hope that my experience won't be such a rare one in the future.

Cheers, Sdkb ^talk 04:07, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

^ For anyone curious, here is what I drafted:
Q: You disclose on your userpage that you have cited your own work. Can you reflect on this?
A: Citing my own work was an error of judgment I made when I was a less experienced editor. I did so until 2021, for a handful of instances where my own work was either the only available source for a piece of relevant information or the best source I could find. I saw my roles as a journalist and a Wikipedian as complementary endeavors to disseminate knowledge (on a secondary and tertiary level, respectively) rather than as a potential conflict of interest. I noted that WP:SELFCITE states Using material you have written or published is allowed within reason, but only if it is relevant, conforms to the content policies, including WP:SELFPUB, and is not excessive. Additionally, because I was citing non-professional work I did as a student, I did not perceive that the edits could be construed as me in any way trying to bolster my career.
I stopped the practice when an editor who knows my identity flagged it to me as a concern. (I had no involvement with the more recent citations to my professional work added by others.) Looking back on it now, I should have at minimum disclosed that I was citing myself in my edit summaries, and preferably submitted COI edit requests. The COI guideline asks for disclosure because we are often unaware of how a COI warps our editorial judgment. The core problem with what I did was not that the edits were bad — none of the half-dozen or so admins who have reviewed them have expressed concerns on a content level — but rather that, by not disclosing, I deprived the community of the opportunity to determine independently whether they were good or bad. In other words, it wasn’t my call to make. Today I am much more scrupulous about avoiding direct editing on topics where I have a conflict of interest.

[1] For anyone curious, here is what I drafted:
Q: You disclose on your userpage that you have cited your own work. Can you reflect on this?
A: Citing my own work was an error of judgment I made when I was a less experienced editor. I did so until 2021, for a handful of instances where my own work was either the only available source for a piece of relevant information or the best source I could find. I saw my roles as a journalist and a Wikipedian as complementary endeavors to disseminate knowledge (on a secondary and tertiary level, respectively) rather than as a potential conflict of interest. I noted that WP:SELFCITE states Using material you have written or published is allowed within reason, but only if it is relevant, conforms to the content policies, including WP:SELFPUB, and is not excessive. Additionally, because I was citing non-professional work I did as a student, I did not perceive that the edits could be construed as me in any way trying to bolster my career.
I stopped the practice when an editor who knows my identity flagged it to me as a concern. (I had no involvement with the more recent citations to my professional work added by others.) Looking back on it now, I should have at minimum disclosed that I was citing myself in my edit summaries, and preferably submitted COI edit requests. The COI guideline asks for disclosure because we are often unaware of how a COI warps our editorial judgment. The core problem with what I did was not that the edits were bad — none of the half-dozen or so admins who have reviewed them have expressed concerns on a content level — but rather that, by not disclosing, I deprived the community of the opportunity to determine independently whether they were good or bad. In other words, it wasn’t my call to make. Today I am much more scrupulous about avoiding direct editing on topics where I have a conflict of interest.

[a]