User:XDanielx/RfA review

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.

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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.

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Questions

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

Candidate selection (inviting someone to stand as a candidate)
I don't think there are any problems with the selection/nomination process -- not structural problems, anyway. Nominations can be helpful in evaluating a candidate, but admin hopefuls who haven't been nominated are, by and large, given fair consideration.
Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)
Little experience; no opinion.
Nomination, co-nomination and self-nomination (introducing the candidate)
Again, I think the way nominations are handled in the status quo is very reasonable. An abundance of nominations is generally unhelpful, but it's not really disruptive either.
Advertising and canvassing
I think it's generally appropriate, though not necessary, when it's done on audience-neutral wiki pages. When it's done on IRC, on talk pages of particular editors, and so forth, it can take on a more personal "do me a favor"-esque tone. That, in my view, is when it becomes inappropriate and results in skewed outcomes.
Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)
The only issue I have with the way questioning is carried out is, the amount of scrutiny each candidate is given varies somewhat widely. This applies not only to questions, but to vote rationales and discussion in general. Unfortunately there's no simple remedy, and a conservative hands-off approach (like what we use now) is probably most reasonable.
Election (including providing reasons for support/oppose)
The discrepancy in scrutiny given to supporters and opposers is enormous (and follows naturally from common social norms), but the high threshold makes up for this.
Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)
No problems with how this is currently handled.
Declaration (the bureaucrat closing the application. Also includes WP:NOTNOW closes)
I'll just make one comment regarding neutral votes. For simplicity I'll ignore the fact that RfA is not strictly a vote and pretend that numbers mean everything. A lot of editors, and some bureaucrats, seem content with treating neutral votes as null votes, i.e., votes that do not contribute to the outcome. This is (A) not consistent with voter mentality and (B) very suboptimal in terms of voting theory. (A) can be made clear with hypotheticals -- if 5-10 editors voted in support of a candidate and 100 voted neutral, common intuition is that the candidate should not be promoted. Regarding (B), a more formal explanation is that since oppose votes bear more weight than support votes, the "oppose" and "support" options can thought of roughly as, say, -10 and 5 in "hurt or heal" terms. It's more desirable to have an intermediate option that falls directly between the two endpoints. (Imagine a ballot with options reading "very good", "good", and "horrible".) The point being that for RfA purposes, neutral votes should be regarded as expressions of weak opposition, not as null votes. To put it in simple terms, a neutral vote can be thought of as half of a support vote and half of an oppose vote.
Training (use of New Admin School, other post-election training)
I found the "training" to be mostly intuitive and unnecessary, but it's certainly not doing any harm. Let's leave it as is unless specific concerns arise, in which case we can improve the new admin guide as needed.
Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)
Obviously there's an enforcement problem, but the process is better than nothing. We desperately need a universal process for removing the bit from admins when there's a reasonable community consensus to do so, as getting ArbCom to do a desysop typically requires waiting for an extraordinary amount of misuse.

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

How do you view the role of an administrator?
In practice, the admin bit is more than a set of buttons. For example, there are no buttons involved with closing a controversial XfD as keep/merge/redirect/etc., but we discourage non-admins from doing so. Admins are not always better than non-admins at these tasks, but there is something of a correlation between whether a user has the admin bit and whether s/he would conduct such tasks responsibly. The correlation isn't a particularly strong one, but it's more reasonable to build off of this correlation than to, say, let all users close XfDs. So in summary, the admin bit means that (A) a user has access to some extra tools and (B) they are (most likely) in relatively good standing in the community.
What attributes do you feel an administrator should possess?
They should have a reasonable degree of familiarity with various policies, guidelines, processes and norms. They should be willing to enforce consensus, even when they do not like the implications. And because (for better or for worse) admins are seen as representatives of the community, they should be reasonably civil and such.

Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:

Have you ever voted in a request for Adminship? If so what was your experience?
Yes; I've participated in maybe 20% of RfAs since I started editing. I've found that the atmosphere is generally cordial and the experience pleasant.
Have you ever stood as a candidate under the Request for Adminship process? If so what was your experience?
Yes -- my only RfA passed, albeit not with flying colors. My RfA was somewhat unique in that the opposition centered mainly on my editorial views on WP:CONSENSUS, WP:VOTE and so forth. (I don't think such arguments are necessarily inappropriate, by the way -- if it affects how a candidate would carry out admin tasks, then it's fair game.) Besides that, it was a pretty normal RfA and I don't have much to say about the experience.
Do you have any further thoughts or opinions on the Request for Adminship process?
No; I think this questionnaire was pretty comprehensive.

Once you're finished...

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This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 23:58 on 24 June 2008.