Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Candidates/Rsjaffe

Nomination

Rsjaffe (talk · contribs · he/him) – I'm Rory Jaffe. I have been on Wikipedia probably since soon after its inception, though I didn't register a username until 2007. I have never edited Wikipedia for pay.

I roam around doing many different things. When I edit, I generally do wikignoming. I use AWB for mass work (e.g., typo fixing, or, in one major instance, using regular expressions to fix messed up references in a mass-created series of articles). I occasionally create an article, typically when I look up something and get surprised that there isn't an article for it yet. Examples include Merrell Williams Jr., Van Norman Dams, Verbena lilacina and Fannie Quigley.

I also prowl for serious issues: e.g., undeclared paid editing, vandalism, and sockpuppetry. I try to be very clear and concise when posting about these issues. For example: Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Umama99/Archive, and this recent ANI thread (contributions are Special:Diff/1250036606/1250036802 and Special:Diff/1250038072).

I have a doppelgänger account Truth69420 to make a point about usernames. It's been incorrectly blocked once, by ScottishFinnishRadish who then came back with User talk:Truth69420#I've been hoodwinked! to apologize. That account has made eleven edits in 2 years to ANI: all very brief. While I enjoy humor, I try to avoid derailing things, and often hold myself back when I'm tempted to say something that I find incredibly funny. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 20:10, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Questions for the candidate

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: I want to help address the backlog in certain areas and improve responsiveness to issues. There currently are an insufficient number of active admins, so those who are active struggle to keep up. While I'm willing to pitch in where needed, my initial idea is to help with sockpuppet investigations, vandals, and undeclared paid editors.

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

A: A few come to mind:

1. Identifying the emerging LLM-generated text issue when it first appeared and bringing it to the attention of other Wikipedians. I was asked to write an article for Signpost, which contains much of the story: Machine-written articles: a new challenge for Wikipedia. Why? Because I identified and provoked action on a serious threat to Wikipedia's mission.
2. Cleaning up Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A featured article, it had accumulated issues over the years, including disjointed text, messed up references, and a few factual errors. I spent a few months (May to December) in 2021 cleaning it up, to the point where 21% of the current text was written by me. Why? Because this was a very difficult and detail-oriented task that fixed up an important article.
3. Using auto wiki browser with regular expressions to fix orphaned references in well over 1200 autocreated plant articles. (I lost count, but it's probably a lot more than 1200.) Why? Because I identified a serious systemic issue with a large number of articles and found a practical way of fixing them.

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: Yes, I've been in conflicts. I generally try to avoid perpetuating a conflict by simply not responding to personal attacks, just sticking to factual responses. I know who I am and I don't feel the need to start up a fight with someone who is already convinced of my wrongdoing. This is very successful in avoiding derailing a conversation. As an example, see ANI regarding CutePeach, where both I and the contents of my report were attacked, but I avoided responding and getting off topic. However, this isn't very satisfying, frankly, and also may not leave my name unsullied in the view of others. For example, I have been accused of lying about doing a WP:BEFORE search on some AfD nominations and decided not to get into a tussle about that even though I had done a before search. My actual fault there was not doing a Japanese script search before search, and even then, I still think some of those were not notable. I backed away from non-Latin alphabet AfD subjects after that.

I do engage when there is a good reason to do so (other than defending my reputation). For example, User talk:Rsjaffe#Could you please stop removing my entry, do you have a bias?, where I tried to counsel a new user who was destined for failure if they didn't learn to assume good faith. Unfortunately, that user didn't reform and ended up blocked.

If I become an administrator, I'm going to have to reconsider my nonconfrontational stance, as it is not only my own reputation I have to think about, but rather the effect on other administrators' reputation in general. I probably will have to engage with unjust accusations more directly, though I will continue to try keep the conversation on track and avoid getting into a fruitless back-and-forth on those side issues.

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Discussion

• Links for Rsjaffe: Rsjaffe (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)
• Edit summary usage for Rsjaffe can be found here.

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