User:Clovermoss/RfA

I have participated in numerous RfAs, so I might as well write down what I think about when I vote in one. I consider RfA to be a community wide discussion about a person's suitability for adminship and I'm fine if anyone presents a counter-argument to my voting rationales.

Criteria

I perceive adminship as just maintenance work, but it's maintenance work that requires a combination of people skills and extensive knowledge of policy. I try to have reasonable expectations and I will almost always support if I think of you as a net positive.

Here are some other things I think about:

Civility: it's one of the five pillars, so please don't bite the newbies, or the regulars. Incivility is pretty much a dealbreaker for me.
Trust. Can I trust you not to do something like delete the main page? If you do do something like delete the main page, do I trust that you will you do your best to fix it and be accountable? I'm okay with mistakes in the past, as no one is perfect, but I do care about sincere apologies and not repetitively making the same mistakes. I might find some past mistakes as more of a red flag compared to others.
Knowledge of policy. There are many ways this can be demonstrated: answers to RFA questions, helping at the help desk/Teahouse, UAA, CCI, NPP, AfC, AfD, creating/improving articles, etc. If you're generally trustworthy and knowledgeable, I'm incredibly likely to support. I'm generally willing to be lenient and see someone learn with the mop than be required to know how to do everything beforehand.

Regardless of the outcome, I appreciate the intentions of anyone who is willing to take on administrative responsibilities. I realize that RfA is an incredibly sensitive environment and I do not take my participation in the process lightly. If I oppose an RfA, I'm willing to consider changing my mind in the future.

Editcountitis

Edit count is often used as a metric in RfAs. I once noticed an !oppose vote that stated 20,000 edits was the de facto minimum for an RfA candidate nowadays. It is common for Wikipedians to state that edit counts do not reflect the value of any given editor's contributions. However, I do think that sometimes editors with higher edit counts forget what that can actually mean in practice. Therefore, I wish more people would consider:

We're all outliers – Out of the millions of registered accounts, there's roughly 5,000 editors who make 100 edits every month and roughly 500 who make more than 1,000 edits a month. If we are evaluating RfA candidates based purely on edit count, the first group of editors would need to make 100+ edits a month with no breaks for 200 months (16.6 years). The second group of editors, if they kept their same pace of editing consistent, would only need 20 months (slightly less than 2 years).
If someone in the first group took an average of 15 minutes to make an edit (e.g. reading comments on a talk page before writing a quick reply, adding a citation to a previously uncited sentence in an article, etc) and they made 100 edits a month, they would be dedicating 25 hours of their time every month to Wikipedia. If their edits took an average of 30 minutes, they would be dedicating an average of 50 hours of their time every month to Wikipedia. Over the 16 years it would take for them to meet de facto RfA edit count standards, they would have spent somewhere between 4,800 – 9,600 hours editing Wikipedia.
Most people have lives outside of Wikipedia and can only dedicate so much of their time here. Personally, I usually work full time and sleep on a regular basis. I also have other responsibilities in my day to day life. Wikipedia isn't my only hobby, even if it's where I focus most of my attention. Realistically, there is only so much time the average person has to volunteer as a Wikipedian. People have varying experiences that can affect this too. For example, women generally have less leisure time than men.

My experience with RfA

Before RfA

When I finally decided to run for adminship in December 2023, I had a history of denying people who asked me about this very path. I said no to 8 different people (some of which approached me on-wiki and others who had approached me off-wiki). My refusals became more complicated as these inquiries kept coming. There were a lot of factors that caused my hesitation. Initially, I was actually quite open to the idea, although I did not feel I was ready. My thoughts went something like this:

Sure, I have been here since 2018. I have mostly been an active editor apart from a year wikibreak I took in the midst of the pandemic. I have never really been in any serious confrontational debates that possible voters would see as dealbreakers and ensure at least a few opposes. But does all this mean I'd be a good admin? No. Did I even have much use for the tools? Also no.

The first serious attempt to convince me to consider adminship came here. I admit that being incorrectly called Clevermoss did not help my confidence because I felt like someone who really knew whether I was ready for adminship or not would know my username. (Sorry Barkeep49, I'm sure it was a harmless error on your part.) However, this experience definitely did not remove the doubt that I may look like a decent candidate on paper but if someone looked deeper and was more familiar with me they would not see the same thing. I knew, intimately, what I had and had not accomplished as an editor on this website. I rarely participated in admin lite tasks. I felt like my content contributions were mediocre at best. I felt like no matter how much I tried... I was simply never good enough at anything. I still struggle with some of these thoughts. One potential nominator expressed that they thought I was struggling from impostor syndrome. They expressed the sentiment that others really did think highly of me despite my personal doubts.

Enter a new age where I was slightly warming up to the idea. I still did not feel ready but I felt more comfortable with telling myself maybe someday. Then two RfAs came along that caused the doubts to come rushing back in. These RfAs were ScottishFinnishRadish's and MB's. The former introduced the concept that people might take my early competence as a red flag in itself. Some opposes in that RfA make vague accusations about possible socking on SFR's part, simply because they did things that newbies supposedly are not capable of doing. Other opposes mentioned that they didn't think SFR was experienced enough. I felt like there was a very real chance that I could go through something similar. I viewed my earliest contributions in a new light. I was now someone that others could view with inherent suspicion. This caused some inner turmoil because Wikipedia is an incredibly important place for me. It's a place where I feel like I belong even if I do not always feel like I deserve this sense of belonging. I did not want to lose that magical feeling and I felt that experiencing such an RfA could change that. This is when I started to experience literal nightmares about what it would be like to run at RfA. MB's RfA also solidified some of my previous doubts. Here was someone I considered to be so much more experienced than me and they failed. What chance did I have?

So I decided on a more definitive level that adminship was not for me. There was simply too much to lose and for what? The possible benefits did not outweigh the risks. Around this time, I also made some strides in becoming slightly more confident. I think my hesitation to avoid conflict (which most people seem to think of as a positive trait) stems from some social conditioning that makes this sort of thing way more difficult than it might be for someone who grew up in an environment that was more tolerant of dissent. More generally, society sees women as bossy and men as decisive when they display the same qualities. Anyways, around this time, I became more comfortable standing up for myself and not just saying quiet when I encountered situations that bothered me. I used to just let things go entirely whenever I encountered pushback. Since 2023, I've been more likely to stand my ground while listening to what the other person has to say. Some examples would be when I responded to concerns about this ArbCom case request and when I responded to concerns about how I acted in this ANI thread and this RfC. The latter situation was particularly difficult because I took issue with the implication that I was acting irrationally because a relative died in the midst of this discussion. I still think that my actions there were relatively reasonable and that the approach from the other editor was incredibly insensitive even if they did not mean it to be.

In November 2023, I attended my first meetup. It was that year's edition of WikiConference North America. It was the first time I was aware of a meetup taking place that did not require me to travel extensively to participate (Niagara Falls is about 120 km from Toronto). I rarely left the Niagara Region as a child (with the exception of visiting regional religious conventions) so even visiting Toronto by myself felt like a big deal. I had only been there a handful of times, even if it was relatively close. This was also my first time staying in a hotel. I decided that it was worth the money for me to more thoroughly enjoy my trip and not have to travel back and forth everyday. The conference itself was an amazing experience. I'm incredibly extroverted and I tried to introduce myself to as many people as I possibly could in-between sessions. The cocktail reception (which I was unsure about at first in attending as I don't drink alcohol and I don't like wearing formal attire) was fun. It was a much more casual affair than I was expecting and I was incredibly relieved that this was the case. It took place at a boardgame cafe and the bar was happy providing me with all the Pepsi I could've asked for. It was somewhat awkward introducing myself to people at first because I kept using my first name to answer "who are you?" when what they really wanted to know was my username. At first, I would just kind of point at my name badge and whisper "Clovermoss". I eventually adjusted to saying Clovermoss more easily when I was introducing myself. I was surprised by how many people recognized my username and how it was always a positive reaction. I was also taken aback in regards to how often people tried to convince to run for RfA while I was at the conference. At one point, I was sitting in a hotel lobby with some arbs, a steward, a bureaucrat, and a few admins. The conversation topic turned to "why don't you want to be an admin?". It was a bit different trying to explain this in-person and to a group. I went into what I call "hoodie mode" where I fidgeted, kept the hood of my sweater over my head, and awkwardly tried to explain everything I've written here.

The RfA itself

Given everything I wrote above, I definitely did not have any immediate plans to run for RfA. The final straw that convinced me to actually take the leap was HouseBlaster's doing. The night before I ran, I was given {{Administrator without tools}}, see here. Looking back, this was the final push that gave me enough courage to run. I worked overnight shifts at the time so I went to work and thought about RfA again. I thought about how I would probably be able to handle possible rejection better than I might have in the past and that the constant pestering about running was a good sign that maybe things wouldn't end horrendously. That said, I knew even at the time that my courage was limited. I worried that if I went to bed, I'd wake up and remain firm in my belief that running at RfA was a very bad idea. So, I decided to sit down and read the instructions for how to go about nominating myself. Shortly afterwards, Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Clovermoss went live.

My first surprise was an unexpected co-nom by Ritchie333 about an hour and a half after my self-nom. [1] The cited rationale was "WP:IAR, adding co-nomination statement I had filed away, to stop "I oppose self-noms due to prima facie power hunger" comments. I was shocked and I was not sure how to approach this situation, so I just left the unexpected co-nomination where it was. When support #7 rolled in to say Excellent choice of nominator with an eye for an excellent candidate. (Sorry, hadn't noticed the co-nom; you could have self-nom'd.), I responded with That's because I did self nom. Ritchie333 has co-nommed as an IAR action, see the page history. I appreciate the intention behind it but the main reason I nominated myself was because I didn't want to have to pick between the several people who've reached out to me in the past about this. This eventually lead to his conom being moved to the support section by Barkeep49 in this edit, before being removed entirely by Ritchie in this one, and eventually he wrote a new support vote the next day [2]. In the meantime, I started a thread at Ritchie's talk page about all this. I explained that I had self-nommed for a reason and that I could live with someone opposing me on that basis.

I consider myself fairly lucky when I think about the sheer amount of questions I was asked at RfA. I had a total of 15 questions and some RfA candidates are asked twice as many. I was incredibly cautious when thinking about how I should answer these questions. I'd seen enough RfAs take a turn for the worse with "Oppose per answer to question x" and I wanted to avoid that outcome if I could. I think that four questions in my RfA were particularly noteworthy:

#6: I found your answer about editing Jehovas Witnesses notable. Are you a Jehovas Witness, and do you feel that being one could impact on your neutrality when editing and administrating the article (potentially leading to stonewalling)?

#7: How do you feel about allegations that the Jehovas Witnesses are a cult, and about having a full section on that allegation in the article? I note that the article you are passionate about doesn’t have substantial sourced discussion of external commentary on whether it is a cult in the article, yet it’s a commonly heard real world comment on the JWs I hear frequently.

#8: Please choose a moment in your editing career where you came closest to violating WP:ADMINCOND, or otherwise exhibited bad judgement in an administration-related area, and describe how you would correct the mistake if the event took place when you have the mop.

#12: You're in a RecentChanges, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see several newly created user accounts. Their names are as follows:

What action, if any, do you take regarding these?

I think my initial reaction to question #8 might have been different if #6 and #7 did not immediately precede it. Collectively, these questions were all a bit headache inducing. Question #8 recieved the dubious honour of being included on this page. Questions #6 and #7 surprised me because I was not really expecting to be asked about my religious beliefs (or lack thereof) at RfA. I believe that this is inappropriate for a variety of reasons. I admit that somewhere in the back of my head I had considered it as something that might brought up in some manner but that imaginary scenario involved more tact. I was worried that maybe someone could consider me unduly biased against JWs. It never occured to me that I might be perceived as an active JW. I thought that my lack of belief was blatantly obvious. Anyways, I was not a fan of vague accusations of wrongdoing on my end. No diffs were provided as a basis for these concerns. Most of my work in this topic area has been reducing the reliance on primary sources, removing synthesis, using stronger secondary sourcing, and remedying gaps that have been otherwise been omitted. I think this question would've been less likely to be asked if I had been a random Catholic editor editing articles about Catholicism. These questions even prompted some concerned voters to email me, mostly to say that they didn't think these questions were appropriate and that I probably shouldn't answer them. There was a section on the RfA talk page about these questions as well as a discussion on the noticeboard for bureaucrats. I found the difference between what editors said at the RfA talk page and what was written at BN to be quite striking. The BN discussion bothered me in a few ways but I refrained from participating there. I didn't agree that it was strictly a COI issue. No concerns were raised about my actual edits and simply being a member of a religion isn't generally considered to be a COI. I did my due diligence and asked about this very subject at COIN before I even delved into any serious editing about JWs. However, my personal feelings were not what bothered me the most about this situation. I've always cared more about other people than I have about myself. I was worried that I had accidently set some of precedent that could impact the questions that were asked of other RfA candidates. I'm glad that part of RfA reform was official RfA moderators because I think that those questions would have been removed as inappropriate in a modern RfA.

While undergoing RfA, I went about my day-to-day life the best I could. When I was not at work or sleeping, I did have a compulsive desire to refresh the RfA page frequently. Most of my time spent on Wikipedia during this timeframe was dedicated to dealing with my ongoing RfA but I did also manage to write a new article (clover lawn). The only time I seriously mistepped and wished I could rewind time was with my response to Q12. I thought about it a lot but I also wanted to make sure I finished an answer before I had to leave for work that night. I guessed that one of the situations mentioned in my Q3 would probably be a bit controversial and anticipated a few opposes on that basis. So I was incredibly anxious when it came to demonstrating that I was not going to be someone who made hasty blocks. I wanted to reassure people that I would approach situations with nuance – some interpretations may vary dramatically depending on who you're talking to. All the news coverage about Henry Kissenger was also on my mind (he was a controversial political figure who had recently died). So after I skimmed the article about Mao Zedong (do not skim anything while you're running at RfA), I got the impression that he was a controversial political figure but not universally condemned. This lead to me writing this answer:

The first two don't seem problematic to me at all. The fourth username would draw my attention because it appears to be a reference to the Cultural Revolution. Except in particularly egregious circumstances, which I'm not sure #4 would qualify as (it might but I wouldn't make that judgement call myself right this second), accounts that have not edited are not blocked for possible username violations. Seeing them in recent changes means they have edited, but I would check the relevant diffs to see if anything in particular is problematic. For example, if #4 edits Cultural Revolution and replaces its content with Mao did nothing wrong, those "scholars" deserved to die, that would be disruptive and I'd hardblock. I'm less familiar with the history of the PRC than other people are, but it seems like the figure we're talking about encouraged violence and thousands of people died as a result of his actions. Unfortunately, that would be an accurate accessment of various politicians. If I suddenly see anyone engage in persistant vandalism and not stop after being adquately warned, I would block them for that. If #3 and #5 edit in good faith, I would encourage them to change their username to something else.

This ended up being the most dramatic part of my RfA. I did not realize that my caution (or my distasteful comparison to various politicians) would be perceived poorly. One editor reached out to me privately to tell me that what I said was comparable to saying a HitlerDidNothingWrong username was not immediately block-worthy. A different editor reached out to me privately to tell me that they didn't think that comparison was quite on the same level and that my answer wasn't actually that bad. It was a very confusing time. The same editor that reached out to me about the Hitler comparison said that I shouldn't be too worried about my answer to this question sinking my RfA. I think they were trying to be reassuring but that wasn't exactly my main concern. For a few hours I wondered if I should withdraw just from the shame alone. I felt absolutely horrible because if I had said something that was Hitler levels of bad... even if it was unintentional... that was unforgivable, wasn't it?

Eventually, I added an addendum to my original answer to state:

I wanted to say I'm sorry to the concerned voters for making it seem like I was downplaying atrocities. I really am. I have no idea how to convey just how much I mean that. The article on Mao describes him as a revolutionary among other things but it also says his actions were responsible for the death of millions and not thousands. As I said, I don't know the history that well. I was trying to come at it from a not making hasty decisions where I'm uninformed way. I generally try to act with caution.

I took the rather unconventional stance of replying directly to neutrals and opposes in my RfA. I'm not sure where the tradition of avoiding saying anything came from but I think it is worth challenging. RfA is the only context where someone is discouraged from explaining their perspective or actions. Actual admins are required to be accountable and I think it's also just generally good practice to be willing to hear people out when they offer feedback even if I might not always agree with them. I wanted my RfA to be an actual dialogue about my strengths and weaknesses. I also did not want other people to speak on my behalf. RfA is a discussion, so I don't think it is badgering to simply present counterarguments. I think it's only fair to offer alternative perspectives instead of doing nothing if you think that someone is mischaractizing your actions or not understanding the background behind them. That said, there's an art to knowing when to respond or not. I only replied when I felt like I had something to say that either showed my side of a situation or was a direct counterargument to the rationale. If my counterargument was not convincing, I let it be. Reasonable people can disagree with each other.

Most of my opposes ended up being about my answer to Q12 (3 out of 5). I responded the best I could to address these concerns but no one changed their minds apart from Homeostasis07 (they were an early oppose that switched to support). I wonder if it's possible that my responses prevented an "oppose train" from starting by reassuring voters who were on the fence about me but that is impossible to determine. One oppose was about my lack of maturity but it was vague enough that I did not think there was anything I could substantially reply with. To some extent, that's a personal opinion that I doubted I could change by pointedly asking "so how do you think I'm immature?" My best guess was that it had something to do with my age (I've always been very open about the fact that I started editing when I was 16 and that I was 21 at the time of my RfA). The only other oppose cited what they perceived as inactivity on my part. I explained why I disagreed, they didn't change their mind, and that was that. My neutrals were a bit more complex. One of the five neutrals partially quoted what I said at an ANI thread which was linked in my answer to Q3. I left that one alone but did engage with a more verbous neutral about the same situation. One of my neutrals was from the editor who asked questions #6 and #7 and the only other one cited "vibes". The final tally at my RfA was 218/5/4.

After RfA

It felt surreal waking up to admin rights. The interface changes when looking at page histories were the most jarring (there was now an option to change the visibility of revisions and directly block people). I had spent so long not being an admin that it took awhile to get used to the idea. I do not think I have changed that much as a person apart from having the ability to perform some additional tasks. While I haven't been crazy active on the administrative side of things, I've pitched in where I can and I'd like to think that this has made a difference. As I said in my RfA: As for the not much need, many hands make less work. I'd like to think that the cumulative impact of people doing a little where they can makes a difference.

A few months after my RfA, I hoped to assuage the concerns of one of my neutral voters. I knew they were concerned about vibes and since they had never met me in person, I hoped a photograph of myself might help towards bridging that gap in trust. That conversation did not go well. It turns out that sharing a photograph/video of yourself does not completely disprove socking accusations. I left that conversation feeling incredibly frustrated. There's not exactly much you can do to convince someone that thinks you physically resemble an LTA and that something you said years ago also sounds like something that LTA would say. I did eventually receive a formal apology after I won Wikimedian of the Year. [3]

Two possible admin areas I expressed interest in my RfA were UAA and perm requests. I haven't dealt with many username blocks through UAA specifically although I have made some while dealing with other tasks such as G11s. I found that UAA/ANV moved quite fast on average and I found that by the time I had made any sort of decision regarding these situations, someone else had already dealt with it. Something I did not expect as a non-admin was that I'd spent time as an admin looking at Category:Candidates for speedy deletion. It ended up being a place where I could deal with relatively straightforward situations and not constantly be outdone by someone else who was trying to work on the exact same thing. So far, I have modified userrights 19 times. I have Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/New page reviewer on my watchlist and I've worked on those user requests almost exclusively. It can be a time consuming process (sometimes individual requests take hours to make an informed decision about) and that burns you out. I think I'm a bit more lenient compared to some of the other admins that are active there. I'm more willing to let people learn as they go and provide extensive feedback after a trial run of the perm so they understand how to improve as a reviewer. This feedback in itself is also very time consuming. I have hope that as time marches on, I'll become more confident in my abilities and learn a wider variety of skills that are useful to adminship.

In May 2024, I made the rather unconventional decision to be the sole nominator for another RfA candidate, less than six months after I passed my own RfA. I met Elli for the first time at WCNA. I think this sense of familiarity helped me feel confident enough to even consider asking her about RfA. In some ways, I saw her as more experienced than I was. I have not yet written a featured article and there's certain technical aspects in which she's skilled and I'm relatively clueless. I went through RfA as a self-nomination so I didn't have a baseline on how exactly I should act as a nominator. I tried my best to offer guidance where necessary, be a listening ear, and respect the candidate's decisions on what she thought was the best way to approach things. I saw the last part as particularly important as it was her RfA and reasonable people can often disagree with each other. Her RfA was the first one to pass in a successful trial process where people were unable to !vote within the first 48 hours. While this was supposed to be a positive change, I think it led to increased scrutiny and more questions to candidates, which is pretty much the opposite of what RfA reform was trying to accomplish.

In September 2024, I co-nominated Significa liberdade with theleekycauldron. It was a "normal RfA" as there were no admin reform trials involved. This experience was way more stressful than I was expecting. I was also quite busy in real life, learning how to put out literal fires as part of a college course. It was different co-nominating with someone – I was expecting it to make it easier because one of the us would almost always be around for the candidate – but in practice, it sometimes lead to conflicting advice and indecision. The RfA made me a bit jaded because I felt like so many of the opposes were unfair. I believed most of the examples given as "improper draftications" to be perfectly acceptable within current norms. I understand that said current norms are somewhat contentious and many editors have philosophical objections to them, but I thought it was entirely unfair to take that out on an RfA candidate. I interjected a bit more than I probably should have. I didn't think I went too far with it because I only really did it when I had something to say, but I think it's for the best to be more restrained in those comments when you're not the candidate. I approached this in a similar way to how I participated in my own RfA but I shouldn't have because the dynamics are different. I think it would've been absolutely fine if Significa was the one to make them (to be clear she didn't ask me to), but RfA is also a weird environment where people feel like they can't do so and so others get defensive because they feel obligated to speak up. While this RfA closed as successful, it might be reflect that maybe I've just been lucky and I should take a break from nominating, because I'm still quite a new admin myself and I hated the idea of leading someone astray with my advice.

In October 2024, I made an exception for Sohom Datta, because I had previously reached out to them months before to ask about RfA. They were hesitant because they had a much lower edit count than the average RfA candidate but I thought their experience went beyond what a simple edit count tells someone. However, Sohom didn't actually go through RfA, which is another reason I was willing to co-nominate them with Novem Linguae so soon after the Significa RfA that made me jaded. Sohom was one of 30 candidates in the admin elections trial. I was surprised how many people decided to actually try for adminship through this process and pleasantly surprised that we got 11 admins out of it. From a nominator's perspective, this was amazing. I barely had to do anything at all and I didn't have a page to obsess over and see voting percentages sway either way as they happened. It was just a matter of writing my nomination statement and waiting.