User:Jonny-mt/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 think the current system of nominations works fairly well. I think there's a creeping bias against self-nominations, but overall this doesn't seem particularly significant or detrimental to the process.
Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)
There's nothing wrong with coaching potential administrators to make sure that they know what they're doing and will be competent once granted the tools, but I have minor concerns with "teaching to the test"--that is, telling candidates to participate in an area they're not interested in just so it will look good at RfA.
Nomination, co-nomination and self-nomination (introducing the candidate)
I've seen a trend towards increasing the number of co-nominations while reducing or even eliminating self-nominations (see above). I don't believe this is a negative thing, per se, but it's definitely a thing.
Advertising and canvassing
I think the current restriction on advertising works fairly well, given the nuances of WP:CANVASS. I know that some level of support from colleagues is going to be inevitable--I received support from several members of WP:HAWAII during my RfA, and I've noticed that a good number of WP:HWY members generally come out to support when one of their own stands--but I consider this to be an organic result of working together rather than a forced attempt to draw attention to the RfA.

That being said, I think there's definitely a discrepancy in the attention paid to some discussions over others, and I would not object to a wider awareness of the RfA process in the community.
Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)
There's been a trend towards more questions lately--while some of these are good (for example, I think things like "What is the difference between a block and a ban?" should be more or less standard), the proliferation of supposedly "optional" questions puts a significant amount of pressure on candidates to answer them or be opposed for their failure to do so.
Election (including providing reasons for support/oppose)
I'm of the opinion that the default position is to support a given candidate, which means that I expect rationales from the opposing voters. Since administrators are supposed to be "selected by the community", I think the election model is fairly good, but I've always felt a bit uneasy about the lack of transparency on what votes are and aren't counted. For example, when commenting in an XfD you can always assume that a keep comment based on the "because it's awesome" rationale will be discounted, but it's not so clear that comments opposing a candidate because their signature is ugly will receive the same treatment.
Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)
I see nothing wrong with the way it's done now--users should be sure they want to be administrators, so they should continue to be allowed to withdraw halfway through an RfA.
Declaration (the bureaucrat closing the application. Also includes WP:NOTNOW closes)
I don't have an issue with this, either--rarely does a bureaucrat need to give a long reason for promoting or not promoting someone, as those reasons are clearly outlined in the RfA itself. Any contentious or borderline RfAs are typically accompanied by a "'Crat Chat", so a closing statement providing a brief summary of the chat's contents and a link to the chat itself is perfectly sufficient.
Training (use of New Admin School, other post-election training)
I found WP:NAS immensely helpful when I got the tools, and I've gone back a couple of times to toy around with protection as well. All the policy knowledge in the world means nothing if you click the wrong button.
Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)
As I mentioned in my RfA, I think the recall process is a good thing overall, but the wholly volunteer nature of it makes it susceptible to wiki-drama. That being said, I think we have enough ways of giving up/losing the tools that any formal institution is largely unnecessary, so I guess it's just a matter of this being the worst system we have except for all the other ones.

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?
Nominally, admins are janitors--we take the heat, we clean up the messes, we do all the grudge work that keeps things running. We know this, the regular users know this, and all is right with the world. However, the rest of our users/readers view us as authority figures or at least experts on the process, which means that in addition to our inward-facing janitorial duties we should also serve as diplomats of a kind for the outward-facing parts of the project.
What attributes do you feel an administrator should possess?
A cool head, a friendly demeanor, and the ability to learn from their mistakes.

Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:

Have you ever voted in a request for Adminship? If so what was your experience?
Yes, I have voted in quite a number of RfAs, although my participation is generally limited to those users I have run across in my day-to-day project work. The experience has largely been positive, although I do have to take care that I'm evaluating the candidate by my own standards and not simply going with the flow.
Have you ever stood as a candidate under the Request for Adminship process? If so what was your experience?
Yes, I have--see Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Jonny-mt. The experience was positive, and the RfA ended with unanimous support. I had received some solid admin coaching from User:Bearian and done my best to prepare myself for whatever was going to happen.
Do you have any further thoughts or opinions on the Request for Adminship process?
I only participate in a handful of projects, with en and Commons being my most active by far. But from what I've seen, en-wiki has both the most restrictive process for gaining the tools and the most liberal process for keeping them (i.e. both Commons and Meta require a certain level of activity from their admins, with Meta admins re-standing for RfA on a periodic basis). While I wish that there was a better way to avoid the domino effect seen in many en-wiki RfAs and would like to see more users searching for reasons to not support a candidate rather than requiring reasons to support them, I think the current, strict process has largely served us well.

Once you're finished...

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This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 05:33 on 30 June 2008.