User:Giggy/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.

If you prefer, you can submit your responses anonymously by emailing them to gazimoff (at) o2.co.uk. Anonymous responses will be posted as subpages and linked to from the responses section, but will have the contributor's details removed. If you have any questions, please use the talk page.

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.

Once again, thank you for taking part!

Ramblings giggy (O) 15:18, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

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


 * 1) Candidate selection (inviting someone to stand as a candidate)
 * People who go around treating the number of RfA nominations they've made as a trophy don't get it. Nominators shouldn't be the RfA regular who sees you when he reverts vandalism on your article. You should be nominated by the person you've worked with for ages, the person who knows you best, the person who's watched you kick butt and have your butt kicked (and, most importantly, how you dealt with it). The thing is, most people are scared shitless of the RfA process, and they know that a screw up on their part will earn the candidate opposition by those who somehow feel good by opposing the candidate for zero reason.
 * 1) Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)
 * Administrator coaching is a good idea.
 * RfA coaching is a horrible idea. User:Giggy/On admin coaching and User:Giggy/Passing RfA for fun and profit! should cover the majority of it.
 * 1) Nomination, co-nomination and self-nomination (introducing the candidate)
 * Who nominates means a bit (see Q1) but only in the sense of how well they know you. The quality of the nom itself means very little in today's clime - people either support per the nominator's name, or they ignore the nom completely. Both are wrong.
 * There is nothing inherently wrong with a co-nomination that brings up new information that the original nomination didn't cover. Infinite co-noms are OK if they obey that law.
 * Self-nominations indicate boldness, and (per my Q1 hopes and dreams) would indicate working in a more lonely area. That's OK. (Unfortunately) they currently mean you don't hang around RfA and ANI much - that needs to be changed (we should be nominating less RfA/ANI regulars).
 * 1) Advertising and canvassing
 * Oh come on, there's no way to discuss this issue in the current RfA clime. WP:CANVASS has been made a joke. If you think that no onwiki links to the RfA = no links to the RfA, you're off your rocker. Majorly and me generally disagree on RfA, but he does have a point at User:Majorly/RfA. If we made public RfA canvassing common practice, so many problems would be lessened.
 * 1) Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)
 * . The links to that make for great reading.
 * Questions specific to a candidate's past actions (not loaded questions, not "you're incivil, discuss" questions, but questions with 2 or more possible answers) are good. Questions that involve copy pasting the blocking policy suck. Beating that message into the heads of users who are desperate to up their edit count and their image (see Q1) is the biggest issue.
 * 1) Election (including providing reasons for support/oppose)
 * No reason is required for support or oppose. Any reason given, though, should be defendable. Don't say "no issues" if there are issues, don't say "bad calls at XfD" if candidate hasn't made bad calls at XfD. In an ideal RfA, every comment would be contested (every commentless vote would get appropriate (minimal) weight in said quasi-RfA) and it would be a real discussion. I can dream?
 * 1) Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)
 * I choose not to comment on this because 1) I have too much to say 2) my recent RfA will impede discussion.
 * 1) Declaration (the bureaucrat closing the application. Also includes WP:NOTNOW closes)
 * NotNow and SNOW closes are silly. Let the candidate withdraw, or let a 'crat close it - they supposedly know what they're doing. NotNow and SNOW are too-often used as part of a Q1 build up (grr) (I know some users do them for legit. reasons - apologies to you guys). If the candidate's feelings are hurt they can 1) say so 2) have the RfA withdrawn.
 * 1) Training (use of New Admin School, other post-election training)
 * Meh. All the more power to someone who learns how to click a delete button in a virtual simulator. Clicking the buttons isn't hard, what's hard is resisting the urge to click them when someone pays out your mum.
 * 1) Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)
 * I like the concept. It could work. It just takes honesty, even when bailing is the easy option. Human nature is kinda against that. It's not an enforceable process (by nature) so what do you do?

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


 * 1) How do you view the role of an administrator?
 * Administrators puts it quite well... imagine, a page understands something better than 99% of our users.
 * 1) What attributes do you feel an administrator should possess?
 * User:Giggy/RfA criteria.

Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:


 * 1) Have you ever voted in a request for Adminship? If so what was your experience?
 * Many times. I find that supporting an RfA rarely raises issues - you sign your name and that's it. Opposing, though (or even neutraling) creates a multitude of spots of bother. People are accused of being edit counters, of not counting edits enough, of having too high standards, of having too low standards. However, not questioning comments would make RfA a vote (and I'm optimistic, for some unknown reason). Making streamlined criteria would make it too gameable. Some balance needs to be found between preventing idiotic support/opposition, and preventing petty complaints about every vote. The people who support every RfA and think that opposing RfAs is a cardinal sin which (contrary to their philosophy, ironically) will earn you a strong oppose are perhaps the biggest detriment to the current status.
 * 1) Have you ever stood as a candidate under the Request for Adminship process? If so what was your experience?
 * Yes, five times (for the unacquainted my most recent is at Requests for adminship/Dihydrogen Monoxide 3). My experiences with the process are... interesting, but for tl;dr reasons I won't go into them in full here (or perhaps ever). Needless to say I think it could be improved a great deal.
 * 1) Do you have any further thoughts or opinions on the Request for Adminship process?
 * It sucks. Good luck fixing it! :-) giggy (O) 15:11, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Once you're finished...
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This question page was generated by RFAReview at 20:56, 12 June 2008 (UTC).