Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2013/Candidates/Gamaliel/Statement

Gamaliel
When I first joined Wikipedia I was an awestruck admirer of the contributions of the established editors here, who were building this encyclopedia and its accompanying software, bureaucracy, policies, and principles out of sheer stubbornness, optimism, and energy. Despite all my time on Wikipedia, I still reflexively think of myself as a casual hobbyist puttering around a monument built by others. But I think it’s time I realized that I played a role in building that monument and I have a lot of experience and expertise to offer. I joined Wikipedia in February 2004 and became an administrator on November 2004. I have 57 Did You Know articles and 56,917 edits as of this writing and I make a very small cameo appearance in Fuzheado's The Wikipedia Revolution.

I think as a whole that Wikipedia does well in the areas of BLP and NPOV, though we should always strive to do better. The key issues currently facing Wikipedia basically fall under the umbrella of the core policy of civility, which we claim is one of our five pillars but we often dismissively treat as lesser policy. But how editors interact with one another has a significant implications for some of the problems we will have to wrestle with in the coming years, like dropping rates of editor retention and the gender gap. Editor behavior should be weighed against not just positive contributions to the encyclopedia, but whether this behavior contributes to an atmosphere of collaborative editing or drives away other editors we will need to meet those future challenges. We should improve how we deal with these issues and the avenues through which editors can seek assistance regarding them. And above all, we should keep in mind that editors should be allowed to make mistakes - and I know I’ve definitely made more than my share of them, and thinking of some of them can still make me wince – because it’s often through those mistakes we learn how to be better editors and build a better encyclopedia.

I use the same account and no others on all Wikimedia and Wikia websites. My identity is not secret though I prefer not to use it on Wikipedia. I disclosed my identity and age to the Wikipedia Foundation upon joining OTRS.