Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2020/Candidates/Scottywong/Statement

Scottywong
Hi there, I'm Scottywong, an editor since 2007 and an admin since 2012. These days, I mostly keep myself busy closing contentious AfDs, MfDs, responding to requests for page protection, and occasionally responding to AIV reports. Previously, before a relatively long semi-retirement wikibreak from 2015-2018, I was heavily involved in technical pursuits such as coding bot tasks, maintaining the edit filter, and creating tools on the now-defunct Toolserver. Many of tools and bot tasks that I created have since been ported to other servers like WMFCloud and are now maintained by other users. If you've edited Wikipedia for any significant length of time, you've almost certainly benefited from the bot tasks and used some of the tools that I originally created, and it's some of the work I'm most proud of.

To be honest, I've probably participated in less ArbCom cases than most of the editors who are reading this. For a long time, I avoided it because I saw it as an overly bureaucratic part of WP, where drama-prone editors go to write thousands of lines of complaints about other editors. However, after spending over a decade on WP, maturing a bit, and lurking more at RFAR, I've come to see that ArbCom is a critical arm of the project that plays a significant role in making sure things continue to run smoothly.

In my professional life, I manage a team of roughly 25 engineers, which I believe has given me valuable experience in dispute resolution, problem solving, good communication, and high-level decision-making. I'm known as someone that can quickly cut to the core of an issue and propose a rational solution to resolve it. I'm also known as someone who isn't afraid to speak my mind, even when I know that others may not agree with me.

I live in the US, and after having lived through the latest political campaigns and elections, I have come to believe that Wikipedia is more important than ever as a reliable source of neutral, factual information in a media environment where factual information is becoming increasingly rare. Therefore, I have a renewed interest in doing my part to help this project continue to succeed, and I believe that ArbCom is an important part of ensuring that that happens.

I affirm that I meet the WMF's criteria for access to non-public data, and I'm willing to sign the WMF's confidentiality agreement. My only alternate account is Snotbot, a bot account that has been inactive since 2014.