Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/CaptainEek

re Ritchie's question
I don't think this is something that necessarily should be on the RfA page general comments, but I'll point out later fallout from the referenced edit: the IP reverted the candidate's incorrect revert, a sysop happened along ten days later, made the exact same assumption of bad faith, going so far as to call the IP an LTA, and re-reverted the good-faith edit. It's only been corrected today. The IP, meanwhile, hasn't edited since. I can't hold that against the candidate, and anyone can make a mistake, and in this case there was an apology, but it's worth noting for the rest of us going about our work that assuming bad faith can have a ripple effect. —valereee (talk) 12:36, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with this, and think the entire situation with the edit history of that link is rather strange. The accepted consensus at the page Murder of Jo Cox is for that title to remain the way that it is - there was even some support (although not consensus) to move it to "Assassination of Jo Cox". I'm thoroughly confused as to why the insistence on "killing" was ever on that page at all - without even getting into whether or not the title of the page should use the term "murder" as opposed to "killing" (although I absolutely think it should use "murder"), it seems a very strange decision to take to try and pull that phrase from another article rather than deferring to the consensus there. Naypta ☺ &#124; ✉ talk page &#124; 12:45, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * , this issue isn't that both of these editors wouldn't have realized the edit was correct if they'd bothered to examine it -- it was a piped link from killing of Jo Cox to Murder of Jo Cox. Both editors are competent. The problem was the first saw a low-edit IP making a change that is very often problematic (killing > murder) and assumed it was POV-pushing. The second saw an experienced username revert that low-IP and get reverted in return and assumed the IP was an LTA. Neither investigated. —valereee (talk) 13:21, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Apologies if it sounded like I was accusing anyone of incompetence, I absolutely wasn't trying to. It's worth pointing out, however, that it wasn't a piped link from killing to murder -  was how it was originally, and then the IP user changed it to , changing the target too. The pipe I don't think was what was causing the confusion here.
 * You absolutely raise a good point with regards to the assumption of POV-pushing though, and I agree with you that upon investigation this would have become an awful lot clearer. The point I was trying to make was, well, why was it ever referred to as a killing? Upon investigation, I see that the original page used the word "murder", and was then changed between "death", "killing", "murder" and "assassination" a number of times before intervened in this revision and changed it back to "killing" again. Keith then a number of times (in my view, correctly) reverted edits using the word "murder", as the murderer had not yet been convicted; I wonder if this was, perhaps, where the initial idea for that phrasing came from, and of course with hindsight we can see that this decision wasn't changed locally to this page after the murderer had been convicted.
 * Then I discovered that the page had actually been moved to and from "killing" a number of times (see also, the move log at "death"), so I think it's actually at the point of the last move (made by ) that the page link should have been updated using What links here but wasn't in the end. Hence we end up in the situation in which we find ourselves now.
 * To be clear, I'm absolutely not saying CaptainEek or any of the users here are at fault, bad at what they're doing, or did anything wrong at all (and I've only made the user references I have here pings out of courtesy to let the users know that this is a discussion going on that they may be interested in) - you're not involved in these processes unless you're clearly and obviously an incredibly competent and able editor. I just think it's useful a lot of the time to slow down and take a look at the broader context of why things are the way that they are, rather than just looking at the most recent changes in isolation. The problem that we've seen here isn't an individual one, it's not one particular editor having an issue, it's a systemic one, and it'd be useful for us as a community to consider changes that would prevent things like it from happening. Perhaps highlighting in some way revisions that flatten a redirect link (e.g. revisions that end up changing  to   could be highlighted) to prevent these sorts of mistakes?
 * All the best, Naypta ☺ &#124; ✉ talk page &#124; 13:53, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * , my bad, Killling of Jo Cox is a redirect to Murder of Jo Cox, wasn't a piped link to. And no, it didn't sound like you were accusing anyone; I was just clarifying I wasn't either. Yes, using killing vs. murder is often a contentious subject. And yes, the problem here is that both editors were hurrying and made assumptions. And I absolutely agree, this is symptomatic of a systemic issue: we regularly fail to assume good faith when an IP is involved, whether it's their edits or their complaints about another editor. We tend to assume that any edit by an IP is worthy of investigation, at minimum. On a side note that IP is clearly so knowledgeable that it's a mystery why they didn't also know to leave an edit summary, which likely would have prevented this. —valereee (talk) 14:08, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I had some ideas about how this might be fixed in future, and being the insufferable nerd I am, of course immediately sat down at my code editor and bashed something out. Village pump (proposals) may be of interest to anyone in this thread (or not!) pinging and  as you've both been involved here Naypta ☺ &#124; ✉ talk page &#124; 22:15, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

I note that the candidate already apologised for this mistake in January, which he did immediately it was pointed out. was part of this discussion at the time but perhaps he forgot about it. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:10, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * , yes, I said in my first post that the candidate had apologized; my point here was the ripple effect when the IP's revert was re-reverted by another editor who also didn't bother to investigate. —valereee (talk) 14:17, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * To be clear, as I stated above: The problem was the first saw a low-edit IP making a change that is very often problematic (killing > murder) and assumed it was POV-pushing. The second saw an experienced username revert that low-IP and get reverted in return and assumed the IP was an LTA. Neither investigated. —valereee (talk) 14:20, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
 * And that incorrect re-re-revert stood for five months until today: Convenience link —valereee (talk) 14:25, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Democracy vs. Reprisal
So I was looking at all of these:

Oppose. Someone who thinks a neo-Nazi apologist who collaborates with Emil Kirkegaard (User:Deleet) should ever be unblocked does not show the judgment I want to see in an admin. I did think hard about this, considering the possibility that CaptainEek wasn't aware of the full background to the Captain Occam case (and perhaps unaware of Captain Occam's skills as a liar). But it was CaptainEek's own comment, the first in the unblock request discussion, that highlighted the AE case leading to Captain Occam's block. And in that case, Captain Occam's links with neo-Nazi racism were made abundantly clear. So CaptainEek clearly did understand who and what Captain Occam is. I wanted to find a way to support this RfA, but I really can't, sorry. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:38, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

[Alfie's vote was here but was requested to have been removed from this section. To read that vote, please see the main article] []

Oppose: the vote in support of Captain Occam's unblock request [3] was a deal-breaker for me. The related case, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive229#Captain_Occam, was linked in the first comment on the thread and should have guided the response. Other issues brought up above are also a concern. --K.e.coffman (talk) 00:46, 6 May 2020 (UTC) Unfortunately I do not think they have the judgement to be an administrator, and am afraid they would rush into sensitive situations they are not familiar with based on first impressions. I'm also not impressed at all with their answer to question three: that is an opportunity to be introspective and think about how past conflict on Wikipedia would form the way one becomes an administrator, in addition to showing the community that you know how to take feedback. Instead we get a pirate joke, a statement that they think themselves to have a laid back demeanor, and generally good advice but nothing that shows us how they would actually interact in a conflict, or shows us the have the ability to be self-reflective.

As an example of something that I find particularly concerning for someone who states that they want to work at AN and ANI is their comment in support of Captain Occam's unblock request a few months ago. While I'm normally not one to hold votes against people in an RfA, I think this one is particularly concerning. Captain Occcam had been canvassing support by playing "pick a functionary" via email, lying to people saying that his block was due to oversighted information about another user, and by trying to be sympathetic on the Wikimedia Discord and talking about his situation there. CaptainEek self-discloses as being a participant on that Discord channel, and was the first person to support unblocking one of the single most disruptive users in the history of the English Wikipedia, whose entire history on this project has been one drama after another based on pseudoscientific POV issues. Now, most of these issues were before CaptainEek was active, but I'm still concerned with what this reveals: this is a pretty quick rush to judgement probably based on hearing about it from Captain Occam (not their fault) given how CO'd been talking about it off-wiki for a while, where they rushed to support someone anyone who has dealt with in the past can tell you isn't suited for this project (see entire thread). That rush to judgement over something like this type of unblock request is an issue for someone who wants to work on noticeboards, and combined with the lack of answer to question three, I'm winding up here. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:11, 5 May 2020 (UTC) '''

I would like to see someone explain to me how this is relevant or acceptable to oppose nomination based on participation in a normal voting process? Is it really the way Wikipedia works now that if someone votes a different way on a topic than you do that you will follow their progression through the site and try to block them where you can for being part of the democratic process? (And for having the AUDACITY to have a different opinion than you). I'd love to see how this is justifiable or relevant.

Very respectfully, BasicsOnly (talk) 14:09, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
 * People are entitled to support or oppose RFAs for pretty well whatever reason they want - they're not votes, it's a discussion, and if they are of that opinion, they are absolutely within their rights to share it. Acceptability doesn't come into it - the amount of weight their argument holds may vary, but that's not a reason for them not sharing their argument.
 * It is, however, unusual and noteworthy - although, again, not by any means prohibited - for a two-day-old user with at the time of writing under 40 edits total, just 5 of which are in mainspace, to become involved in RfA in this way - especially given another newly-created user has also participated, asking questions about legitimate uses of sock-puppetry. Please don't take this as me accusing you of anything, because I'm absolutely not trying to - 'tis but a mere observation, and if this is your first account, it may go some way as to explaining why people might be a bit sceptical. Naypta ☺ &#124; ✉ talk page &#124; 14:26, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I note that whilst I was writing this response, the user was blocked. Naypta ☺ &#124; ✉ talk page &#124; 14:28, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Congratulations!
Congrats on your successful RFA! BasicsOnly (talk) 05:58, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

Please disregard
My comment before the end of the RfA. I somehow came to the mistaken belief that the discretionary range was lowered to 60-70%. Kurtis (talk) 16:40, 12 May 2020 (UTC)