User:Headbomb/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!

Questions[edit]

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)
...
Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)
...
Nomination, co-nomination and self-nomination (introducing the candidate)
There should be more "basic" questions asked, especially about the candidates' ability to remain cool when in a heated debate, about his/her willingness to accept consensus even though he/she personally is against it.
Advertising and canvassing
Due to rampant accusations of canvassing when people didn't actually canvassed, but rather gave a neutrally worded "friendly notice" on a wikiproject, I propose that there's a "standard notice" text that people could fill up and post in a relevant place. Something like.

I, USERNAME, have currently made a request for adminship. I've put a notice on this page because INSERT REASON. Please review my request in an objective manner and feel free to either support or oppose my request.</nowiki>

Also, votes with "Canvassing" as a reason should be examined and discarded if they are found that the candidate posted a noticed in a completely allowable fashion.

Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)
Should be strongly encouraged when people make an oppose vote. Candidate should be expected to answer ALL questions, or provide rationale if he/she declines to answer one.
Election (including providing reasons for support/oppose)
Providing a valid reason should be mandatory and votes made without any reasons should be purged on the spot. Same goes for "I don't like it" votes, or votes made on completely idiotic grounds. After all, wikipedia WP:ISNOT a democracy.
Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)
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Declaration (the bureaucrat closing the application. Also includes WP:NOTNOW closes)
The bureaucrat closing the application should review each vote individually and determine if the reasons given are valid, up to date. Votes that are not should be discarded (striked in the archives). Then the tally is re-calculated, and bureaucrat checks if their is consensus based on the valid votes.
Training (use of New Admin School, other post-election training)
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Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)
Should be mandatory

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?
...Someone who either does clean-up work (deals with vandals, deletions, etc...) or supports the community.(by helping non-vandals to edit protected pages for example). Currently, the former is emphasized while the later is viewing as not "admin-like".
What attributes do you feel an administrator should possess?
Integrity, impartiality, good faith, ability to keep cool in heated debates (and being curt is not being uncivil), willingness to explain his decisions, willingness to review his decision, always being open to recall

Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:

Have you ever voted in a request for Adminship? If so what was your experience?
Yes. Nothing special.
Have you ever stood as a candidate under the Request for Adminship process? If so what was your experience?
Yes. By far and large it was very negative. Replying to voters is looked down when it should be encouraged to the point of being near-mandatory. Only by debating can valid arguments be identified, misconceptions cleared, etc. A lot of people assume bad faith and aren't willing to reconsider their votes. Others oppose for completely spurious reasons. This would not be a problem if the quality of the reasons were considered, or that votes made for reasons that have been exposed as spurious or obsolete would be discarded, but as of now RfA seems to be handled like a democracy where insane and obsolete votes counts just as much as sane and up to date ones. My request probably still wouldn't have passed, but I least I wouldn't be pissed about it.
Do you have any further thoughts or opinions on the Request for Adminship process?
It really needs to be run less like a democracy and more on the merits of the arguments made by the support and oppose camps. RfA should handled in a similar way than FAC and FLC. The "admin" position job title should be enlarged to accommodate the nominees who would rather support the editing community than cleaning up after them.

Once you're finished...[edit]

Thank you again for taking part in this review of the Request for Adminship process. Now that you've completed the questionnaire, don't forget to add the following line of code to the bottom of the Response page by clicking this link and copying the following to the BOTTOM of the list.

* [[User:Headbomb/RfA review]] added by ~~~ at ~~~~~

Again, on behalf of the project, thank you for your participation.

This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 17:01 on 30 June 2008.