User:Livitup/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

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)

   Process or qualification? I see no problem with the current process. I don't think a strict set of criteria is a good idea for judging qualification. I will say that I don't think that 'number of GA/FA articles', etc. is a good judge of potential admins. You don't need admin to contribute to an article. More focus should be put on a candidate's nominations for speedy, PRODs, etc. since those are where the tools are actually used.

2. Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)

   Coaching someone on how to "pass the test" of RfA is a bad thing. Mentoring potential admins is a good thing. The process should be based less on how to answer the "magic questions" to get people to support an individual's RfA, but more on how to be a good admin, so they can answer the questions intelligently themselves. After all, will the "coach" review all the mentoree's admin actions after the tools are granted?

3. Nomination, co-nomination and self-nomination (introducing the candidate)

   I have no problem with the current nomination process. I don't see the difference between a co-nomination and a strong support, so I would remove the co-nomination clauses, just to simplify things. I have no problem with self-nomination... an editor could make a great admin without attracting enough individual attention to get nominated. In fact, I think these are just the kind of admins we want... people who blend in and make lots of helpful, if small improvements.

4. Advertising and canvassing

   I'm probably in the minority here, but I wouldn't have a problem with RfA candidates 'advertising' via the use of a standard template on the Talk pages of people who the candidate has worked with in the past. I would wager that the majority of Wikipedians have better things to do than watch the RfA page, so candidates wouldn't get support from people they have actually worked with. Why is RfA a shark tank? Because the same crowd of people keep circling the same proverbial pool of water.

5. Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)

   I think the current standard questions are good enough as a starting point, but I think candidates should do a lot more work in their 'opening statements' and that the debate should be a lot more Q&A with the candidate, rather than bickering between support/oppose.

6. Election (including providing reasons for support/oppose)

   Important enough for consensus building, but wish there was a lot less discussion at this point. I think the debate and election should run separately, instead of concurrently. There seems to be debate amongst 'voters,' but not much chance for the candidate to answer/respond to the issues raised in the debate.

7. Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)

   Of course this should be a possibility.

8. Declaration (the bureaucrat closing the application. Also includes WP:NOTNOW closes)

   I'm not aware of any problems with the current process for this.

9. Training (use of New Admin School, other post-election training)

   I've never looked into these, but there should be good documentation for the roles, responsibilities, and procedures for use of all admin tools. The jobs admins decide to take on are varied, so I can't think of a logistically feasible way to provide formal training, nor do I think it would be particularly useful.

10. Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)

    I don't think this is broken now.

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?

   Janitor. They act on the consensus of the community. In only a few special circumstances should they act on their own.

2. What attributes do you feel an administrator should possess?

   Level-headedness, calm, etc.

Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:

1. Have you ever voted in a request for Adminship? If so what was your experience?

   No, though I will probably start. I have been reading RfA for a while to get a feel, and it seems like a very adversarial process.

2. Have you ever stood as a candidate under the Request for Adminship process? If so what was your experience?

   No

3. Do you have any further thoughts or opinions on the Request for Adminship process?

   Maybe later.

Once you're finished...

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:Livitup/RfA review]] added by ~~~ at ~~~~~

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

This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 18:47 on 25 June 2008.