User:GRuban/RfA

Hi, folks. I'm George Ruban, User:GRuban (capitalizing matters). I've been here a while, since 2005. The last few years, there have been regular articles on the Signpost about how the number of administrators is decreasing. The last two years, I was asked about becoming an administrator, and this year, I decided to try.

Here's my Wiki-bio, circa 2015, for a journalist's interview with me. I have never edited for pay, but have written most of 3 articles about people I have theoretically worked with, and tried hard to follow all the WP:COI rules. I have had one alternate account that I haven't used in years, that the ArbCom knows about; hopefully User:Newyorkbrad, a rather prominent former Wikipedia:Arbitrator, will show up to say that it met the WP:VALIDALT requirements, and was never blocked, and that he would trust me with his life, his family, and his wallet (OK, maybe not that far). I am a member of Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias and its subproject Gender gap task force. Finally, as an old style editor, I intend to join Wikipedia:Administrators open to recall (Lar's process) even though I know that has fallen out of fashion lately; I trust the community that I expect to trust me.

What administrative work do you intend to take part in?

As an admin, I don't have any specific areas that I plan to specialize in. I intend to fill the need and help clear up the WP:ADMINBACKLOG as it becomes necessary. I've done that sort of thing before: a few years ago, when there was a huge backlog on Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Requests for closure, over 100 days in many cases, and (the amazing) User:Cunard asked for help from experienced editors, I was one of several people who stepped up to review and close as many Wikipedia:Request for Comments as I could. I still come back to close others at times. Here is a list of (many? half? most? I gave up eventually...) of my closures that could be useful to see my judgment. None were ever overturned, but a few people disagreed with my closures on my talk page, I link there as well. Of course it isn't actually necessary to be an Administrator to close most RfCs, though at times people do ask for an admin. (Or a Muslim!)

Over the years I've become fairly knowledgeable about image copyright, so could help there. I haven't done many Images for Deletion on EN Wikipedia, but on Wikimedia Commons I have uploaded a number of images; am a fairly experienced License Reviewer; wrote a popular license finding guide; nominated several hundred for deletion, defended others. On EN, people come to my user talk for image help, gave me a Precious and a barnstar. I won't say I know everything (one of the main things I've learned is that image copyright law is so complex that no one can know everything!), but I would venture I know more than the average EN user, and possibly even more than the average EN admin who doesn't specialize in images.

Mostly I'm asking for the tools to allow me to help out in admin areas as needed, and offering the above as examples of what I've done close to it. I see the mop as, well, a mop, not a pen or a paintbrush. It's not a goal in itself, it's to clean up the unavoidable messes so that editors can do the real work, writing, editing (uploading images... ).

What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?

I've created about 80 real articles, listed on my user page. I hope I've gotten better over time; some of my favorites include:

• the man who turned Harlem black, partly by evicting whites
• the pulp artist who gave up anarchism after he left a bomb in a Pittsburgh outhouse
• the local runner who ran 7 marathons on 7 continents in 7 days, and won them (Antarctica was so cold her iPod shattered)
• the black Victoria's Secret model ... and computer programmer
• the Canadian model and ovarian cancer advocate (she died the day after I started on her article; and the DYK got 34,666 page views, qualifying for All-time DYK page view leaders)
• my most recent is the child CEO of a multi-million dollar healthy candy company (also with noticeable DYK views)

I've also uploaded over 1000 images for articles, most on or linked from my Commons user page. Each one is worth a thousand words, right?

I am also proud of the RfC work, above. Cunard particularly liked two of my tougher ones, Talk:Freedom Caucus#RFC: far-right and especially my "excruciating"(!) longer explanation when it was questioned; and Talk:Vaccine#Proposed merge with Vaccination, where there was no consensus for the merge, but the merge was done anyway, and 2 months had passed since, and there were no volunteers to undo the merge ... so I did it. That sort of lending a hand when needed, that's what I'm proud of, it's what makes us a community instead of each doing our own thing. That's also why I want to be an admin, to help out in yet another way.

Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or have other users caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?

I've been in editing disagreements, certainly, since I've been here 13 years, I can't even list them all - you can see how I dealt with some over a 6 month period when I was thinking about RfA last year. In each case I've tried to keep them from getting to the level of "personal", or spreading. My theory about these things is that they shouldn't matter enough in that way. What we're doing here is amazing, building the single largest source of knowledge in human history (also free, shareable, updateable in real time, and volunteer built), but any bit of it is much less important than the whole. Any bit of an article is generally less important than having the article; any single article is generally less important than the so many other articles we're writing; and any disagreement with a constructive editor is generally so much less important than the benefit that editor brings in writing other articles.

Editors who get into "if you don't agree on how to use the Oxford comma, I'm going to take my ball(,) and go home" arguments just make me sad. The statement I stuck on the top of my user page refers to that, and that's how I try to behave in disagreements. "We disagree here, but I appreciate these other things you've done more." If/when I don't live up to that, I try to apologize, and not do it again. There are exceptions - vandals, single purpose editors, spammers - but they're relatively rare, easy to see, and quickly dealt with (by admins, in fact). Most of are here in good faith, and can work together constructively in general even when we disagree in some particulars.