User:Natalya/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.

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Questions

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)
To me, I want them to be someone responsible, respectful, and confident in their abilities to do and learn about administrative tasks. However, with how much candidates go through with everyone expecting them to know everything, pretty much, I would be very hesitant to nominate someone for adminship, just becuase I would feel that someone would always be able to find something negative about them, and then everyone just seems to canvass on opposes.
Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)
I think it can be helpful for people to learn about admin tools, but the personality and temperment of the adminstrator is much more important to me. Anyone can learn to use tools; not everyone can learn to be calm.
Nomination, co-nomination and self-nomination (introducing the candidate)
I don't like how self-nominations are automatically reasons to oppose for some people. True, we get a lot of dumb people self-nominating, but we also get valid contributors self-nominating too, and I don't think that should be the sole reason for an opposition of a candidate. We should comment on the candidate themselves, not whether or not someone else nominated them. Yes, a self-nom can be taken as other people not having confidence in the person to nominate them, but I think we can see through people who are legitimate candidates versus those who are not.
Advertising and canvassing
Letting people know about the RfA is fine; spamming/posting in notable places to get people to !support or !oppose is not okay.
Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)
There are an unreasonable number of questions that get posed to all candidates. People seem to post so many questions about "when would you block" or "would you delete this", etc. Anyone can look up the answer to these questions, and also, anyone (including current administrators, geez!) can also make a mistake! I think that we really need to cut down on the number of questions. If there is a legitimate reason to ask candidate X about blocking for some particular reason about that candidate, that's fine. But the !questions are pretty overwhelming, and not that helpful.
Election (including providing reasons for support/oppose)
Supporting/opposing editors seem to police this pretty well themselves.
Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)
If people want to, there's no reason why not to.
Declaration (the bureaucrat closing the application. Also includes WP:NOTNOW closes)
I think the WP:NOTNOW closes are good, as long as it is truly clear that the vote is a landslide oppose. We shoudln't do it prematurely, though.
Training (use of New Admin School, other post-election training)
Just tell people to take it slowly! Everyone makes mistakes; the best way to learn is to do. If new administrators do things slowly, they'll slowly get their feet under them. This is why I don't think it's necessary for a candidate to know everything about being an administrator as long as they express that they're not going to just go out and delete things willy-nilly without looking at the guidelines.
Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)
Any admin can be desysoped, I don't think there needs to be an official way to go about it. Although, do we need to consider something like the tenure process for professors? It depends if we want more okay administrators, or fewer great administrators.

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?
A role model for other editors, a calm presence in a dispute, an enforcer against disruptive editors.
What attributes do you feel an administrator should possess?
The ability to stay calm, respect for other editors, respect for the encyclopedia, the ability to admit that he/she is wrong.

Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:

Have you ever voted in a request for Adminship? If so what was your experience?
Yes. None of my votes have been particularly controversial, so there haven't been any notable experiences.
Have you ever stood as a candidate under the Request for Adminship process? If so what was your experience?
Yes. I had a lovely time (people were very complementary!). I really took it seriously, though. It was back before everyone and their mother posted a million questions, though, so everything was a bit more reasonable.
Do you have any further thoughts or opinions on the Request for Adminship process?
I'm glad we're looking at this!

Once you're finished...

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This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 21:14 on 30 June 2008.