User:Trialpears/RfA debriefing

This was originally posted at Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship#Trialpears debriefing on 12 June 2021, a few hours after Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Trialpears closed as successful with a final tally of 217/0/0.

As I promised, here comes my debriefing. I found earlier debriefings useful to read before going through my RfA and they answered lots of the questions about how it can be to go through the process. This will probably not be the most exciting debriefing of all time, my RfA wasn't either, but the more data points the better.

It is important to note that this is just my experience and cannot be taken as true of other candidates, which should be abundantly clear given the horribly stressful RfA with lots of poor behavior which started along side mine. Almost all other RfAs also have at least a bit of opposition which I assume would completely change how the process feels.

Since there isn't too much to say about the RfA itself, it has been called as snooze fest for a reason, I will focus a bit more on how I ended up here and give some of my thoughts on RfA questions.

My first somewhat serious thoughts about adminship were already back in November 2019 when Xeno said some very kind words and joked about Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Trialpears being a red link. While I obviously wasn't ready back then I think that interaction took RfA from something only the best of the best could pass through to something that may become possible in a year or two.

In July 2020 Lee Vilenski said that their email was open in case anyone wanted to talk adminship and I took the opportunity. Instead of the "you are on the right track but still ways to go" answer I expected it was more you don't have much content creation and your (non-automated) mainspace edits are quite few, but other than that it looks good. They even offered to nominate me right then and there if I found a second nom. After politely declining saying that I wanted some recognized content and a few more months of tenure first I went on my way and didn't think much about adminship for a few months.

Then Barkeep contacted me in December saying they've heard my name mentioned as someone who could make a good admin. At this point I was still quite hesitant, especially considering my lower activity in the months prior, but given that I now knew that quite a few editors believed in me and I would have significant use for the tools I thought that it would be for the best to go through with it. I did as Barkeep said and got a few months of higher activity and (slowly) returned to working on List of countries by Human Development Index before contacting Barkeep again in early April saying that I finally wanted to run. I found the next week where my schedule would be quite empty and I could devote mostly to RfA if it got rough which I still thought was somewhat likely.

I contacted Primefac asking them if they wanted to be my second nominator and they accepted. During the two months leading up to the RfA I worried about it a decent amount. This mostly manifested itself as me compulsively reading policy in the middle of the night. In retrospect I see a decent amount of benefits to starting it immediately upon hearing that people want to nominate you if your situation allows for it.

Just over a month ago I learned that Vami too was running and sent them a few discord messages about it. They indirectly convinced me to open up a bit about my RfA and I started to allow myself to talk about it if it came up naturally. Around this time I also spoke with Izno about it and Xaosflux came to my talk page and wondered if I was interested in running. All this made me feel a lot more confident and stopped me from worrying about it. At this point I felt that the likelihood that I would fail was just a few percent with me saying something incredibly stupid being the most likely culprit in that case.

I answered the 3 standard questions, my noms wrote their statements and then it was time to start. I, like I expect every other candidate, started out being incredibly nervous, but after a few hours of seeing tons of support flood in I started to feel a lot better and for the rest of the week I just enjoyed reading all the incredibly kind things that were said.

Given that many people brought up that they thought my answers were really good I guess I'll share a bit of my thoughts around writing them. Just like when closing discussions or performing many admin actions these answers/actions are things you really should be able to stand behind. If there's anything you're uncertain would be appropriate it shouldn't be in the answer or at least be modified to account for that. This principle very naturally leads you to threading carefully when in new waters and very much influenced how I wrote Q7 about the rouge template editor which a lot of people thought was particularly good. Q7 was also the one I was the most uncertain about, it is a situation we don't have procedures for but that needs to be handled quickly. I really couldn't say that I was sure my proposed course of action was appropriate and hence I would have to get more eyes on it which resulted in me suggesting to take it to AN afterwards. Similar things can be said for many of the other answers.

Other things that can't have hurt is that I'm well read on Wikipedia policies, guidelines and essays but that really shouldn't be essential since you will inevitably have picked up the stuff relevant to the areas you work in if you are a suitable admin candidates and have an overreaching understanding of the rest of the project even if you haven't read say WP:ARBPOL or WP:MASTODONS. I also considered how I would have answered some of the questions given in the past few RfAs. Before publishing answers for any of the the more important/difficult questions I took a few minutes to do something else before making sure I thought they were good even after getting a bit of distance from them. This resulted in a few of the answers becoming more clear than they otherwise would be.

If you think you might be interested in adminship (even if it's a year+ away), my email is open, but be warned that I haven't even been an admin for a day at this point and am far from the most competent person on the matter. If you're interested in my non-judgemental thoughts or just a chat I'm happy to provide though. I think I'm far from the only one who underestimate their chances.