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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Jeffrey Mall (talk | contribs) at 20:10, 6 June 2010 (→Questions for the candidate: Answer to Q10). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Jeffrey Mall 2

Voice your opinion on this candidate (talk page) (16/2/2); Scheduled to end 13:48, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Nomination

Jeffrey Mall (talk · contribs) – Fellow Wikipedians, it is my great pleasure to nominate Jeffrey Mall for the mop. This is not Jeffrey's first run, he ran last November but failed to get consensus. At the time I was only a weak support myself as I had concerns that he was still quite a new editor. Fortunately he has decided to stay with us, and I think has continued to develop as a Wikipedian. As it is now over six months since his first run and over a year since he started editing, I would like to submit him for your reconsideration.

Jeffrey was already a useful vandal fighter when he first ran. He has since developed in a couple of directions, as a gnome wikifying and improving articles, and as a new page patroller. His edits are largely in article space or user talkspace, indicative I think of the sort of useful, communicative and uncontroversial admin that I believe Jeffrey Mall is now more than ready to become. ϢereSpielChequers 12:53, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here: Thank you WereSpielChequers. I accept. :-) Jeffrey Mall (talk • contribs) - 13:48, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia as an administrator. It is recommended that you answer these optional questions to provide guidance for participants:

1. What administrative work do you intend to take part in?
A: Since my last RfA, I've gotten into CSD a bit more, so I'd like to spend some time over at CAT:CSD, particularly in the G10 and G3 departments, as I see both candidate types regularly, sitting around, waiting to be deleted and I believe I may be able to help out with the CSD backlog in that respect, although I intend to work primarily with vandalism and attack pages I'll also help out with other CSD types if an extra admin is needed.
Anti-vandalism
Although I tend to perform less anti-vandalism rounds nowadays than I did 6 or so months ago, I'm still interested in helping out over at AIV and with anti-vandalism in general, I tend to hang out at AIV sometimes, well actually, fairly regularly watching reports being dealt with or even dealing with some reports myself! (To the best of my ability without access to the block tool, that is) If I'm not there to report a user or IP who's been regularly vandalizing I'll be responding to reports already there, watching reports being dealt with or removing users or IPs who've been blocked when the helperbots are down.
General maintenance
And last but not least I'd like to help clear the Temporary Wikipedia userpages backlog and assist in granting the rollback tool to users who've shown knowledge of Wikipedia's vandalism policy and some good experience dealing with vandalism in the past. I may also venture out into RfPP somewhere along the lines but I won't go jumping in at the deep end here, although I'll tread softly at RfPP to begin with, I'll still be protecting pages I may stumble across that have evidence of relatively recent and excessive disruption.
Short but sweet answer
2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?
A: In my opinion, my best contributions to Wikipedia would have to be my work Wikifying lonely articles in need of attention. A few months ago I completed one of the biggest Wikification and cleanup projects I've been involved in so far during my time here on Wikipedia: Acoustic resonance spectroscopy, an article I found difficult to understand and whose subject I had no prior knowledge of whatsoever, the article had a very confusing footnote format but, in the end, I managed to cleanup, Wikify and perform some slight copyediting to the page to finally produce this which I was quite happy with. If you'd like to see more examples of my work with Wikiproject Wikify, I maintain a sporadically updated list of articles I've worked on, whose end results I personally, am most proud of. I'm also quite proud of a list that I created not too long ago where I did some fairly strenuous source gathering and formatting. As I don't like to and am not very good at (In my opinion) writing content, the only serious content creation work I do on Wikipedia involves lists as they don't require a whole lot of writing yet still contribute content-wise to the 'pedia's ever growing index.
3. 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?
A: The only real conflict I've been in would be this one which is barely a conflict in itself. The basic structure of it was that I'd moved a recently created page on a footballer named Iro Curmi (footballer born 1963) away from disambiguation in its title as there was no other footballer with the same name (or so I thought), I had run some searches but from what I found, I thought that multiple documents were all referring to the same Iro Curmi, so I moved the page, however it turned out that there were indeed two footballers with the name "Iro Curmi" so the page was moved back, over redirect, to its original title, I'd already discussed this with the page's author and we agreed that the redirect (left behind after my page move) was no longer needed and as there wasn't a page on the second "Iro Curmi" a dab page would be fairly pointless as one of the two links that would appear on it would be red, as such I requested the redirect be deleted per R3 as an implausible typo, a CSD, admittedly, with a hint of IAR as it's not totally implausible but would prevent any future confusion from readers if it were to be deleted now, if I were an admin at the time I would have simply suppressed the redirect during the move but the admin who dealt with the CSD in the end disagreed with my rationale for deletion and so declined the speedy deletion. I dealt with this conflict the same way I've dealt with every other minor conflict over editing I've experienced on the 'pedia, through discussion with the parties involved, although the redirect wasn't deleted in the end, I'm happy to have been able to walk away from the conflict knowing I'd gotten somewhere at least, even if it wasn't the way I'd originally wanted to go with the page.
Additional optional question from Tommy2010
4. What is the most powerful administrative tool in your opinion? Why do you believe this and how should you go about using it?
A: In my opinion the most powerful tool is either page protection or Special:Block. Page protection if applied ro restrict editing and page moves by anyone except sysops will limit the number of people able to edit or move the page from potentially millions of users (anonymous or otherwise) to around 1,800 administrators on the english Wikipedia, if not page protection then it would probably have to be the access to the block form as blocking whole ranges incorrectly can have detrimental effects. I can't ever see myself blocking ranges to be honest with you, as I lack the technical knowledge to do so and as such will be leaving this to the admins willing to make these difficult blocks. As for page protection I can't see myself protecting pages with the sysop-only settings any time soon, these protection settings are typically only used for edit-warring and high visibility pages and templates, as I don't participate at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring and tend to avoid areas where content disputes are active as much as possible, I can only see myself using the sysop-only protection settings for the latter case and not anytime soon.
Additional optional question from Boing! said Zebedee
5. So, what's your take on BLP policy? (Someone had to ask)
A: The BLP policy is a very good, solid, policy in my opinion. I was just one of the many, many editors who voiced their opinions and commented on the proposals not too long ago at RfC in regards to unreferenced BLPs, and was one of those who supported User:David Gerard's views (among others) who proposed a type of "sticky prod", as it were, for newly created unreferenced BLPs. I'd say we're handling BLPs and enforcing the BLP policy nowadays much better than we were last year. In the 6 or 7 months that have passed since my first RfA I've found myself in areas where the BLP policy had to be enforced and found myself taking action against edits which potentially violated the biographies of living persons policy. I hope that sharing my opinion of the policy here and the diffs I've supplied will give a little more insight into my level of understanding of the BLP policy which I believe was one of, if not, the primary concern at my first RfA.
Additional optional question from Tommy2010
6. You are patrolling the recent changes and you see a brawl break out between another administrator and a new user over an article they are both working on. The administrator, in your opinion, is being blatantly rude, unhelpful and overall biting to the point where you feel a block is necessary to prevent further damage to the encyclopedia. Do you block the sysop in this situation? Why or why not?
A: No. I tend to avoid directly getting involved in controversial situations such as this, even if I felt the admin required blocking, I wouldn't be the one to block them, if I were to block the admin in question directly, I think things could easily get much worse as I've seen all too well what a controversial admin action such as this can accomplish and it's not pretty. I may simply talk to the admin either by email or on their talk page and tell them that the way they're acting is totally unacceptable but it really depends on the circumstances, if I feel the need to, I'll make a post at ANI to discuss the issue with others and that way we can work out the appropriate action to take against said admin (if any).
Additional questions from Suomi Finland
7. There was an election for new checkusers and oversighters. The ballot was secret, unlike this RFA. One checkuser was elected. The others failed to be elected. Some people want to appoint some of them anyway. Others say that changing the rules of the election after an election is not good. There have been other suggestions, like temporary appointment and a new election. What is your opinion? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Checkuser_and_oversighter_selection
A: I can see how changing the "rules" soon after an election took place could be seen as controversial, but if the current election process isn't working then something has to be done about it, although having said that, there is a possibility that the reason the election process no longer works is that users' expectations and standards of and for the granting of users access to the restricted checkuser and oversight interfaces have risen over time as both checkusers and oversights are not only trusted and expected to use the checkuser and oversight tools within policy but have access to information from the database that shouldn't be publicly accessable and as such requires a very secure account and a very trustworthy individual to handle such tools, therefore it would be necessary to place users interested in having access to these restricted interfaces under intense scrutiny in order to make sure that the user will indeed use the checkuser or oversight tools within policy and will never abuse either of them.
8. If someone wrote a valid, constructive comment, but this was removed by someone citing "disruptive" even though it was a calmly written, seemingly valid comment, would you block that person that removed the comment? Is it vandalism? Or should one just accept the fact that comments were removed? What if someone removed "support" votes in someone else's RFA and you were an admin?
A: No. Simply removing a comment doesn't justify a block especially if a sensible rationale of any kind is supplied in the edit summary. Good faith should always be assumed and as such I wouldn't even revert the edit, I would however leave a note on the user's talk page requesting clarification of the removal of the comment. I would do the same for any type of !vote in an RfA, this changes however, if the user or IP who removed the comment has been actively vandalizing and just decided to randomly remove the comment citing "disruptive" in an attempt to cause disruption.
Additional question from HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts?
9. This is as follow up to Q6 above. Would your actions in that scenario if the party behaving unacceptably was an established, respected editor but not an administrator and would it change again if they were relatively new with only a few edits?
A. As an established editor I would have expected them to already be aware of our behavioural guidelines and policies, specifically Wikipedia:No personal attacks and Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers, depending on the severity of the user's actions, a block may be needed in order to prevent any further damage, which, depending on the user's history with us (including their block log) would hopefully only span a few hours, if I were to indeed need to do this, I would however, also request a review of the block at ANI.
Additional question from Mkativerata
10. How would you deal with these two speedy deletion nominations? [1] [2]
A. Both have been tagged as A7 articles yet neither of them could be appropriately deleted per A7 of the criteria as they both claim some degree of significance in one way or another, I would have declined both of them, if push came to shove either article could at any time be either proposed for deletion or be brought in for discussion, having said that, nowadays #1 would have to be BLP prodded if sources couldn't be found.

General comments

Please keep discussion constructive and civil. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review their contributions before commenting.

Discussion

Support
  1. As nominator. ϢereSpielChequers 14:21, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Support Checks out alright with me. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 14:36, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Support per my good interactions with the nominee on some lower profile articles. Lambanog (talk) 14:38, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Support - seems fine to me. Orphan Wiki 14:46, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Support Been around for 12 months and his interest around the admin related areas gives me no choice but to support. Excellent candidate. Minimac (talk) 15:00, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Support did so last time and will do so again! Airplaneman ✈ 15:40, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Support - Giving Jeffrey a mop seemed like a good idea to me at first glance. I then read through his first Rfa, which confirms that he took some good advice, including work on speedy deletes, and is ready. Best wishes! Jusdafax 15:53, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Support Never heard of temporary wikipedian userpages, after clicking on the link in his past Rfa, I was genuinley amazed to find such a backlog. Acather96 (talk) 16:14, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Support as someone who was neutral last time, I am more than happy to support you this time :)--White Shadows stood on the edge 16:36, 6 June 2010 (UTC) (moved to oppose per Q6 and Q9)[reply]
  9. Support. This editor appears willing to engage on their user talk calmly and directly. Having addressed what seemed to be the major reasoning for the opposes in the previous RfA, along with my observation of Jeffrey's clueful contribution, point to a major net positive. Tiderolls 16:57, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  10. No problems that I see. Hi878 (talk) 17:13, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Support Per above. Immunize (talk) 17:19, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  12. Support per consistently being helpful and clueful every time I've stumbled across his edits. —fetch·comms 17:37, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  13. Seems to have genuinely improved since the last RfA. ceranthor 18:23, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  14. From what i've seen, its a yes. Dwayne was here! ♫ 18:36, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  15. Weak support – Giving Jeffrey the mop is not a bad idea. He's been very helpful around Wikipedia. However, I am worried about his answers to questions 6 and 9, as the oppose below have mentioned. Just because someone is an admin does not give them immunity from blocks. If an editor is being disruptive, they should be blocked, regardless of whether or not they are an admin. If they try to unblock themselves, they will be desysopped by ArbCom (Tanthalas39 (talk · contribs) is a prime example). If he corrects his answers to these questions, I may change to a normal support, but currently, I have to unfortunately only weak support. Cheers, —MC10 (T•C•GB•L) 19:54, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  16. Support User has a clue about not blocking other administrators. It's unfortunate that the initial opposers have seen that as a double-standard, but I believe I understand it for what it is: a strong preference for drama-avoidance. Blocking another administrator is a guaranteed drama magnet, especially in the circumstances posed in the questions he answered. Jclemens (talk) 20:05, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose
  1. Oppose. Maybe I'm getting the wrong end of the stick from the answers to Q6 and 9, but you seem to think admins are exempt from policies or are exempt from being blocked for violations thereof. Also, admisnhip is about making tough decisions- if it wasn't, we'd have bots that do more than just clerk AIV and RfPP. Wishing to be an uncontroversial admin is commendable, but I worry that you wouldn't be comfortable having to make potentially controversial decisions and I have concerns over how you would deal with the inevitable screams of admin abuse that follow any controversial decision. I can't support an admin who won't make a judgement call when it might be controversial- that why we have admins. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:37, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    I think the candidate means that he expects all administrators to be aware of those policies and thus a block may be appropriate depending on the situation.. but I understand the double standard point you made.  – Tommy2010!message 19:03, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Oppose (for now) Q6 and Q9 seem to tell me that you belive in double standards here. You litteraly said that If say HJ here got into a big fight with an Ip or a newbie, you'd not block him since he is an admin but you would block oh say me since I am an established editor but not an admin. Until you clarify your answer a bit more and tell us that you're admin related actions would not be influenced by another person's "user rights", I'm going to have to oppose this RFA.--White Shadows stood on the edge 19:11, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Sorry if that's the impression I gave off but no one is exempt from policy and I never said admins were either. Not too long ago we lost several admins including this one due to apparent disputes in which one admin blocked another who then unblocked themself and blocked another, this is exactly the scenario I'm talking about and would like to prevent from happening again in the future to the best of my ability, I'm all for having an admin blocked if it's called for under the circumstances but I'd rather discuss it beforehand instead of blocking an admin on the spot (technically could be classed as a cool down block) as it can be lifted by the blocked user as they're an administrator themself and especially if said block is not backed by community consensus as this is where thinks can go nastily wrong, however inappropriate or against policy this may be you have to take into consideration that it is indeed technically possible in that the software will allow you to do it. I'm presuming the bit that grabbed attention was this: As an established editor I would have expected them to already be aware of our behavioural guidelines and policies, specifically Wikipedia:No personal attacks and Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers, this was added to my answer to Q9 specifically because it was noted that User:HJ Mitchell was talking specifically about an established editor and yet I've seen editors who've been here years and not known of some policies, editorial and behavioural guidelines such as these, this wasn't added to my answer to Q6 because it would be obvious that I (as well as everyone else) would expect an admin to be aware of such well known policies and behavioural guidelines as Wikipedia:No personal attacks and Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers. I don't believe in double standards and I by no means believe admins are exempt from policy, it's unfortunate however, that my phrasing on Q6 was off and I hope this expansion would have cleared up some of the confusion. Jeffrey Mall (talk • contribs) - 19:51, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Thank you for that explanation. I'm not quite satisfied, though and would appreciate it if you could elaborate further. So, if you saw me do something for which you would block a non-admin (White Shadows, for instance), would you block me. Also, I have the technical ability to unblock myself (technically, I could block myself!) but I'm not allowed to and there are messages to that effect on all the relevant special pages, so if I did, I'd probably be desysopped. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 20:07, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Neutral
  1. Waiting for more answers definitely leaning towards support, excellent answers to the questions  – Tommy2010!message 18:04, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  2. It appears from Q's 6 and 9 that you see Admins as warranting special treatment compared to an established editor. I note that blocks were held as options in both cases, hence my neutral for now, but in the case of the established editor (who "should know the policies") the block seemed to be higher up on the list of options than for the admin, who is certainly expected to know the policies as well. ArakunemTalk 19:20, 6 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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