I so appreciate everyone who takes the time to write a debrief. This one seems particularly challenging to have written and so I am especially appreciative. I do have a few reactions:
The RfA process could be restructured to remove or greatly reduce the possibility of crash-and-burn failures (roughly making the social impact of a failed RfA no worse than that of a failed request for a sub-admin permission).Agreed.
This restructuring would have to be major;Agreed.
the first idea that comes to mind as potentially sufficient is banning replies to votes by anyone other than the candidate.I don't see how this helps with the loss of social standing. I hypothesize that the reason we don't see 80/20 rfas anymore is because many of the 20% have been socially pressured to not say silly stuff. So either something is serious enough to merit many opposes or it's trivial enough to get less than 10. Having a situation where more people feel OK opposing seems like it would give more people for whom there is a loss of social standing, not less. So I would love any more insight into how this last part helps with the earlier pieces.
The community, on a deep and pervasive level, enjoys RfAs like ours.Strongly agreed.
RfA won't get better because the community doesn't want it to get better.I think this is slightly more ambiguous. RFA2021 was a failure but I'm not sure it's fair to say it's a failure because the community doesn't want RfA to get better.
the only way [RfA change] will happen is if people say publicly that they're not comfortable running under the current system, and stick to that.I think you're missing just how common this is already. See this discussion for a recent and concentrated grouping of people saying just that. In other words, it's not some new solution. People are already choosing, explicitly as in that discussion and implicitly in the declining numbers, not to run. I do agree that the longer this happens the more likely it is that there will be an eventual will to fix RfA but I think the actual not running matters far more than the people saying it publicly.
Thanks again for writing this and, despite my invitation above, please feel no pressure to actually reply. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:43, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
the scuttling and wholesale replacement of RfA as a system. And I agree that it's good that people have been publicly indicating their reluctance to run, but I think a more visible effort with a unified message would make a big difference. I would make a userbox or something, but I don't think it's my place, as someone who can't boycott RfA because she's already done it (and already committed to re-RfA under certain circumstances), to actually start that effort. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they) 20:37, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
My second RFA was a very long time ago, and maybe second runs have changed their odds without my noticing. But my experiences both as a candidate and as a nominator is that second RFAs are generally uncontentious, provided the candidate has waited a few months and addressed the major reasons why the first RFA failed. If anything, a first run RFA can neutralise an issue, as subsequent runs focus on events since the last run and whether the candidate has responded to the opposes. ϢereSpielChequers 16:50, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
Well, the leekycauldron way is to throw statistics at the problem. So, here you are:
Attempt no. | Successful | Unsuccessful | Success rate |
---|---|---|---|
All RfAs | 2,185 | 2,792 | 43.9% |
2nd | 243 | 376 | 39.3% |
3rd | 47 | 106 | 30.7% |
4th | 9 | 38 | 19.1% |
5th | 5 | 11 | 31.3% |
6th | 1 | 4 | 20% |
7th | 0 | 1 | 0% |
With exception for the 5th RfA, which seems to be a lucky number of some sort, it looks like each successive RfA (not counting reason) is less likely. The possibility for success on the first try has to be higher than the total, so that the average balances out... wasn't able to differentiate based on failure reason. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/they) 08:40, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
My main takeaways: RfA won't get better because the community doesn't want it to get better. The community, on a deep and pervasive level, enjoys RfAs like ours.
I shouldn't act holier-than-thou as I can be drawn into this myself, but I do agree. A lot of people write that RfA is broken, but few say so with their actions.
That you drafted a leaving message is quite a bombshell. We knew that, if the 'crats found no consensus, that would just be the end of things for us on Wikipedia.
People who voted oppose should be under no illusions: they voted for you to leave the community. It is hardly as if there is no precedent for what happens after RfAs like yours fail.
You have some interesting advice: I do think it establishes a clear lesson for others, though: Don't RfA. You don't know what random thing will turn out to be the single aspect of your work that hundreds of people judge you by. ... But the only way [RfA will be replaced] is if people say publicly that they're not comfortable running under the current system, and stick to that.
I do feel that I reached some similar conclusions in the 'crat chat commentary: Each oppose has the effect of not just opposing this one person becoming an administrator, but opposing all people becoming new administrators, and of opposing this one person continuing their outstanding volunteer work on this website. ... I cannot [run for RfA] unless I am prepared to treat the exercise as a joke, in which whether I pass is a matter of randomness and I am scrutinised based on things I do not believe or that do not accurately reflect my contributions to this website (and in which this paragraph will inevitably be quoted back to me in a hostile manner).
I guess your suggestion to me would be to refuse to run for RfA, something I've been achieving for a fair few years now. But I am more pessimistic as many Wikipedians seem in denial of the fact that the website is currently on fire and facing existential threats in several different directions. The community, however, is incredibly resistant to all change. RfA seems not to be special in this regard.
(Feel free to move my comment here—or just remove it—if you don't want it on your main talk page.) — Bilorv (talk) 09:35, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
Though I don't quite have confidence that me saying "I will not run for RfA until..." would be seen by most Wikipedians as an "oh no, we're missing out" rather than a "thank god" or a "who are you?".I've seen you previously and likely therefore am not most Wikipedians, but in general my immediate inclination toward any random editor (with a reasonable contribution history) wouldn't be "who are you". Rather, just as I trust most Wikipedians (past the extended confirmed mark, perhaps) to be civil and cognizant of the basic policies, I would similarly trust them with admin tools. At least, I think misuse would be rare enough for the community to address via noticeboard. – Anon423 (talk) 02:52, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for sharing but many many people were hoping youd address the concerns, could you please? This kinda comes off as tonedeaf.Tooscaredtospeak (talk) 20:05, 26 May 2022 (UTC)
I missed this whole RfA and personally looking at it now I'd probably be neutral on the whole candidacy. Given that I indirectly prompted the comment which led to the question that blew up your RfA, I'd say there's an undercurrent of hypocrisy in this entire wiki relating to how we treat extreme left political views and how we treat extreme right political views. I got put on blast for bringing up a candidate's current political views by the same people who said that it's your right to oppose a candidate based on political views. The difference was I was opposing someone who I believed to be a leftist and you were discussing opposing someone who was on the right. That being said, you weren't hypocritical at the RfA in that regard (you did say support for Stalin/Mao is dq'ing) and I don't know enough about you to have an opinion on whether you'd be a good admin; I believe everyone should have the ability to impose their virtue tests at RfA because the alternative is having a central authority define what opinions are and are not OK.
The reason why I'm bringing this up now is because the substance of this debrief is that you're mad that people opposed you and imposed virtue tests on you, when the entire nexus of this dispute is your answer saying you would impose a virtue test on others. To quote "C" (who hasn't been listed as a "minority opinion" so it seems like they speak for most of you): "All this even though most of those personal attacks and misrepresentations made no attempt to tie back to the question of suitability to serve as an administrator. Because RfA isn't about suitability to serve as an administrator. It is, and has always been, a virtue test."
C says this, but you still feel you can impose what you openly acknowledge is a virtue test that nobody else would be OK with. F says that "You don't know what random thing will turn out to be the single aspect of your work that hundreds of people judge you by." yet you judge people by what many people consider to be a single aspect of their personality in regards to RfA. 5 says that "Things started to stabilize a bit, particularly as people began to defend our right to object to support for our own oppression." but again go on to criticize the very system that gives you (and everyone else!) the right to object to support for your own oppression.
This is the reason why RfA can't be "fixed". RfA gives everyone in the Wikipedia community the ability to oppose or support based on what they personally feel is legitimate; and this necessarily leads to conflict when people's ideas of what are "valid reasons" differ significantly. Everyone hates this conflict, but there's no way to resolve it without creating and endorsing a rubric for grading admins; but to do so would take away everyone's ability to idiosyncratically judge candidates according to their particular standards so nobody seems to want that to happen.
I'm certainly in the minority here but I don't believe there's anything wrong with RfA. I grew up having never known a world where Wikipedia has not existed as the sum total of human knowledge. The majority of what I have learned is from Wikipedia. This is true for most English-speaking people nowadays, so it's impossible to call RfA a WP:NOBIGDEAL when it's the confirmation process for the judges and arbiters of what is the most widely used source of knowledge in the world. When you are an admin, you are granted a massive amount of power with endless discretion and not much oversight on how that power is used, power that extends far beyond the clique of those who edit Wikipedia, power that is more than a fair chunk of elected public officials.
You said yourself you want to be involved in WP:ARBIPA; that would make you responsible for policing the edits of a community with 1.64 billion people in it. [1] Many of those people speak English, given that those are the official languages of India and Pakistan.
I would say it's a fair price to put admins under the microscope in a public trial by fire, given the damage an actively hostile admin would do to the project. In 2015 an admin abused their power to create thousands and thousands of unnecessary redirects. It took 2 and a half years + the creation of a special deletion criteria to clean those redirects up. [2] Imagine how much worse it would be if it was on an issue that actually mattered. Chess (talk) (please use ((reply to|Chess))
on reply) 06:16, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
I missed your RfA (was on an unintended break) but I have been encouraging people to debrief for quite a while now in hopes of convincing the community that we have a problem. Many non-admins think we have a specific need to make RfA "difficult" -- if you can't deal with RfA, how will you deal with adminship? -- and don't see that it's not just difficult but is often an incredibly hideous experience that can actually cause lasting harm. Many admins who RfA'd more than seven years ago think it can't possibly feel as bad as some of us are telling them it is because "I've been through it and it wasn't that stressful." Like they think we're either exaggerating or we're just not made of the same tough stuff as they are. So thank you for this. Valereee (talk) 16:11, 2 October 2022 (UTC)