Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Greenman

Greenman

Voice your opinion on this candidate (talk page) (16/1/0); Scheduled to end 20:55, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

Nomination

Greenman (talk · contribs) – Greenman has been editing Wikipedia for a long while now. He joined the platform back in February 2003 and has amassed more than 16,000 edits. He is an occasional contributor on the Afrikaans Wikipedia and also on the other indigenous African languages Wikipedias. A South African Wikipedian, he serves on the national Wikimedia ZA board as a committed member. Greenman is also a friendly editor and regularly participates in community discussions regarding South Africa and many more topics. He has obtained a trustworthy reputation among numerous editors and will go out of his way to help you in any situation. He has shown consistent reliability. His main interests are South African literature, sport, politics and technology. LefcentrerightTalk (plz ping) 11:12, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here: Thank you User:Lefcentreright for the nomination, I accept. I confirm that I have never edited for pay, and do not ever edit under an alternative account name (excluding the occasional inadvertent anonymous edit when I am logged out). Greenman (talk) 11:32, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia as an administrator. Please answer these questions to provide guidance for participants:

1. What administrative work do you intend to take part in?

A: Although I have been editing since 2003, I have been reluctant to be an administrator. I am fairly conflict-averse, the process has always appeared quite onerous, and I have always preferred to work quietly in the background. However, after discussions about the lack of admins in our local community, and problems local editors have experienced, I have agreed to be nominated.

I don't see myself getting widely involved in new areas I'm not currently involved in. I do see myself getting involved in two main areas:

1) Vandalism prevention. For example, on 5 August, the article Joel_Wilson_(umpire) (history) was subjected to 179 edits in less than an hour. I happened to spot the announcement on the 3rd party site that led to most of the vandalism. When I came to view the page, it was being subjected to multiple vandalism attempts per minute. I got involved in attempting to roll back the vandalism, and requested that the page be semi-protected. I also warned vandalising users, and requested a block for multiple offenders that had already been warned. If I had been able to do either of these actions myself, it would have saved a noticeable amount of work for other admins (who besides blocking and semi-protecting, also later had to redact various edits for violations of WP:BLP). I warn users and request blocks reasonably often.

2) Viewing (and occasionally restoring) deleted articles. Working on African Wikipedia content, I have in the past quite often come across articles that have been needlessly deleted. Often, the reason for the deletion was not that the topic was not notable, but that the original editor was inexperienced, and did not reference the article properly. They may also have been unable to defend the article properly during the deletion nomination process. This results in the efforts being lost, and quite often the editor losing interest. I have found myself wanting to view their original contribution (which may have been substantial) so that I could assist in improving the article, as well as nurturing a new editor interested in African content. I remember one particular case where the efforts were substantial, the topic was clearly notable to me, and I was in the midst of tracking down sources (mostly not in English). Before I could finish, the article was deleted, and there was no way to continue.

I have come across far fewer of these recently. I am unsure if this is because the situation has improved, I am just not noticing as many. Greenman (talk) 20:06, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?

A: I tend to be WikiGnome-like in style, so my contributions are often minor, and nothing in particular stands out. I have never worked towards getting articles to good or featured status. Rather, I work in areas that don't interest too many others. I tend to start lots of small, articles for the purposes of completion (such as making sure all participants in the various editions of the Chess World Cup have an article, or that all political parties contesting the 2019 South African general election have an article). I see my best contributions as being indirect - helping in the formation of the Wikimedia South Africa chapter, and in encouraging and assisting local editors. Local content tends to fall prey to link rot, or simply not exist online in the first place, and I have worked extensively to get organisations to rectify this so that the content can be referenced on Wikipedia. Greenman (talk) 20:27, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

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: Yes. My most frustrating time editing Wikipedia was in 2007. A single-purpose editor was, to my mind, rewriting history at the Herero and Namaqua genocide article. No other editors seemed interested in the article, and I became angry and despondent. I would rate this and this as my two worst edits on Wikipedia - they're both quite cringeworthy to read now. But there were positives. From the experience, I learnt to trust Wikipedia's processes. The article was protected, and the user was banned, and the systems, slow and frustrating as they seemed to me in the moment, with the 'wrong' version of the article remaining locked on the page for a lengthy period, worked in the end.

I have been involved in very few disputes since then. My style is to avoid conflict, disengage where needed, and to have patience with and faith in the systems in place. I tend to await consensus rather than act unilaterally in general. If accepted as an administrator, I will continue this style, and mostly use my privileges in uncontroversial cases of vandalism and the like. If there are more serious disputes and conflict, I will likely step away, rather than escalate the situation. My aim in accepting the nomination is to reduce the workload on other admins, and ease frustrations in the local community, not to increase my own stress levels! Greenman (talk) 20:56, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

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You may ask optional questions below. There is a limit of two questions per editor. Multi-part questions disguised as one question, with the intention of evading the limit, are disallowed. Follow-up questions relevant to questions you have already asked are allowed.

Additional question from John M Wolfson

4. Why do you want administrator rights on the English Wikipedia specifically, when it seems like your talents would be better suited towards global rights?

A: Primarily because I was nominated on the English Wikipedia to assist on the English Wikipedia. I would have no objection in principle to attaining global rights as well. However, from what I understand, Global rights are limited in some aspects on the English Wikipedia, as consensus has not been attained in all areas. See WP:GRP. Greenman (talk) 23:20, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

Additional question from ThatMontrealIP

5. Could you comment on why you chose not to include inline sources in these article creations over the past couple of years? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

A: For 1, the source is included as part of the sports team template. The rest are all chess players, and the standard format includes three main sources, included as templates/external links; FIDE, the international chess federation, which is the official source for their titles and rating and which includes some biographical information, as well as chessgames.com and chess365.com, which are chess databases containing a record of their major games. So all articles have sources, but little if any extra content needing further inline sourcing. Greenman (talk) 23:09, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

Additional question from Lee Vilenski

6. Thank you for running! You have ~16,000 edits, and 16 years of service. Do you see you activity levels increasing with the mop?

A: My least active year was 2004, with 132 edits. 2019 has been my most active year, with 2652 edits so far. I see my activity levels in future changing according to my available free time, rather than whether or not my nomination is approved. Greenman (talk) 22:55, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

Additional Questions from Beeblebrox

7. This is a follow up based on the second half of your answer to Q1: EN.Wikipedia does suffer from inadequate coverage of African topics, so wanting to work on that is great, but there are some aspects of your answer that are bit troubling. One is that you seem to be suggesting that you would substitute your own judgement for that of an admin who previously deleted an article. The other is your statement that you were tracking down sources for an article when it was deleted and there was "no way to continue." To my mind the solution to both of these issues is to simply write the new article yourself, so I'm wondering why that seemingly did not occur to you.

A:

Additional question from Beyond My Ken

8. 540 of your 1,214 page creations are User:talk pages [1]. Can you explain why that is?

A:

Additional questions from Cryptic

9. To Q1, you say you want to work with page protection and undeletion. In the last year, I can find five edits to WP:RFPP ([2] [3] [4] [5] [6]) and two to AFD (to 1 and 2) and nothing else deletion- or undeletion-related (though I looked only in the WP: namespace); and zero to WP:REFUND or WP:DRV ever. Is there something obvious I'm missing? —Cryptic 01:50, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

A:

Additional Questions from Kudpung

10. What in your opinion are the benefits to the encyclopedia of a user creating hundreds of stubs (some poorly sourced) in a niche topic and hoping that other editors will find them and turn therm into proper articles?

A:

11. This is not a two part question as it requires only one answer. Imagine you are a New Page Reviewer. (something which I believe you have never done) There is a script devised by a user that greatly simplifies adding the appropriate Wikiproject banner and rating. Should New Page Reviewers be expected to do this or should the author, especially autopatrolled users do it as part of the article creation process?

A:

Additional Questions from Lourdes

12. On 23 June 2019, you wrote on your user page that you were employed part-time by MariaDB. Did you reveal this conflict of interest before 23 June 2019 in a formal manner during your edits to articles such as MariaDB, List of content management systems, Comparison of relational database management systems and others where you edited information related to MariaDB?

A:

Discussion

• Links for Greenman: Greenman (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)
• Edit summary usage for Greenman can be found here.

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

Support

1. Seems to meet my criteria. Valid need expressed and long term no drama contributor. Be careful when wading into project space and please feel free to ask other admins for help if you pass. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:27, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
2. Support I don't see any problems with giving this user adminship. Their contribution to Wikimedia South Africa demonstrates a deep and impressive commitment to Wikimedia and Wikipedia. Regards, Willbb234^Talk (please {{ping}} me in replies) 21:35, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
3. Weak support I am not particularly impressed with Greenman's contributions, especially his low edit count in projectspace (not to mention overall) and the low number of AfDs he's been in given that he wants to view and possibly restore deleted content. Nevertheless, he would appear to be a (slight) net positive, and NOBIGDEAL applies. – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 21:42, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
4. Strong support: adminship is NOBIGDEAL so my only major concern in almost all RfAs is temperament. Greenman appears to have a good temperament and I'm sufficiently reassured by the second paragraph in the answer to question #3, and the Wikimedia ZA board participation. As for the first paragraph, I think it's fairly brave to drag up that 2007 incident here, which would be concerning were it recent, but the understandable frustration when dealing with an overt racist and the intermediate 12 years are plenty of mitigating circumstances for me to ignore it entirely. We need more editors working in our under-maintained and under-developed South African content and giving an editor already working in that area the ability to work more effectively seems to me like a no brainer. I also agree with TonyBallioni above. — Bilorv (talk) 22:09, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
5. Support. I like the well-reasoned answers to the standard questions. Q1 and the example of Joel Wilson (umpire) shows why it's a good idea to have (more) admins from South Africa (I can't think of any of the top of my head). From a mild view of the candidate's contributions, I don't think the tools will be used much, but I can see having Greenman have access to them being a net positive. I especially like the focus on editor retention and the willingness to rescue articles that may have been wrongfully deleted. Good luck! -- Tavix ^(talk) 22:30, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
6. Support - an excellent member of the community, does very good edits, should be an admin.CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 22:46, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
7. Support Writes articles, knows about BLPs and is reasonable at AfD. No reason not to support that I can find. Collect (talk) 22:51, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
8. Support Worthy of the admin tools. No real reason to oppose. A definite support. VibeScepter (talk) (contributions) 23:18, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
9. Support Long term contributor has been around since 2003 clear net postive.Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 23:20, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
10. Support for a clear net positive. No evidence that they would misuse the mop, and I see no reason to oppose. Miniapolis 23:34, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
11. Sure. — 🦊 02:03, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
12. Support. This is more like a mild support, due to concerns about low AFD participation and no edits to various other admin boards. Nevertheless, I think the candidate is knowledgeable about policy and has been editing long enough to know what is and isn't allowed. epicgenius (talk) 02:06, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
13. Support: a trusted contributor; thank you for volunteering. --K.e.coffman (talk) 02:18, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
14. Support: Fully mature and ready to take the janitor's keys. From AnUnnamedUser ^{(open talk page)} 02:48, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
15. Support: Long history of constructing editing and sound knowledge of policies.Hughesdarren (talk) 02:52, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
16. Support. No concerns about the mopworthiness of this candidate. bd2412 T 03:18, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Oppose CoI editing is strongly discouraged on Wikipedia. Irrespective of whether his edits are acceptable or not, his continuing engagement with the MariaDB article (his part-time employers) makes it impossible to differentiate what is paid editing and what is not. If you're editing your employer's page, even if you are not getting paid for the edits but are being paid for any other work, the differentiation is but so little. If Greenman confirms he will stop editing the page and go to the talk page for any editing requests, I may reconsider this oppose. I am clear that other editors may not agree with my oppose. Thanks, Lourdes 07:36, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

   On the contrary, Lourdes, it's an excellent point. What would seem even more significant, perhaps, is that in their acceptance of this nomination, they even confirm I have never edited for pay. This suggests that they do not, in fact, understand what paid editing actually is. Which is only slightly less troubling a vista than their not understanding WP:COI in the first place. ——SerialNumber54129 07:52, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

General comments

• Re Q8: it's normal when patrolling for vandalism to create a lot of IP user pages, as Greenman's contribs show: [7]. So do mine: [8]. And so do yours, BMK [9] – Levivich 04:41, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

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Wants to fight vandalism. Has 45 edits to RFPP and WP:AIV over sixteen years? The candidate is clearly suited to what they currently do and the method with which they currently do it. ——SerialNumber54129 06:25, 6 October 2019 (UTC)