Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/SMcCandlish

The following discussion is preserved as an archive of a request for adminship that did not succeed. Please do not modify it.

SMcCandlish

Final (30/19/1); Scheduled to end 05:02, 17 February 2007 (UTC) Ended 01:10, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

SMcCandlish (talk · contribs) - SMcCandlish caught my attention when browsing Category:Wikipedia administrator hopefuls, but more importantly on this thread on the discussion page for speedy deletion. Having since reviewed many of SMcCandlish's nearly 8000 contributions (which are quite well distributed between the namespaces), I am wonderously pleased with his insight on various talk pages to work toward consensus in difficult or complex situations, and his willingness to maintain unflagging civility. His block log is clean and his participation in deletion discussions is thoughtful. Many of his contributions center around WikiProject Cue sports, but his second-most edited article is Albinism and the third is the list of redundant expressions, so he is not a one-trick pony by any means. I am pleased to have SMcCandlish be my first nominee on RFA, and believe you all will agree in finding the same good traits that I did. -- nae'blis 16:22, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here: I accept, and appreciate the opportunity to get more deeply involved. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:49, 10 February 2007 (UTC) Rescinded. I'm sorry, but this RfA has gone out in left field and is filling up with cascading oppose votes that are based on factually incorrect assumptions, starting around day 2, some detailed on the talk page, some in responses below. I thank everyone for their input, regardless how you voted. It's been very educational, especially with regard to the oppose/neutral concerns that aren't disputed - I do have some work to do. I would be quite happy to discuss any issues raised here in user talk or on this RfA's talk page. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:59, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Candidate statement: Thank you for the consideration for this role and responsibility (and of course thanks to nae'blis for the faith and praise. :-)

User talk:SMcCandlish pretty accurately describes my activities, projects and thoughts when it comes to Wikipedia (and even issues within it).

I have seen my role here unwaveringly as one of working toward:

• Encyclopediarity (if I may make up a word: verifiability, neutral point of view, comprehensiveness, encyclopedic tone and wording, etc.)
• Education (both internally and externally)
• Community- and consensus-building (and when necessary -defending)
• Incremental improvement, through dilligence, patience and planning
• Consistency (both internally and externally)
• Problem solving and resolution (as opposed to complaining)
• Vigilance
• Reliance upon policies and guidelines, not emotion or opinion

I do not have a tens-of-thousands edit count. I am proud of my edit count as it stands, as I value quality over quantity (I often submit tens of edits in one "Save page" after an hour or more of work, with a detailed edit summary, rather than bore other editors with one edit summary per tiny change.)

Disclaimer: My track record is not utterly spotless. In my wikiyouth I got involved in editing an article about something that I was a principal author of in "the real world"; it was subsequently AfD'd in part on WP:COI/WP:AUTO grounds (though mostly WP:V and WP:N). That was my Big Lesson, after which I grokked WP with much more fullness. I was also self-declaredly uncivil toward two parties in a taut debate at Wikipedia talk:Notability ca. Nov. 2006; I publicly appologized to both targets of my lapse of patience, at the end of this thread (and admitted to, I believe, admin Radiant!/Radiant that I needed to back off from him lest I cross that line again, such as here) at that page (now archived) — if I mess up, I say so. Also, I do not yet pass the "Diablo Test"; I feel that it is unneccessarily narrow in gauging encyclopedic contribution level — some of us simply prefer the nuts and bolts to the limelight. Nevertheless, I have helped CornerShot reach Good Article status (which it retains); Albinism is well on the way but not quite ready for FA review just yet; and one of the language articles I "shepherd" is a 2nd-time Featured Article Candidate and will be getting attention from me toward that goal. Other traditional down-sides: I have the dreaded customized signature, and I find userboxes on user pages to be a source of harmless amusement, and sometimes actually informative when used properly. Hopefully not too controversial. Update: My entire point in bringing up the COI mistake was that I recognized it as a mistake, one that won't be repeated. Full disclaimer, total honesty. I cannot fault anyone for voting against me as a WP janitor because of this, but many of the oppose votes seem to think that this COI mistake was very recent, or something I've tried to hide.

On the other hand: I maintain a constant 100% major/100% minor edit-summary record per ESU, and use accurate and informative edit summaries, despite the time this takes (I do not use summaries like "rv ?able ed, NFT", but nor do I bore people with "typo fix, namely I changed 'the the' to 'the' because it was redundant" when "Typo fix." does just fine). My Interiot/Wannabe-Kate edit stats show breadth of participation, and I've been on board (with a user registration) since Aug. 2005. I explain my reverts (not doing so being one of my biggest WP peeves and examine-for-vandalism red flags). I have never to my knowledge violated WP:3RR, nor ever been subject (with regard to self or content) to mediation or arbitration, and often act as an on-the-spot mediator when I can; e.g. this recent editwar prevention, background here, starting Feb. 7, and its associated talk explanation. I believe that my contributions to WP:N (more in the very involved dicussions on its talk page especially from Nov. through Dec. 2006 than in directly editing its wording, though I have done that too) have been quite substantially co-formative of its present, more objective state. Despite my cognizance of WP:IAR and its status as a WP Policy, I have never invoked it, even when I thought it might be justified. Even when {{Test1a}}'ing an IP vandal, if the user page doesn't have a {{Welcome3}}, I add one, and use edit summaries like "Welcome! But please don't blank-out article sections.", as here today. I have received two barnstars or equivalent. I am a huge fan of {{Resolved}}, and of actually resolving issues with articles that are raised on talk pages instead of just commenting on them (see Talk:Albinism for an example in action). I have never once received a legitimate vandalism tag (though I retain a bogus one, the only one I've ever gotten, fairly high up on my talk page as an cautionary example of WP:AGF/WP:NPA template abuse.) I have never engaged in WP:POINT nonsense. My talk page and its archives are remarkably free of strife and especially of complaints about my edits; that by itself should speak volumes as to my attitude towards both editing and editors.

In short, I'm basically already a de facto admin and have been acting like one, doing admin-ish work to the extent possible with non-admin tools for some time. For a while some JavaScript near-clones of some admin tools were available, and I used them appropriately (they quit working about 2 weeks ago, at least on my system.) I don't see adminship as some kind of "prize" to attain, but simply a) access to tools that will make the work I'm already doing more efficient, and b) acceptance of a serious responsibility to act as a role model and take on improving WP in a more formalized way. To me it is like a military promotion: While you won't get one without consistently doing good work, it is not just some pat on the back; with the rank comes an increased expectation of dutifulness and conduct becoming an officer, as well as specific new duties themselves.

I will be quite happy to answer any of the usual questions that are posted to RfAs (or even all of them for that matter; feel free to copy-paste any question from previous RfAs), and any custom ones.

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia in this capacity. Please take the time to answer a few generic questions to provide guidance for participants:

1. What sysop chores do you anticipate helping with? Please check out Category:Wikipedia backlog and Category:Administrative backlog, and read the page about administrators and the administrators' reading list.

A: For the short term, I think I would largely continue to do the kinds gnomish WP cleanup activities I already engage in when not actually working on article writing, just more efficiently. I would estimate that about 90% of my edits are gnome edits. I have been a somewhat active member of numerous relevant maintenance-related WikiProjects for some time, including Stub Sorting, Recent Changes Patrol, New Article Patrol, Copyediting, and many others. Though my user page still says I'm largely an exopedianist, in current reality I'm more half-and-half, as evidenced by my activity on policy/guideline pages, templating, etc. My number one peeve is vandalism (and second, without rancour, is sandboxing in real article text). I have a rather large watchlist, which I patrol often 20+ times per day for potential vandalism/experimenting to revert, as well as unsourced opinion. I look forward to having more effective means of combatting vandlistic edits. More broadly, I have also been getting somewhat more involved in XfD processes, but do not feel they would be the focus of my efforts. My principal feeling about WP is that it is an encyclopedia, so I focus on fixing things that make it less encyclopedic than it should be.

That said, there are a number of low-profile admin activities that I think I could be helpful with, including fulfilling {{Editprotected}} requests (which sometimes seem to take an inordinately long time; I suspect more eyes needs to be turned there), dealing with article and category moves, and other "unsexy" activities. I'm sure other roles will attract my attention. (I just wiki that way; Category:Surname disambiguation templates now exists because I saw some uncat'd templates of this sort, found a need for more of them, made them, and categorized them all, old and new, with new documentation, both locally and cat.-wide. If it's broke, fix it, as it were.)

Update, 01:34, 11 February 2007 (UTC): Other areas of interest include WP:PROTECT and WP:SALT, closing WP:DRV's (to which I'm drawn largely because as Dakota points out I once misunderstood its workings), and responding to requests at the WP:AN. Also, deleting junk articles with expired {{Prod}}s, and responding to {{Helpme}} requests.

2. Of your articles or contributions to Wikipedia, are there any with which you are particularly pleased, and why?

A: I watch Albinism and related articles like a hawk, as they are subject to frequent insipid vandalism (lately that one in particular is was semi-protected, at my behest, but it's a widespread issue as we all know), as well as edits by well-meaning contributors unwilling to cite sources, and a great deal of original research when left unattended. The vast majority of the sourcing and at this point roughly 40% or more of the text at Albinism is from me. Though I am still in the process of sourcing from about the second half down, the article (which when I arrived at it was in serious danger of AfD because of months and month of bad edits) remains slated for inclusion in both Wikipedia Version 0.5 and the Release Version as well as the CD, and retains an A-Class rating by WikiProject Medical genetics. I'm the principal author of Three-ball and Five-pins, both of which need some additional sourcing. The former is a folk game, not found in any official rulebooks from BCA, WPA and the like, and so requires a lot of offline research to find any sources at all, despite the popularity of the game; while the latter is only reliably sourced in Italian (and in Spanish, in South American sources I have no access to hardcopy of), thus requiring a lot of translation effort on my part, and double-checking (I am nowhere near fluent in Italian). Neither are quite ready for GA candidancy, but I am very determined to get them there. I also keep a close eye on, and have totally overhauled, a number of language/rhetoric articles, such as Pleonasm and some of the ones that are "See also" links from there, such as Redundancy (language), et al. I created Sandbox (software development), and various other articles, though I remain proudest of my overall cleanup efforts, which span many, many articles. My "baby", though, is WikiProject Cue sports which is becoming more and more effective, with templates, task lists, efforts at sweeping article consistency fixes (you'll note my contrib. history for the last week is totally dominated by cue sports bio edits), etc. Aside from me, only one other participant is particularly active, and more focused on article-writing efforts (which is great — we need both!) The WikiProject structure and documentation is almost entirely my work aside from WP:CUEBIOS, and the vast majority of edits, but sheer number, to relevant articles in the last two months are mine, mostly gnomish improvement work. I'm also half-way through an effort to archive and index the history of "notability" on Wikipedia, at Wikipedia:Notability/Historical, mainly to prevent rejected conceptions of it ("fame", "importance", "popularity", etc.) from polluting WP:N again. Work on that has stalled while I do cleanup work elsewhere, but I will return to it, as I feel it is of great WP-internal value. This just in: I guess my own user page has its value too: "Just visited your User Page ... WoW! Well done. I learned alot about Wiki." That really makes my entire quarter.

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: Certainly; I think this is almost unavoidable due to human nature — but overreacting to it isn't. The biggest one was at WP:N talk, ca. Nov. through Dec. 2006. As noted above, the discussion got so heated I felt personally that I might have transgressed WP:CIVIL, or come close enough to it that an apology was needed; no one asked for one, I just did it because it seemed warranted. The debate in there was very heated, but I think that the eventual results were ultimately well worth it (personal blushing or not). The entire debate teetered on the edge of a flame war literally for weeks on end, and I kept from "going there" by always returning to logic and formal rhetoric over personal opinion and feeling, and reliance upon established policies, guidelines and precedent, versus subjective ideas on how things "should" be. I made few friends on either side of that debate, but I don't consider that of much consequence. The inclusionists called me a deletionist and vice versa, but we now have a WP:N that makes a lot more sense. Some of the activities that took place in there (like sudden human-handled archival, and thus effective termination, of discussions still in progress, as one example) were exasperating to the point of apoplexy, but I simply took a short break and returned with a calmer head. (In that case, I simply retrieved the active subtopics from the archive and restored them, rather than reverting the entire archival or even that of the larger topics containing the subthreads, and expressed disapproval of that sort of "refactoring to silence".)

More recently, in late Dec. 2006 - Jan. 2007, Albinism was radically edited by a medical professional who literally refused to cite sources, considering him/herself a source and saying that citing was a waste of time. After it looked like it would turn into an edit war, I backed off and proceeded to {{Fact}} tag instead, and had rather extensive wikieducational discussions with him/her on that user's talk page and again at the article's talk page here, eventually conceding everything I thought possible to concede in an effort to a) gain consensus on how to move on from there, and b) not discourage the new editor from participating any further. I'd rather have to hand-hold a new editor, and lose face temporarily in the process, than lose an editor. And around the same time period, there was quite a row over what the Cue sport, then Billiard, article ought to be called, due to the quadruple ambiguity of "billiard[s]" (I won't go into details about that; it's covered at Talk:Cue sport in detail.) Rather than fight about it, I set up a consensus poll, and maintained the results with such refactoring accuracy that to this day there are no complaints about the poll and the representation of its results.

Optional question from User:nae'blis:

4. Please visit Category:Candidates for speedy deletion and locate one article that you feel does not meet any of the criterion. Name that article here and explain why you would decline that speedy request, and what your follow-up action would be, if any.

A: A tough call. Most of that stuff is unsalvageable and should be SD'd. So far out of the ones I've looked at, I would decline Vincent Arbuiso and instead send it to AfD. The A7 label on it appears faulty, as the article arguably effectively asserts notability (even if it does precious little else) by prominently mentioning Arbuisio's role as Sammy Hagar's recent bandmate, and Hagar along with his band are very certainly notable. I'm skeptical that it would survive AfD because it requires a total overhaul even to be a reasonable stub and cites no sources at all. But all it would take is one metal fan with a stack of Creem back issues to source this adequately enough to be an AfD-resilient stub at least; and regardless, it shouldn't be SD'd on A7 grounds, and no other SD grounds seem to fit. It's poor, very poor, but decidedly not categorically nonencyclopedic, and simply in need of attention which is fairly likely to arise, given rock fandom. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 01:28, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

As it got SD'd anyway, should I pick another one? — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 09:23, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

You're welcome to if you like, so non-admins can see what you evaluated (and rescuing false positives is one of those admin-like actions you can already take!). CSD is an art, not a science, so I mainly wanted to see your thought process. -- nae'blis 13:51, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Rather than do a repeat, instead I'll just follow up. In looking at the deletion log and the rationale there, it is clear that the closing admin did his/her own research into the issue, and concluded that the Hagar-related claim of notability was not supportable (and my followup confirms this). The same result would have come up in AfD but would have wasted several other editors' time, so it was a good call. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:16, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Optional questions from User:BigDT:

5. WP:CSD gives a set of circumstances under which a page may be speedy deleted. Are there any times when you might "speedy" an article that are not specifically mentioned in that policy? Why or why not? --BigDT 05:34, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

A: None that I can think of, and in principle the concept (of SDing something not quite within the confines of WP:CSD) raises hairs on the back of my neck. That way PoV Monsters lie! I think the SD criteria are rather well thought-out and represent a great deal of consensus-building. I see SD as a) an emergency release valve for material that desperately needs to be immediately purged (sometimes) and b) (other times) a way to reduce load in AfD when it comes to "articles" of a very objectively definable and incontrovertible nature (or rather any of several such natures), that absolutely would not survive AfD and would be a waste of AfD time and attention because the precedent for deleting them is utterly uniform. But, in my reality-tunnel, if there's any doubt at all, they should go to AfD, period, end of discussion (the very idea that there would be any contrary discussion pretty much auto-mandates AfD vs. SD, as it were.) As the redlink in Q4 above demonstrates, my rede of WP:CSD is probably narrower than average, because Sammy Hagar's backup guitarist just lost his (admittedly terrible) article. I personally would have preferred that it go to AfD, since some guitar-god fan almost certainly could have sourced the bare facts in a few hours or less, and we'd probably have a pretty good stub at this point, instead of a hole. But I would not challenge the deleting admin in this case. I indicated above that the case was marginal, and I would not fault another admin for coming to a different conclusion than I did about what to do with the article in such a circumstance.— SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 09:23, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

6. In your response to question #1, you mentioned replying to editprotected requests as an area of interest. When evaluating a requested edit, what criteria or thought process will you use to determine whether the edit is appropriate? --BigDT 05:34, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

A: I would use precisely the same criteria I would for judging any other edit anywhere on Wikipedia. There is nothing special about admin vs. non-admin perception of any particular edit's worthiness or value, and there is nothing special about the editworthiness of a protected (or semi-protected) vs. unprotected article. Protection or semi-protection exists to thwart vandalism, editwars and other disruption, and has no bearing on content or said content's value. If I understand the question between-the-lines properly, I would say that if someone asked for an EP that seemed suspect, I would leave the EP in place as-is, and add a post asking for clarification/justification, just as any other editor might. If an EP appeared to be resisted, I would disable it, again with comments, based on the example of the admin who handled my latest EP at Template talk:Fact. I made a valliant or perhaps quixotic effort to revert changes to that template with an EP, and met some but not overwhelming resistance; the admin who came by to deal with the EP properly noted the EP request did not have consensus, converted it into a {{tl|Editprotected}} (with 'nowiki') and moved on. Precisely the right action, in that it did not ignore the EP, but resolved it (as a denied request for action), left it in-place for Talk page history purposes, and effectively just sent the entire issue back to consensus-building discussion. Good show, and for me a model of questionable EP handling (even if I didn't get the edit I wanted. Heh.) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 09:23, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Optional question (or questions) from —— Eagle101 ^{Need help?}

7. Spam has almost doubled in little over 2 months. This information was derived from watching Linkwatcher's (IRC bot, created by me) output as it sits in #wikipedia-spam, a channel on the freenode IRC network. The core policies and guidelines dealing with spam are WP:SPAM, WP:EL, and WP:RS. An open ended question, what is your view on how severe spam is, and why? What is the purpose of External Links? Should we be allowing every myspace, youtube, blogspot, ect links into Wikipedia, Or should our standards be a bit higher then that? Some useful stats that have been collected recently are Veinor's stats on which domains are being added daily, and Heligoland's stats on frequency of link insertion. All stats are derived from LinkWatcher (IRC bot) logs. You can have a look at the full counter spam efforts on meta at m:User:Eagle 101/Spam.

I have mixed feelings about some of this, as I think the community as a whole does. I keep a sharp eye out for blatant spam, e.g. insertion of a link like "FooBarU! The worldwide source for AUTO-INSERT TOPIC, with over 1,000,000 links!" I just delete that crud on sight. I especially have misgivings about the recent flood of social networking and Google Video/YouTube links. I honestly think the jury is still out on that. Many of them are bunk. Then again many bands whose articles surivive WP:N don't run their own websites any more but use MySpace instead of rather than in addition to having one of their own; if we don't ban all "X's official website" external links, I'm unsure of the rationale for deleting non-redundant MySpace ones. But, I am leaning more and more towards the views espoused in Wizardry Dragon's essay, on pretty much all points.

My take on external links is that they must provide genuine value to the reader, as a reader of an encyclopedia, as well as various specific prohibitions from WP:EL. Most blog links, links to commercial websites that are selling something, or links to "online community" sites that do not have a rich history of actually being online communities but are really just e-advertising vehicles, just don't cut the mustard. (And e-forums in particular are not very often appropriate EL's anyway, rich history or not.) On the other hand, I don't think a link that does provide genuine value under WP:EL should be excised solely because the site that hosts it is a for-profit entity. We'd have to stop citing online editions of newspapers if we went that far. When it comes to this sort of thing, there are a lot of judgement calls involved.

One way in which I go to pains to make such calls with careful judgement is to convert, when it can be done, external links that are ostensibly there for sourcing purposes into actual reference citations, e.g. changing 'Foo' to '"Article title", by Article Writer, Source Publication (online edition), January 12, 2004; accessed February 11, 2007', and using <ref> to convert it from a random-seeming "External links" item to an on-point "References" item that something(s) specific in the article are citing. If an extlink can't be converted in this way - because it doesn't seem to pertain to anything in particular in the article - this is a good sign it should just be removed. Another subtle anti-spamming tactic I use is to change things like Person Name, at Foo.com to something more like An industry profile on Person Name - tell the readership what the link actually provides for the reader and what its slant/bias is, and remove any spammy mentioning of the sitename in the article text per se. Needless to say, this requires actually following the links to see if they go to something cognizant under WP:EL to begin with.

Heligoland's bot coupled with Veinor's stats are very useful for catching big-time linkspammers (farecompare.com, etc.), who to me are simply vandals, though I think it still takes a lot of human judgement to clean up the less egregious link problems that are all over the place.

Lastly, when it comes to sources of questionable reliability or claims that don't seem to be supported by the sources they purport to cite, I have no qualms about flagging them with {{Verify credibility}}, {{Failed verification}}, {{Dubious}} or the like, or simply removing them. Please see my work at the Albinism article, in which I've been sourcing as much as possible from refereed medical sources; not only sourcing unsourced facts, but re-sourcing where sources from last year were questionably-reliable websites of uncertain authorship and control.

PS: As a countervailing example of a blog extlink I did not remove, but instead reformatted into a ref with details per the Wizardry Dragon essay's recommendations, see the (only) blog citation at the Rodolfo Luat stub. I kept and improved that on the basis that it was in fact the only source (so far) for the fact that cites it, and given who the author is and his reputation, there isn't any particular reason to believe his blog would not be reliable on this particular matter (he's a top professional in the field, was an eyewitness, and lying on his blog would have immediate negative repercussions for him.) If a less bloggy, editorially-controlled paper source arises, I would replace the blog link with a citation to the offline publication.

— SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:53, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Optional question from llywrch

8. Can you imagine yourself deciding ever taking a day off from Admin duties? Just deciding to let someone else worry about the vandals, troublemakers, and personality disputes in order to spend that entire day simply improving Wikipedia's content? -- llywrch 04:08, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Definitely. With over 1000 janitors at this point, I think WP is in good hands. While I do a lot of admin-style stuff already, if I get on a real editing "tear", sometimes I devote all day long to improving a particular article, and am quite single-minded about finishing what I started, so yes, sometimes I'm in just-a-content-editor mode. I also take breaks from Wikipedia, period, to work on other projects. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 05:59, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

General comments

• See SMcCandlish's edit summary usage with mathbot's tool. For the edit count, see the talk page.

---

Discussion

Support

1. Support as nominator; I have asked the candidate before nominating them and they feel that having the tools would be an asset to their participation in the project. -- nae'blis 16:33, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
2. Strong Support; a user with a great personality, and a wordnerd. What more can you ask for? I also like people who are thoughtful on AfD. And, as Binguyen pointed out below, he is in his fourth month of high activity. That means he is less likely to burn out now, because he's not in the twilight of his pinnacle. That, in turn, means a greater chance for excellent admin output. Also, Binguyen pointed out below that SmicCandlish is rude in his copy-editing; although this is somewhat accurate in some situations, I don't believe that it will spillover to admin activities. It's merely something he needs to work on when copy-editing articles; hopefully, this RfA will open that up. — Deckiller 05:09, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
3. Support Active in XfD; vandal fighting,warning & reporting to WP:AIV; Wikiprojects and apparently a Wikignome with many minor-edit improvements to the mainspace too. I see no serious problems with this editor. (aeropagitica) 06:44, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
4. Support Per nom and I see no evidence this editor will abuse admin tools.--MONGO 06:48, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
5. Support especially because of your answer to question 4. Viridae^Talk 07:31, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
6. Support - After reading this entire thing it looks as if you would make an excellent admin. I'm glad to see someone else picked up leaving {{welcome}} to all user pages that don't have them when leaving vandalism warnings. VegaDark 09:21, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
7. Support. If Nane'blis trusts you, that's good enough for me. Adminship is no big deal, and we need more admins. Regards, Ben Aveling 10:08, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
8. Support great editor all round and excellent answers. The Rambling Man 10:27, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
9. Support seems like a great editor, should be an asset. --IvanKnight69 10:49, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
10. Support This user is a good vandal fighter and answered the questions very well.--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 11:59, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
11. Support per nom. Great candidate. - Anas ^Talk? 12:05, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
12. I'm Mailer Diablo and I approve this message! - 12:55, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
13. Support per all above --BigDT 15:44, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
14. I support this candidate.--Kungfu Adam ^(talk) 15:46, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
15. Support Woah! Great answers, great candidate. Cbrown1023 talk 17:30, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
16. Rettetast
17. Support Great candidate, will use the tools well. S h a r k f a c e 2 1 7 19:37, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
18. Support. I recall your work at Albino bias, where you demonstrated both an ability to add good content and a knowledge of policy.--Kubigula (talk) 19:53, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
19. Support Very nice, how much? (/borat). ⇒ SWATJester ^{On Belay!} 20:28, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
20. Support per above. Yuser31415 (Editor review two!) 20:30, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
21. Support. Good all-rounder, no problems apparent, and has always seemed an eminently sensible editor every time I've see him. Angus McLellan (Talk) 22:46, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
22. Support another one on the side of the good guys. Grutness...wha? 22:58, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
23. Support SMcCandlish is a great candidate for adminship. He is an active contributor to all the namespaces, and has gotten himself involved in policy discussion, XfDs, and has also done a lot of work in the article namespace. This user has demonstrated himself through his work, and I have strong confidence that the user will be a good admin. Nishkid64 23:47, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
24. Support Plenty of reason to support. Little reason to not support. Captain panda In vino veritas 03:44, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
25. Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 07:02, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
26. Support. Wow. YechielMan 20:48, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
27. Support. Get on it. Dfrg.msc 06:15, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
28. Support. Proto::► 11:53, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
29. Strong support, why not? Causesobad → (Talk) 12:58, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
30. Support. SMcCandlish is a dedicated contributor, and has often learnt the ways of Wikipedia the hard way, and shows a desire to continue that learning. I can hardly see the Wilcox-McCandlish law debacle being repeated again (that's not redundant); and knocking his brash or untactful edit summaries is either a silly or specious reason to oppose a candicy. There is no reason to suppose he would abuse sysop powers. I admit SMcCandlish's praise of my "resolved" template brought me here, but his good work has swayed me to support. SMcCandlish certainly has shown himself worthy of adminship. —Pengo 00:28, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Oppose mostly per the answer to question one. It seems you might not need the tools for Stub Sorting, Recent Changes Patrol, New Article Patrol, Copyediting. You mention little in actual sysop chores. Also a failure in understanding WP:COI this which had to go through the deletion twice and my own interactions with you has left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth relative to civility issues regarding the use of the word Bogus [1].-Dakota 00:00, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
2. Strong Oppose • One of the "cardinal sins" in adminship (in my opinion anyways) is failing to recognise a conflict of interest. This leads to all sorts of wheel wars, unfair blocks, and overall Bad Things^TM. It is important for administrators to be aware of their feelings and reactions, and have the wisdom to know when their judgment is impaired and recuse themselves from such issues. That to me, is the prime thing I look for in administrators. Skills can be taught. Temperaments, less so. ✎ Peter M Dodge (Talk to Me) 20:24, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
3. Oppose a few things stack up. Firstly, major activity has only been since November 11, so it has basically been only three months of healthy activity. His actions with respect to Dakota's AfD closures seem to not be the most way of moving things along productively. In November Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wilcox-McCandlish law (second nomination), a concept which the candidate appears to have coined is closed as a delete. A bit of post AfD dialogue occurs at User_talk:DakotaKahn/Archive26, where there is also a post AfD dialogue on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Isabella V 2nd Nomination. The candidate subsequently makes his debut at DRV Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2006_December_3 and argues on procedural grounds to overturn Dakota's decision, despite an overwhelming consensus that the article was not notable. It was consequently deleted for the third time Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Isabella V (3rd nomination). The process wonkery and making a debate debut on an AfD closed by the same person who deleted an article about his concept doesn't seem like good admin judgment to me. The other thing that adds together is his undiplomatic edit summaries about other user's grammar Fixed utterly atrocious grammatical malformations. Also typos and missing wikilinks. There are a number of other irreverent edit summaries around, which seem rather gratuitous and potentially damaging. There are many excellent Wikipedians, some of our best in fact, whose first language is not English, and are from non-English speaking countries and write hundreds of articles on Central/Eastern European topics which have low Anglophone coverage. Many of these people like User:Attilios do not have the best grammar, but are trying their best to cover topics which would otherwise be void on WP. I don't think that this conduct is appropriate in this sense. eg, a group of people copyedited this article by Darwinek, a very prolific writer, so that it could be put on WP:DYK after concerns were raised about the English [2].Blnguyen (bananabucket) 06:36, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
4. Oppose per the above opposes. Dionyseus 12:13, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
5. Strong Oppose per Dakota, especially. Failing to heed the advice of WP:COI and WP:AUTO regarding a "law" with one's own name in it -- a "law" of very dubious note, moreover -- is an automatic disqualifier for adminship in my view. Candidate must demonstrate great growth as a Wikipedian before I would trust him with the mop. Xoloz 15:18, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
6. Object per civility issues, and because SMC has a tendency to drown out discussions through sheer sesquipedalian verbosity, as well as "Jimbo said so" arguments, and accusing people who disagree with him of WP:OWNership and such. For instance, consider that this page is 245kb long, and SMC wrote more than half of it, all in a week's time. >Radiant< 16:08, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
7. Oppose per the above. ~ Kathryn NicDhàna ♫♦♫ 17:35, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
8. Weak Oppose per Radiant. I'm afraid he may indulge in too much wikilawyering as an admin. Wikipedia is imperfect and never totally consistent in its policies. I doubt it ever will be. Unless people feel comfortable working in this gray area and work towards building consensus their contributions can be counterproductive. I want to feel like we can all work together even when we disagree. -- Samuel Wantman 23:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
9. Oppose per above (Radiant and Samuel Wantman especially). WjBscribe 00:41, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
10. Weak oppose per Dakota, Blnguyen, and Radiant. I've limited interaction with this user, except a brief, peripheral event; Radiant summed up my thoughts afterward almost exactly. Had it been a single instance, then I certainly wouldn't oppose, but it appears to be more of a pattern than not. Verbosity, although not ideal, I can deal with; I was most concerned about labeling opposing viewpoints as being penned by "fans" (and the context strongly implying he meant "fanbois") with no respect for policy. No matter whether his/her position were correct, I would not be comfortable with an administrator assuming such bad faith without cause. —bbatsell ¿? ✍ 02:06, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
11. Oppose The points made by the opposers are more convincing that the ones made by the supports especially the WP:AUTO and WP:COI. Admins need to know better. --John Lake 05:52, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
12. Oppose, per the personal attacks noted throughout this page. — CharlotteWebb 06:13, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

    Which personal attacks, please? Diffs? -- nae'blis 16:34, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

13. Weak oppose per Samuel Wantman and own observations. Garion96 (talk) 11:05, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
14. Oppose per Dakota and Blnguyen - Tragic Baboon (banana receptacle) 14:42, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
15. Oppose. I'm really curious how this edit would "border on vandalism" in the perspective of anyone who's not a pool enthusiast. In the absence of context, the word "hustler" would sooner make me think of pimps and hoes than anything else, so much so that I would invariably prefer the term "pool shark" to avoid such connotations, as would Jack Horkheimer. I think the least you could do in a case like this is assume a little bit of good-faith. I'm not sure where you got the idea that you were reverting "highly POV pro-legalization political edits", but I would suggest you might be giving the anonymous user too much credit. Also, his self-described immediatist tendencies make me worry about his understanding of the project as a whole, particularly his removal of red links which I have noticed in several edits. This style of editing frustrates me deeply in my role as an occasional creator of intriguing stubs. I've often found it necessary to Google the entire site to find a list of pages which refer to this sweet topic o' mine with the decency to link to it (because more often than not, some wise guy has removed the [[bracket markup]] for his own aesthetic reasons, or something). —freak(talk) 03:17, Feb. 11, 2007 (UTC)

    Since you ask (I wouldn't respond otherwise, as I don't think one should argue with RfA votes): In the case of the Hustler (disambiguation) case, the edit history of the user might be of value here, who also edited another article/dab, Hustle, in that case with even more pointedly-politicial PoV in it, here; the edit (and edit summary) of the former make more sense in the context of the latter, which was the first of the two reversions, of the more clearly politico-PoV of the two sets of reverted edits. I did not assume bad faith on the part of the editor, it was just clear that WP:NPOV was being blatantly ignored to make a WP:POINT. As WP:POINT defines such behavior as a form of "disruption", it does seem to be quasi-vandalism to me. My first take was the same as yours, but after reading the edits closely (especially at "Hustle", which put the ones at "Hustler (disambiguation)" in a clearer light), they are in fact quite polical, about the nature of consensual crime. Honestlly, I actually lean toward the same view myself, but I don't think such opinional language is encyclopedic. Other topic taken to your talk page since you did not ask me a question about it here, but I would actually like to understand your concern better. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 16:23, 11 February 2007 (UTC) PS: Reverting the change to the order of the street & pool entries on those two dab pages was incidental; I have since inverted them again, to put the street definition first, as I think that may've been part of your concern. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 17:00, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

16. Oppose am concerned about the relatively recent comment at DRV [3] and the complete lack of brevity. The potential combination of filibustering and misunderstanding process if a recipe for disaster, sorry. Also a minor point majority of activity confined to last 4 months. Cheers Lethaniol 17:53, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

    So the fact that many admins are promoted with only three months of experience doesn't bother you? -- nae'blis 16:34, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

17. Oppose I love the replies to the questions, length of the replies is not a problem to me, but I feel that there is a certain amount of stuff that needs to be learned before we hand out mops, one of them is when to back out when you have a conflict of interest. Admins with conflicts of interest sometimes are lead to fail to act in the communtiy's best interest. While the mop is really not a big deal, to me admins need to be acting in the communty's best interest. Untill I can see that, I have to oppose. Regretfully, —— Eagle101 ^{Need help?} 20:51, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
18. Reluctant Oppose did a complete bashing on a new user of an AFD. Administrators must assume good faith and have patience with such situations. The user could have read the site for a long time and only recently signed up. In anycase, I could close the AFD and no harm is done. NoInsurance (chat?) 14:35, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

    Diff/link please? -- nae'blis 16:34, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

    This one I do have to respond directly to. The "bashed" "user" in question is demonstrably a sockpuppet, and acting in uniform, documented bad faith. It is a repeat vandal and policy violator, who deletes SD tags, spams, and modifies other people's AfD votes, and doesn't do anything but such abusive things, all documented by me solidly here, after an initial presumption of misguided but good faith. I'm not even the first to note that this user is a sockpuppet (I also documented this fact at the link provided). I did not want to believe it (see my initial user talk comments to the "user" which not only assumed good faith, but offered guidance on how to flag articles for cleanup/expansion). But over an hour of research shows it to be the case. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 22:14, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

19. Oppose Firstly, content / POV disputes are distinctly not vandalism. Calling them vandalism is a very good way of escalating such disputes. A better edit summary would have been "reverting to a less judgemental definition of street hustlers that lets the facts speak for themselves". If you really must use a generic term, try "policy violation" or "disruptive", which are still somewhat offensive, but less so. Also, there are politer ways of making it clear to the closing admin that someone's AfD opinion should probably not be taken seriously. You can use {{afdanons}} as a polite welcome / caution message. If they are a new user or a single purpose account, and their reasons for keeping or deleting are not that good, that is probably enough. Keep in mind that it is very difficult to distinguish between sockpuppets and innocent meatpuppets. If you really think there is sockpuppetry going on, the correct places to investigate it are Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets and Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser. Anyways, sorry if this oppose seems rather harsh, but it might be good if you found nicer ways of putting things before becoming an admin. — Armedblowfish (talk|mail) 23:00, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

    Comment: Begging your pardon, and I don't disagree with any of this points in general, but I directly documented actual vandalism by the user in question. I emphatically did not label the meritless AfD as vandalism, and responded to it as a legit AfD, with policy-based arguments for why the article should be kept, and provided documentation as to notability. This user is provably not an innocent meat puppet. It is someone that I and others have conclusively shown to understand Wikipedia policy in detail, and to engage in uniformly disruptive behavior. This simply is not a case of failure to AGF; I did AGF, but the bad faith evidence became overwhelming. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:41, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Neutral

1. I think Radiant's comments above are important - Wikipedia is not a filibuster. Brevity is the soul of wit, and all that. Still, I think SMcCandlish has made a bunch of good edits and worked on some quality articles. At first I leaned oppose, but I'll wait to see if anything anyone says convinces me one way or another. Coemgenus 18:27, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

   I guess those are some good points; SMcCandlish definitely knows about brevity and succinctness; once s/he chooses to lean toward that in Wikipedia communications, I'm sure s/he'll strengthen even more as a user. — Deckiller 00:44, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

The above adminship discussion is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the talk page of either this nomination or the nominated user). No further edits should be made to this page.