Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Red-tailed hawk

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Incapable of telling a lie

@Tamzin: It is laying it on pretty thick to say, "I don't think he's capable of telling a lie at all. I do think he's capable of not getting a dirty joke". If someone was really that clueless would we want them to be an administrator?

What is it about meeting an editor in person that makes other editors think they would be good admins? I have a friend who is gregarious and kind in person - everyone likes him... give him a keyboard and you'd think you were talking to a negative mean bully. Lightburst (talk) 14:54, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The full quote is a bit more specific: I don't think he's capable of telling a lie to someone's face (emphasis added). I have this same problem, which I like to think has only cost me the jobs and relationships I shouldn't have had anyway.... Folly Mox (talk) 18:53, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Folly Mox Lest I be accused of manipulating quotes to favor an agenda:

He looked me in the eye and said that's really how it happened. I don't think he's capable of telling a lie to someone's face. Frankly, I don't think he's capable of telling a lie at all. I do think he's capable of not getting a dirty joke. He's that kind of guy, which I say in the nicest way possible. Mild-mannered and urbane, occasionally to a fault.

Lightburst (talk) 19:02, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ah thank you for calling attention to that bit, which should have been clear from the context. I responded to the part that resonated personally. Apologies. Folly Mox (talk) 23:17, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Like I said, he's an incredibly sincere person, sometimes to a fault. You can take that however you wish. If you see it as more a negative then a positive, I wouldn't blame you. I just don't think it's correct to take him for a liar. Of course this all rests on how much you trust my own judgment of others' characters. If you don't put much stock in that, then what I've had to say doesn't count for much. 🤷 That's what RfA is, everyone making judgments based on how much they trust each other's judgments. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 19:10, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discord discussion

Perhaps we should just start asking candidates if they're active on Discord from the get-go. That we can add the +30 autovotes from their off-wiki pals directly to the total and save everyone some time. – Joe (talk) 22:57, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Joe Roe: I beg your pardon? -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 23:10, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

About what? – Joe (talk) 23:21, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

About what you just said, obviously. It reads as a pretty serious personal attack. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 23:27, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Does it? Sorry. It's intended an observation that, in recent RfAs, users who are active on the Wikipedia Discord reliably receive a significant number of support votes from other users who are active on the Wikipedia Discord, many of which explicitly mention friendship or similar as a reason. – Joe (talk) 23:33, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That may be true in general (would be curious to see the numbers), although in my opinion that's just a function of editors knowing more people. Mentioning friendship or personal connection to a candidate is a double-edged sword: It highlights an aspect of the candidate that might otherwise go unremarked upon—their character—while also disclaiming a bias. Should this fall within the discretionary range, I would expect the closing 'crat to give my vote a bit less weight based on my disclosed friendship with the candidate, as well as my on-wiki content collaboration with him, and that's only fair. So I don't see how friendship is a bad thing. Your disdain for the Discord is well-known, but as you say below, is really neither here nor there for an RfA talkpage. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 23:44, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW I've noticed and respect that you're consistently open about when your reasoning is based on a personal relationship – not everyone is. I don't think your or anyone else's votes should be downweighted (not up to me, of course), but this RfA has pretty obviously been affected by the phenomenon I noted above, and don't see any reason to be coy about that observation. – Joe (talk) 23:54, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that's entirely fair Joe — the point on cabals has historically included mailing lists, IRC and things like edit-a-thons/pub meetups. A candidate having editors they're friendly with encourage them to run for adminship, and then turn up to support them is part and parcel of a community, no? — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 23:31, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is probably not the place to get into an extended discussion of reappearance of influential off-wiki cliques (which I think is a better term than the deliberately-minimising 'cabals') in recent years – though I'd welcome one. I'll just say no, I don't agree that they are a necessary or desirable part of the Wikipedia community. – Joe (talk) 23:38, 29 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry you don't see the value in them, but I'm confident in saying that there is a benefit to those communities. My biggest and brightest example is the NPP Discord. We regularly use it to coach users and for real-time discussions on aspects of a review that they're struggling with, or when someone simply want a second opinion during the process. It makes it easier for some users to converse back and forth and learn when they're able to do so in that environment. Hey man im josh (talk) 00:46, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, to be fair, all the issues I've seen have come from the other Discord. Not all off-wiki communication is bad or clique-forming, it's just bad when it is. And as TNT already noted, not all cliques form on Discord. But again, I didn't mean to launch a general discussion here. – Joe (talk) 00:48, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

None of these are cliques. "Clique" may have useful negative connotations, but it gets those negative connotations from exclusion. Nobody is excluded from these groups/platforms. If anyone can just click a button to be part of a group, you're not joining a clique; you're just engaging with other members of the same community in a different way. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 17:48, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I feel excluded from any platform that requires the ability to attend to frequent push notifications on top of the existing ones from my SMS and social media apps that are already too many. I do understand that this is both 1. a feature rather than bug, and 2. a me / my brain problem (one of many) rather than a social or technical limitation. Folly Mox (talk) 19:00, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Folly Mox: You should turn those push notifications off like I do :) Hey man im josh (talk) 19:01, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Before I uninstalled Discord at some point in 2022, I did disable its permission to generate notifications, which seems to have coincided exactly with when I forgot it existed for several months. (To tangent to an entirely orthogonal issue, I low key think what my brain really needs is some kind of notification aggregator, so I can be reminded of things but all in the same spot. Or maybe a personal assistant?) Folly Mox (talk) 19:13, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I guess we could just address the problem at the root and make a policy that nobody born after 1996 is allowed to edit Wikipedia, never update the year forward, then in ten years we can all get really confused and do the Home Improvement "Aaueeeeeehhhhhhh?????" noise about why the maintenance categories have 38 months of backlog. jp×g 🗯️ 06:27, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps we should just start asking candidates if they're active at [FAC, DYK, NPP, AfC, one of the big WikiProjects, a Wikimedia affiliate, Wikimedia conferences, IRC, Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon...]. Then we can add the +30 autovotes from their off-wiki pals directly to the toal and save everyone some time. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:24, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You make it sound as if being involved in a project is a bad thing and like there's canvassing going on. There are plenty of people from Discord I'd oppose, but there are also plenty of folks I've only realized were as competent as they are because of their replies when helping people on Discord. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:33, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My point is Joe was singling out Discord like it's some secret club rather than where a bunch of people who are already committed to this project communicate, coordinate, and yes, form social relationships within this larger community... like all of those other ways that people communicate, coordinate, and yes, form social relationships within this larger community. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:46, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have not been on Discord so I am not sure I understand why we cannot coordinate WP business on WP. Lightburst (talk) 16:33, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We can and often do, but sometimes a real time chat for back and forth can be more beneficial. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:41, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

For which a user has a talk page, no? - SchroCat (talk) 17:26, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discord is just easier for rapid communication, especially for younger folk who are used to it. As Josh mentioned earlier, the NPP Discord is a good use case, it is very easy to get new patrollers up to snuff using Discord. Is it required? Perhaps not, but I don't think it creates a crazy cabal lol. ULPS ^{(talk • contribs)} 17:34, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Different media have different affordances. Talk pages work for a lot of purposes, but have limitations for real-time coordination. Just like there are some things it's better to have a zoom meeting for than an email thread, so too somethings can be worked out more easily in realtime chat than through a sequence of edit conflict-heavy messages on a talk page combined with repeated reloading. I don't think I qualify as a "younger folk" but I'm a casual Discord user because there's no other space where you can ask a question about Wikipedia and get three opinions in a matter of seconds without having to watch a page and revisit it throughout the day. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 17:42, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've only been onto Discord once, saw someone lying about me in terms that should have them insta-blocked if they did it on WP, but of course it's not on WP, so no-one even pulled them up on it. That may not be typical of what happens on there, but it's left a sour taste about the thing and I've not been back. - SchroCat (talk) 18:12, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You're not the only one. – Joe (talk) 18:48, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely not typical @SchroCat. If you ever want to revisit the discord and something similar happens then do feel free to ping me there. The mods so kick users from the server but they don't block on wiki based on actions there. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:59, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I "singled out" Discord because it's relevant to this RfA. I agree that cliques can and in some cases have formed in all the other placed you mentioned. – Joe (talk) 18:51, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If I understand correctly, the complaint here is that the candidate has interacted with a bunch of people from Wikipedia, and as a result of those interactions the people they've interacted with think well of them. That seems ... good? Like, if the candidate were incompetent or a jerk or gave bad advice or was routinely rude or ignored what others have to say, then presumably the people they interact with would have picked up on that? --JBL (talk) 17:45, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Honestly, though: if you're reading this comment, on the "talk page" of a "request for adminship" on what is otherwise an encyclopedia, you're already so deep in the inside baseball of the nerdy underbelly of the internet that you might end up losing an outsider's perspective on what a clique actually is. This is the clique. >99.99% of people who have ever visited this website, and >90% of people who have ever contributed to this website, have no idea that a page like this exists at all. Every project page, every RfC, every everything on this site works because there is a reclusive and insular group of superusers who speak a common language that nobody else understands, and they have social and technical control over how every other contribution on this website is judged. I'm a part of it, and you're probably a part of it too. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 21:56, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Objective moral evil"

@TonyBallioni regarding the phrase objective moral evil is precisely the kind of pontificating that I find problematic and tiresome. In my nuanced response, I even noted that a modern day GDR would most definitely censor/restrict Wikipedia. I am not a fan/support of Stasi regime but the McCarthyite discourse around it, makes any reasoned discussion very in-conducive to different worldviews. If we want to talk about freedom, there are 2 million people in prisons in the US, who are restricted from editing and accessing Wikipedia, yet I don't make the ridiculous assertion that anything remotely supportive of USA is supporting objective moral evil. I merely made a neutral statement for some reflections and don't want to badger this topic further here. It is not fair to RTH and I expressed my concern in hope they reflect/keep it in mind in the very likely path they become an admin. And I think they will generally do a good job. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 13:24, 1 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support count stuck at 186

Currently there are 195 support votes, but the count at the top and at RfA page is 186. Had tried to modify the entry at 186, but can't seem to get it work. – robertsky (talk) 04:31, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's a spacing issue. -- Amanda (she/her) 07:46, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Q8 observations

I'm could be all wrong, but for what it's worth, A8 seems to be written with the assistance of AI. I run it through GPTZero (which has admittedly received mixed opinions) and got a 48%, 8/13 sentences written by AI. I'm definetly not saying that using artificial intelligence to assist on writing is a bad habit for an admin, but if the outline is written by it or something, I'm rather worried whether RTH's answer fully reflects his own view on the topic. I've asked Q21, but Red-tailed hawk won't probably make it in time to answer, given that there are only a few hours left. [1] NotAGenious (talk) 21:31, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]