Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Candidates/LindsayH

Nomination

LindsayH (talk · contribs · they/them) – Hello. I am LindsayH, editor and gnome. I've been here and active a little over a decade and a half; my user page gives more information about what i do (finding a backlog or list of potential edits and doing them), my alternate accounts (three, Kahtar, Rhydypennau, and Rhubarb Bikini), and why i'm not a content creator despite believing in our content-central mission (i don't enjoy it as much).
What i would like to do here is suggest what i would do if given the admin tools. A glance at the earliest of my contributions shows that i started very slowly, using talk pages a lot, trying to learn without messing up entirely. If granted the tools, that is exactly what mine actions will be ~ going very slowly, watching and following knowledgeable admins and learning from their actions, and absolutely not doing what i believe the community would disapprove of. That last phrase is central to my Wikipedia ethos: We are a community, virtual, but no less real, made up of very real people, and i feel that that fact should be and is central to the way we interact through editing and discussing together and through any actions taken by those with advanced tools.
I have never edited for pay, nor would i. Happy days, ~ Lindsay^Hello 09:32, 14 October 2024 (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. Why are you interested in becoming an administrator?

A: I'll be entirely honest, i do not have a “need for the tools”, rather i look at being an admin as a way i may help with the community. I have read and occasionally participated in many discussions over the years on both the declining numbers of administrators and the potential reform of RfA, and i suppose it would be hypocritical of me not to offer to serve and alleviate the one when a suggested solution to the other comes along. Mine interest is purely in serving the community, in the process of helping the construction and maintenance of the world's best encyclopaedia (i may be slightly biassed in this assessment). I cannot predict in detail what i would do as an administrator, other than looking for tasks which seem to need doing and aren't being done ~ in other words, most likely i would be scanning the backlogs for what i feel i could do. What i can predict, on the other hand, is that my behaviour and feelings towards the content creators will remain the same: I admire intensely those who choose to serve by writing our encyclopaedia, and all my actions are and will remain focussed on supporting them and their writing.

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

A: I am a gnome, pure and simple, not a content creator, so my best contributions are definitely gnomic. One of the best is the work i do on reducing some CS1 errors ~ those red error messages you have probably seen in some reference sections ~ which i came across when reading and wondered what the message was about. When i first corrected and started tracking the type of errors i focus on (specifically, these ones) there were 36,000 of them, and when i last checked (i've been on holiday, away from WP for a week) there were under 5,000; by no means do i claim all that reduction, but a good chunk of it is mine. Another task i feel good about it correcting grammatical or typographical mistakes which substitute a wrong homonym for a word (think “there/their”, for example). As to the second part of the question ~ why? ~ easy: It is my belief that anything which makes our content more accessible makes it better, and my little actions definitely do that, far more than the few content creation or development actions i have made; i believe that this history page or this one can demonstrate that my content work is not nearly as important as the gnome stuff i describe above.

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: Of course; in my case, usually, it is with someone who doesn't understand what i'm doing or disagrees with it, rather than conflict over content. The only real content conflict was over ten years ago, in 2009, over some interpretation and presentation of history over the de Clare family; most of it can be found here, if you're interested. At that time i kept calm, tried to explain what i thought, and did my best to separate the person who disagreed with me from the disagreement: It is essential to me to remember that we have chosen to do this thing as a community of individuals, each of whom from the Founder to the very newest IP editor deserves my respect ~ though their actions may not. I believe i act in the same respectful way when someone comes to my talk page to ask why i have made a certain change or correction.

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You may ask optional questions below. There is a limit of two questions per editor. Multi-part questions are disallowed, but you are allowed to ask follow-up questions related to previous questions.

Optional question from Thryduulf

4. Why did you choose to seek adminship via election rather than via a standard RFA?

A: Thanks for the question, Thryduulf. I'm sorry it's a rather long answer. In my RfA criteria i mention a comment i made at talk:RfA nearly twelve years ago which triggered me to become more interested and active in the process of how we create admins; since that i time i have read just about every discussion and participated in some, and was very excited by the real prospect of some changes in the process. During the course of our first experiment, the first two days being limited to discussion not !voting, i was disappointed at first that no one seemed willing to try it so planned to myself because i believed that the experiment needed to be given a chance, then three candidates did try but each were, for assorted reasons, unusual and unsuccessful so i anticipated myself as a candidate again, then we had three great candidates who succeeded. I decided that i wouldn't hang back when the second experiment, elections, came along, because i wanted to be sure that this trial got a shot at working and, as with many people, i did not expect such a large candidate pool; as it happened, i was away from home (and therefore Wikipedia, as i find editing on my phone quite difficult) during the first week of the call for candidates but threw my hat into the ring as soon as i returned. TLDR précis: I wanted to be sure our experiments for modifying the process had a chance.

Optional questions from Trainsandotherthings

5. Are there any areas you would not be interested in participating as an administrator?

A: Thank you for the questions. So, i have very little technical ability ~ for reference, if you look at my questions at VPT, they are of a very basic level ~ and i think we can be sure i would not be interested in anything requiring that ability. Other than that, i am so conscious of this community and the importance of being part of it that i tend to be loath to remove people from it except in the most extreme (long term behaviour) or obvious (persistent vandalism) cases, so i anticipate using the block tool as an area i am not really interested in.

6. You say on your user page "I can write, i do write, quite a lot, but i write expressing opinion, and i don't choose to avoid that here." How will you balance expressing opinion with being impartial as an administrator when required? This is not a "gotcha" question, it is something I have struggled with myself and part of why I've never run for administrator.

A: What an interesting question ~ i can't say that i've ever thought of things that way. Put simply, i suppose, i do not see my writing as being involved in my external life, it is a very personal part of me and does not affect my life or interactions with the world around me. For example, i have been a manager in the places i have worked for about thirty years, and the fact that i write opinionated book reviews, poetry, prose pieces, &c. has never affected mine ability to be impartial towards those people i support. To my mind, the same is true here, so my writing style does not and will not change the way i approach editors (people) nor mine interaction with them.

Optional questions from Femke

7. Could you give us a few examples of backlogs you feel comfortable starting with, given your experience?

Discussion

• Links for LindsayH: LindsayH (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)
• Edit summary usage for LindsayH 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.