User talk:Jasper Deng/Voting on an RfA

Voice opinions here.

Feedback

It's good to have feedback like this from users. Yes some of us do have criteria. I do. However, my criteria are in fact very flexible and never applied rigorously. I think content creation is important because the style of a candidate's articles will demonstrate that they know the basics of page format, layout, and above all referencing. If they haven't done much content work, we have nothing to judge whether they understand these things. I come down hard, for example, on candidates who have created articles that are still tagged and not cleaned up. I don't think 1,000 edits is enough to demonstrate this. They will also need to have demonstrated that they have been sufficiently active in page patrol, deletion debates, moves, and redirects. They also need to have sufficient dialog on their talk pages to show that they are clear headed and civil, and know how to advise other users - some new contributors might be university professors or industry bosses, and they deserve respect. If I see a lot of 'teen-talk' wen answering questions about why an article has been deleted for example, perhaps there is still some way to go with acquiring the level of maturity that demonstrates that Wikipedia is a serious project. It takes me up to an hour to research and make my mind up how I will vote.

I don't think admins vote 'oppose' because they want to keep adminship a closed club. All admins know that we don't have enough admins. The 'hate' and 'I don't like him/her' votes come from users who have not understood what a serious process RfA is. If anything, we should probably consider implementing some controls on who can vote.
Just my thoughts. --Kudpung (talk) 06:23, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Feedback, part deux

I disagree with this page. It comes off as generalizing and naive. Some statements in particular with which I strongly disagree are:

• "You should support regardless of edit count if the count is a thousand or higher."
  • What does this mean? That I should support any user with 1,001 edits?
• "Only oppose a user for extreme cases of potential mishaps like blocks."
  • So you should only oppose users who have been blocked, but not those who frequently misapply CSD tags?
• "You should oppose a user who has never done dispute resolution properly and one who does not get involved in vandalism fighting at all."
  • Vandalism fighting is a very small part of adminship. If a user has no desire to work on AIV or RfPP or regularly deal with vandals as an admin, why is this necessary?
• "In addition, judge users by their quality in the past two months or so ..."
  • So you should support users who were jerks three months ago but then suddenly turned to angels just to get your support in their RfA?
• "I disdain strict personal RfA criteria. I think the criteria of most users with such criteria defined are too quantitative and not qualitative. In addition, you should not vote oppose just because the user did not achieve a minor part of your criteria. If you do have criteria, considering ignoring it for a little amount of time while you actually critique the user on quality."
  • This seems to contradict the rest of your essay.
• "In general, do not support a user on basis of a single reason."
  • So you should not support a user if your reason is "I believe they will be a good administrator"? That would sum up every other detailed reason there is to support, I imagine.

This page is styled as a "voting guide". I do not consider that appropriate, as it is really your personal list of opinions. "You should ..." does not come off well with me, because I should not do some of the things listed here. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 00:49, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

None of any of this criteria is set in stone. I did not intend that.Jasper Deng (talk) 00:51, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

I deliberately avoided being as blunt as Fetchcomms, but his points are valid, he is a very experienced user, and I greatly respect his opinions. Perhaps it would be a good idea to move your essay to a page name that sounds less instructional, and which is more neutral and implies that it is only your opinion, such as simply User:Jasper Deng/RfA criteria like most of us do. Try also replacing each instance of 'you should...' with 'I believe that...' . and then see how it reads. Kudpung (talk) 06:52, 28 March 2011 (UTC)