D&D Wiki:Requests for Adminship/Guy 2

Guy

Voice your opinion Done!

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(9/0/0) 100% Approval; Ended 12:00, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

“ Guy has a strong grasp of wiki syntax, which particularly benefits the infrastructure pages with minor problems. Guy has a very keen eye for editing pages that can be improved. He has added good content (albeit with confusing summaries), and I would be proud to call him an admin (if not this nomination then another one soon!). ” —Green Dragon, Requests for Adminship/Guy
“ Beyond his knowledge of 5e rules, design, and philosophy, I think Guy also has knowledge for necessary maintenance tasks. Allowing Guy to use admin tools would only help current admins. ” —BSFM, Requests for Adminship/Guy	“ He's always been helpful, knowledgeable and I think that his work on the Hyrule 5e campaign setting goes a long way to show both his dedication and his grasp of D&D 5e mechanics. ” —GamerAim, Requests for Adminship/Guy
“ Curses! I was foiled in my disclaimer attempts by guy's better knowledge of wiki policy, curse you well educated user. CURSE YOUUUUUUUU lol ” —Cotsu Malcior, GamerAim's unofficial Discord sever	“ Thank you for making great creative content, curating articles reasonably, good technical contributions, and generally being a real level-headed Guy, a very welcome presence. It seems nary a week goes by that I do not appreciate your work in some way. Thankee. ” —SgtLion, a generously given barnstar

I repeatedly improve others' creations if they don't meet standards, but as much as I can I avoid throwing my weight around or stepping on others' toes. I make continuous efforts to collaborate with other users, especially if those other users are not as familiar with wiki policy or with the standards of 5e balance. On many occasions now I've improved everything from archaic site infrastructure, to whatever controversial new content is filling up recent changes. I try to lend a voice of reason when it is warranted—even if that sometimes makes me sound like a lone, crazed conspiracy theorist. If it matters, I also contribute frequently with content of my own.

At this point I feel like I have great knowledge of policy, of templates and conventions, of wiki markup, of balance and standards in the current edition of D&D, of the community as a whole, and most aspects involved with D&D Wiki. That said, one never ceases to learn. I try to use and share this knowledge when relevant, but hopefully without being overbearing or condescending.

Overall, Guy is a cool guy according to Guy. Maybe everyone thinks they deserve to be an admin, and perhaps nominating oneself is arrogant? Maybe giving yourself a second shot is even more arrogant? Forgive my hubris, but even if I fail a second time (see D&D Wiki:Requests for Adminship/Guy), I'm honestly going to keep trying. - Guy 05:42, 11 September 2018 (MDT)

Questions for the candidate

Please take the time to answer a few generic questions to provide guidance for voters:

1. What sysop chores do you anticipate helping with? Please read the page about administrators and the administrators' reading list on Wikipedia before answering.

A: Like BSFM, I remain convinced that the best contributor won't change in policy or manner after becoming an administrator. My level of contributions won't change, but I look forward to doing a few things I can't do as effectively without sysop privileges:

• At this point it seems like only an admin with a screw loose would want to go through the process of deleting hundreds of copyright-violating unused files, but for better or worse that screw is loose in me. It's something I would like to do.
• I could improve pages that need improvement without asking, waiting, and hoping for an admin to do so. This seems to happen often. Sometimes, almost frequently, I fail to correctly specify the exact edit I had in mind—but I hesitate to send a message of, "Hey thanks for doing that thing for me but now do it again and this time correctly resolve petty issue I have with it, please." Other times I fear an admin will never notice unless I pester them directly.
• Naturally I expect to routinely patrol User talk:Admin, Category:Needs Admin, and candidates for deletion, among others. I might set up something like Concealed Light's Control Panel for these and other things, as it seems like it could make my efforts more effective in the long run.
• It would be nice to be able handle trolls without waiting for someone else to respond. That said, it should go without saying that locking a page is best avoided, warnings are a penultimate resort, and banning is an ultimate resort. I expect I will rarely use any of these functions outside of trolls and spambots.

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

A: I've written several guidelines, but of them my favorite is Spell Design (5e Guideline), which has seen other contributors but at this point remains mostly my work. There have been several positive remarks about Hyrule (5e Campaign Setting), my most expansive original contribution. I'm usually more proud of accomplishing maintenance tasks and improving the ideas someone else had than creating my own, though. I feel compared to most contributors I more enjoy fitting pieces together than creating pieces, if that makes any sense.

3. Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or do you feel other users have caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?

A: Of course. If I have a conflict with editing or policy, I usually address the user if the user still appears active. At this point I've addressed ConcealedLight and GamerAim over several issues each, which I'm sure either contributor can validate.

When I strongly disagree with the actions of another contributor, I often have an urge to write in response an overly verbose essay (which realistically I expect may never be read in full). Sometimes I fail to resist this urge. Often, the response to this habit of mine is negative. Occasionally, though, my feedback results in something almost amicable. Rarely, it even results in positive change, but I can continue to hope and try for the best.

4. In your opinion, what reasons would a contributor prefer to not see you become an administrator?

A: This isn't a standard question, but I'd like to take the liberty of addressing possible concerns.

• There are the sometimes-too-passionate disagreements as noted previously, and that goes hand-in-hand with little tolerance for what I see as autocratic administrator policies.
• My current user page recently changed user page amuses me, but I will change it if even one person declares it too unprofessional. Even so, I would still prefer a (very) brief and simple user page.
• No one has actually addressed me about this directly, but in GamerAim's unofficial Discord sever (with which I'm not currently involved), there was a question posed and conversation held about my talk page. On some other wikis it's common to simply remove or delete resolved messages and conversations, either periodically or after a period of time. I prefer that. Here it seems more commonplace to "archive" these conversations indefinitely, even though from my perspective the history tab does that for you. I dislike this method as to me it makes the page feel overly cluttered. Instead I've taken to comment-marking old conversations, which from my perspective still "archives" the messages while giving me almost the same satisfaction of keeping it tidy in appearance. If it ever became a problem significant enough for someone to address me about it, it's an effortless fix. This issue seemed more problematic than I expected. It isn't my preference, but User talk:Guy has conformed to expectations. - Guy 09:08, 12 September 2018 (MDT)
• I dislike talking about my real life on forums such as this. In an age where you can easily "Google" someone's address, family members, finances, and so on with little expertise, with no money, and nothing but a non-descriptive username in less than an hour, this is becoming (to me) an alarmingly uncommon preference. Thus if I suddenly cease editing for a while for reasons I prefer not to announce or specify (usually job-related), others appear to see this as negative. To be honest I don't completely understand the rationale, but it was enough of a problem to vote against my adminship last time.

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Discussion

I'll respond to this in a more comprehensive manner later. However, I do agree that that userpage might be a tad inappropriate for a potential admin. That talk page does annoy me a bit, but it's not against the rules by any stretch. — Geodude (talk | contribs | email)‎‎ . . 10:19, 11 September 2018 (MDT)

I'll take that as the declaration of note. User:Guy should now be more appropriate. - Guy 15:05, 11 September 2018 (MDT)

What are your thoughts, if any, about an external wiki tavern e.g. Discord? Do you think the warning policy needs attention, or the Featured Article process needs attention? Outside of the discussion of a banner and namespaces, do you have other thoughts you think could improve the wiki’s “status/reputation” as a homebrew site? While these aren’t exactly related to adminship, I think they’d help to understand even more the user/admin you are or might be. BigShotFancyMan (talk) 17:38, 11 September 2018 (MDT)

Discord. If it is GamerAim's private server, then it's fine as it is, but at present I'd rather not be part of it. If it is the official D&D Wiki Discord as it is far too often treated, then there several problems which should be amended. To highlight a few things: (1) universal consensus sans one person should be respected by the server owner and not dissuaded as illegitimate, (2) the server owner should respect other administrators' thoughts and actions at least as much as his own, (3) the server owner should not delete others' messages if they are respectful and following the rules just because those messages are critical, (4) no one should ever use "it's unofficial" as an excuse. Before I left the server last week, I highlighted the simplest solution to these problems.

Warning Policy. I think it's fair and good to have a step between "please stop doing that; here's why" and "I am banning you for a a day (or longer) because you did that." The only problems I've personally seen with the policy is that some administrators skip that first step. That said, I think it's best that there is no hard-and-fast rule in the policy itself that this pre-warning needs to happen, as it sends a message a user can intentionally be a problem before receiving anything close to a repercussion. So, to answer the question directly—no, I don't think the policy needs attention, but I feel the implementation of it does.

Featured Articles. This is going to be a controversial and probably unpopular opinion, but when a wiki focuses primarily on creative user-generated content, I don't particularly believe in having Featured Articles. The feature works on Wikipedia or other wikis that only feature facts and endeavor to be objective, but the homebrew content of D&D Wiki is very subjective. I've mostly abstained from this practice for this reason. That said I'm not going to attempt to stop others from engaging in it just because of my (very) mild disapproval.

Reputation. This site has been around for years, and it's infamous—though not as infamous as it used to be. The only significant difference between our site and any other homebrew site is (a) we are particularly renowned, and (b) new users infamously mistake unofficial content for official content. If you've been around the block, you know any source of unofficial D&D content—especially aggregated homebrew—will be seen negatively by a good amount of D&D players. We just happen to a big, old, and have that infamous problem of mistaken identity. If we fix the mistaken identity, our reputation will recover somewhat as years pass, but at the end of the day a large portion of players will always sneer at us because we focus on homebrew. Needless to say we've already taken strides towards a fix, and thanks to recent discussions we seem to be taking more. Curating and improving content certainly helps too, but in my mind it's a lesser factor that is drastically more difficult to achieve—curators simply have too much content to curate, especially considering how few of us engage in content outside of 5e. - Guy 18:40, 11 September 2018 (MDT)

• So many words x.x But good job <3 Your recent behaviour, answers (of all visibilities) to the above questions, and effort put into this self-nom all fill me with confidence, ye are a star! But as there have been some bad experiences with RfAs, I hope you'll excuse just a quickie of my own.

As I've said before, being able to actually implicitly trust your IRR templates makes me so happy. But this is an issue which continues to drain all of my wiki-energy, so I'm eager to clarify (jus' a couple sentences would be plenty by me, but write all ya like, 'course) -

1) Could you give me your quick thoughts on when/if speedy deletes are/should be appropriate? --SgtLion (talk) 02:07, 12 September 2018 (MDT)

2) What are your thoughts on our current approach towards deleting IRR'd articles? --SgtLion (talk) 02:07, 12 September 2018 (MDT)

Speedy Deletion. I think anyone is valid in using Wikipedia's criteria for speedy deletion on D&D Wiki so long as it is reasonably applied, which I've seen Marasmusine do. It might be best if we draft our own policy, but to my knowledge none currently exists covering Speedy Deletion explicitly, and for now this seems like the best substitute.

IRR Deletion. I've put up many {{Delete}}s myself, needless to say. As you know, there is at present no definitive and perfect solution everyone agrees with. Although some policy exists on this subject, I think it would benefit from being more definitive. Anyway, personally, I think regardless of how many problems a page has, unaddressed IRRs only warrant a {{Delete}} from a third party if the content is unusable—unbalanced/confusing/vague/etc to the point of being unusable in a campaign without undue effort by the DM—and there are no signs of the content improving anytime in the near future. In my mind, {{Abandoned}} itself can be used as a check to see if the content will improve in the near future, and I think it will always be preferred over {{Delete}} for IRR content that has a great deal effort or detail put into it but remains unusable.- Guy 05:32, 12 September 2018 (MDT)

Thank you very much. That's all great~ --SgtLion (talk) 13:55, 12 September 2018 (MDT)

Support

• I'm totally cool with Guy being an admin. Best of luck to you, Guy! :) --EpicBoss99 (talk) 09:32, 11 September 2018 (MDT)

• I must say I have debated this for quite sometime even before the request was up. While there is 0 doubt for Guy's ability to perform amazing edits and for Guy's exceptional knowledge I feel that this comes hand in hand with a temperament that I feel may discourage newer, less experienced users. However, seeing as Guy has addressed these issues in the page and seems to not only be aware of these concerns but willing to address and work on them, I see no reason why he shouldn't be an administrator. -- Cotsu Malcior (talk) 10:52, 11 September 2018 (MDT)

• Guy is a fantastic candidate for administrator in all respects. I'd like to go against what others have said, however, and just say that I have no problem at all with the way that he keeps his personal life separate from this website. As a matter of fact, I'm surprised that it's an issue to begin with. He has my support 100%.

Plus, the dude's got a great sense of humor. C'mon, what more do you people want? Quincy (talk) 15:11, 11 September 2018 (MDT)

The issue wasn't that he was keeping his personal life separate; that's actually a good thing. The issue people had was that he disappeared from the wiki for long stretches of time for (what at the time appeared to be) no reason at all. Now that we know that these disappearances are due to what he does for work, I doubt it will be an issue again. — Geodude (talk | contribs | email)‎‎ . . 18:45, 11 September 2018 (MDT)

My issue was that it always seemed to follow an incident where he seemed to get upset, so I think it came off the wrong way. Either way, having him acknowledge it makes me feel better.--GamerAim (talk) 17:22, 12 September 2018 (MDT)

• I supported Guy in his previous RfA and my opinion of his suitability for this position has only strengthened since then. I even gave him a barnstar recently for exemplary work. Really I don't know how he didn't become an admin last time. — Geodude (talk | contribs | email)‎‎ . . 18:45, 11 September 2018 (MDT)

• I’ve been meaning to do this for weeks but I always spend extra wiki time on uncategorized pages. Though I think Guy has done a better job than anyone would have drafting this up. My comments still stand and I support all the quotes that are listed. Guy’s most recent contributions are quite noticeable, too. They also reflect a level of custodial work outside of just maintenance templates. To help work more on the site infrastructure I believe Guy can put admin tools to great use. In regards to the “questionable” topics; disagreements-the community won’t grow if we’re just an echo chamber. With that in mind I think Guy is one of the better users at discussion. I think that a user’s time matters when they are gone for quite extensive periods vs a few weeks here and there. I resonate with comments about “fitting pieces together” because I take that as a user who’d like to help others figure out a compromise with their works, not force it to fit within a mold he or she thinks is the only way to do something. For the user page and talk page- I knew Guy is having fun with this! But I don’t like it, because it inconveniences me and I like transparency and having to make extra clicks is tedious as flippity flip because someone wants to be different. But, no rules are broken and my preference is not a standard.

To acknowledge to comments above, thanks for such elaborate answers. I find them refreshing and insightful. BigShotFancyMan (talk) 19:24, 11 September 2018 (MDT)

• Guy has shown his determination to improve the wiki, work with other users, and discuss serious issues with novel ideas. As I supported him before, he has my support. I don't know yet what to think about his talk page suggestion, but that is a discussion for another page. --Green Dragon (talk) 08:51, 12 September 2018 (MDT)

• Yap. I'll admit I've been a little hesitant in the past, as we disagree on a couple totally academic matters (and I would've totally voted support in the last RfA as I said). But there's no doubt Guy has been consistently helpful, friendly, clever, reasonable and enjoyable, even in just my own sporadic encounters. And his answers show a proper understanding of the spirit of the wiki. He meets my newfound three pillar system: Good competence, good intention, and contributions I can implicitly trust. You don't need my vote, but you still totes deserve it. --SgtLion (talk) 13:55, 12 September 2018 (MDT)

• This is a nice surprise. You have my vote and apologizes if the wording during your last RfA came across as negative rather then curious querying. —ConcealedLight (talk) 06:50, 14 September 2018 (MDT)

• I did it before, I'll do it again :) --GamerAim (talk) 17:00, 16 September 2018 (MDT)

Oppose

Neutral