Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/CheckUser and Oversight/2011 CUOS appointments/OS/WilliamH

WilliamH

CheckUser candidate pages: 28bytes • AGK • Courcelles • Elockid • HelloAnnyong • Keegan • Kww • Mentifisto • WilliamH

Oversight candidate pages: Courcelles • Fluffernutter • WilliamH

Comment on the candidate below or by email • Community consultation period is now closed.

WilliamH (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA)

Nomination statement (250 words max.)

Hi again. In case you missed it, I’m Will and I have been an editor for 5 and a half years and an admin for 3. I live in GMT/BST and have OTRS access. I’d like to offer assistance as an Oversight because I believe that my nature and experience would be only advantageous to Wikipedia in this role, and it would be a pleasure to assist the good work the Oversight team already do. I have the utmost respect for privacy. As previously stated, I am frequently available, often at odd hours. I am over 18 and already identified to the foundation.

 From candidate: I am currently packing for a flight tomorrow. I look forward to getting stuck into these questions once I have reached my destination. WilliamH (talk) 21:31, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

 From candidate: As mentioned, I have reached my destination and have been working through questions as best as I can. WilliamH (talk) 00:59, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Standard questions for all candidates

Please describe any relevant on-Wiki experience you have for this role.

A: I've been an admin for three years and inevitably have had experience requesting Oversight. In particular, I am a helper and operator in #wikipedia-en-help, where a perennial issue is helping new and inexperienced users with their first edits/articles. This combination understandably results in the manifestation of edits that should be suppressed. WilliamH (talk) 00:59, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Please outline, without breaching your personal privacy, what off-Wiki experience or technical expertise you have for this role.

A: One of the most pertinent things I can put forward is that I have a proven legacy of several years never having violated the privacy of any of the Wikipedians I know in real life, but as mentioned, I was a voluntary assistant manager to MSN's official community for teenagers before MSN Groups was disbanded, prior to me editing Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. Given the nature of this community, there were instances where individuals posted sensitive material about themselves that had to be removed in the forums, either because they wished it to be removed, or because it had to be removed per policy or the law. As an example, sometimes it would be people who had been outed by an angry ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, and their details had to be removed. Material seldom had to be redacted, but when it did, the scope for doing so was virtually identical to Oversight policy here.

I have also worked for a couple of local schools, employed by the local county authority and cleared by the UK Home Office's Criminal Records Bureau. If I had disseminated the information I had access to, I would've lost my job very quickly indeed. WilliamH (talk) 00:59, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Do you hold advanced permissions (checkuser, oversight, bureaucrat, steward) on this or other WMF projects? If so, please list them. Also, do you have OTRS permissions? If so, to which queues?

A: I have OTRS access to info-en, Junk, Junk (non-spam) and permissions. WilliamH (talk) 00:59, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Questions for this candidate

• How much Experience would you say you have with the revision delete tools as an admin? (And of course this is an opinion question, more like do you feel fully comfortable using it) -- DQ (t) (e) 19:43, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

• You have only logged one action with RevDel according to WP:ADMINSTATS; why do you think you have the experience and the technical aptitude required to be an oversighter?

A: I'll answer both of those questions in one since they overlap, and I think that User:DeltaQuad touches on what I think is most relevant.

The expertise for oversighting edits is minimal, on par with blocking in my opinion. Admins cannot have had previous experience with blocking before being inaugurated, and Oversighters were obviously appointed before RevisionDelete was enabled for administrators in 2010. So I think that the technical aptitude aspect is a bit of a misnomer and yes, I feel comfortable using it.

As for experience, to me this translates as understanding: knowing what should and shouldn't be oversighted. For your consideration, I offer the sort of requests where I anticipate issuing a suppression, namely and mainly disclosures of non-public personal information in various contexts, for example (and not exhaustively) a) accidentally, where a logged-out editor makes an edit in such a way that his IP is linked to his account, b) good faith, where a user acting in good faith and perhaps unaware at the time of the consequences of their actions submits something like a home or work address, and c) in bad faith, where an editor outs another editor. Since first requesting Oversight over 2 and a half years ago, I reckon I have a pretty solid understanding of its scope. WilliamH (talk) 00:59, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

• Looking at your contributions, it seems that the majority of your activity was back in 2008 and early 2009, and then you were inactive (or almost inactive) until July this year. Is this a fair interpretation of the statistics, and if so, would you mind telling us (without going into any detail you're not comfortable with) why you were inactive for so long and whether you think you'll have sufficient time to undertake this role in future?

No problem. I wouldn't say it was a completely accurate interpretation. There is the aspect of real life, which I can't expect anyone to edit exclusively away from. I tried to keep things ticking over and many of my contributions do not leave a paper trail, such as assisting users in IRC and checking deleted contributions. Additionally, in terms of content building, I do not tend to make incremental edits on wiki, but write in Wordpad and preview my work, which often results in large edits seemingly out of nowhere.

Real life circumstances did not lend themselves to contributing much before the summer of this year, but that was then and this is now. An important aspect is that Oversighting is not time consuming. New e-mails reach me very quickly and to take care of a request is no problem at all. On a side note, I don't like to see editors burning out. As far as I'm concerned, I'm a Wikipedian for the long haul. There's still many more things I'd like to do here, and I don't believe that going at them full tilt is a healthy philosophy. WilliamH (talk) 00:59, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Comments

Comments may also be submitted to the Arbitration Committee privately by emailing arbcom-en-blists.wikimedia.org

• I am slightly worried about activity. 200 edits go back three months. JORGENEV 17:52, 5 October 2011 (UTC)