SmashWiki:Requests for bureaucratship/Miles of SmashWiki

Miles of SmashWiki (talk • contribs • edit count • RFB page)

Candidate, please summarize why you are running for bureaucratship below.

I'm Miles of SmashWiki. I have been a SmashWiki editor since May 2008, and a SmashWiki admin since December 2008. I previously presented myself as a candidate for bureaucratship in August 2009, and was unsuccessful. It has been 6 years since then, and circumstances are very different. The site is different, the userbase is different, and I feel that I have matured as a person, as an editor, and as a leader for this community.

A bit of history: for a very long period of time, SmashWiki has operated with a single bureaucrat, who as a result is responsible for managing all the responsibilities of that role. When SmashWiki moved from Wikia to being hosted by Porplemontage in 2010, our last active bureaucrat was Emmett, who was unable to continue in that role. Upon leaving, he promoted then-admin Toomai to bureaucrat without a formal RfB process. In the five years since that time, Toomai has been SmashWiki's sole bureaucrat.

Toomai has done an excellent job. Nevertheless, I believe that the site could be better off having more than one bureaucrat, so we are not singularly dependent upon him. In light of a few instances of somewhat reduced activity from Toomai, I feel that I would be a good candidate for the bureaucrat role.

There's a few main tasks that I would be empowered to act upon as a bureaucrat that I cannot as an admin:

• Renaming users. Toomai has generally done a good job with this, and I feel I could do so as well.
• Interwiki table management. Not a crucial point, but given that some Smash series lack NIWA wikis to link to, we may want to discuss if there are other wikis worth cross-linking to through Special:Interwiki (for example, the Xenoblade Wikia).
• Managing user rights. Requests for rollback and requests for adminship have been languishing a bit of late. We've had 6 RfAs in the last few months; 4 of these have only been resolved by the candidate withdrawing themselves, including one case where the RfA more or less sat there unresolved for two months. I feel that nobody benefits from leaving things unresolved for so long, and a few weeks is usually plenty for most issues in the RfA process to be spelled out in such a way as to present consensus or lack thereof.

So what makes a good candidate for bureaucratship? This is a bit of a tough question, given that we have not had a new one in so long. However, I think I am a good candidate for the following reasons:

• Experience. I am one of the most experienced editors on SmashWiki, in terms of time and quantity of edits; as to the latter point, counting both my old and current accounts, I have over 22,000 edits to SmashWiki. I have a deep familiarity with both Smash and this site.
• Back-end contributions. I have contributed significantly towards writing and updating policy for this site. I authored pages like SW:NOT, SW:TRIVIA, SW:IMAGE, SW:NEWGAME, and SW:TONE; I also worked on a significant revision to SmashWiki's Help pages to make them less Wikia-styled. I regularly make updates and revisions to SmashWiki's infobox and navigation templates, in order to make the site more useful and navigable.
• Front-end contributions. I also frequently work towards contributing to SmashWiki's mainspace content. This includes editing existing pages, but also implementing many other large pages from scratch. Recent examples of this include overhauling List of voice actors, and creating List of minor universes, List of Super Smash Bros. 4 character posters, List of composers, and Tournament legal (SSB4). I also have worked on large batch edits such as standardization of Japanese names, and implementing pages for Smash Tour items and Mii costume characters. Another area I frequently contribute to is managing ongoing projects like tracking recent appearances, keeping the amiibo page up to date, and updating the downloadable content page.
• Dispute handling. Handling disputes between users is one of the most difficult tasks an admin is faced with, especially if both users are displaying good faith and are not factually incorrect. I will admit to having had difficulty with dispute handling in the past, but I believe I have gotten better at such things, and I take seriously the feedback of other users. I seek to find a middle ground where the needs of the wiki and the desires of the users involved are best satisfied, whenever possible. Consensus is key, and I frequently seek more users' opinions whenever a discussion appears to have gotten stuck, as a way of trying to reach a better conclusion.

With all that said, I would appreciate your thoughts, and would be glad to answer any questions. However you vote, I hope that I can continue to be a good leader for SmashWiki. Miles (talk) 00:49, 1 November 2015 (EDT)

Support

1. Support We probably need more bureaucrats since Toomai hasn't been online frequently. ZeldaStarfoxfan2164 (talk) is a never lover boy 00:53, 1 November 2015 (EDT)
2. Strong Support I've seen you around every day. You're a great sysop. Like ZeldaStarfoxfan2164, we may need more bureaucrats since some of the bureaucrats are inactive. That would be a fresh start to have a newer bureaucrats. Luigi540 (talk) 01:00, 1 November 2015 (EDT)

Oppose

1. ...

Neutral

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Comments

Can you provide me some specific examples of currently unhandled tasks that require a bureaucrat, and additionally, how exactly you would handle them? Serpent∞King (talk) 01:00, 1 November 2015 (EDT)

I mentioned the three types of task that are bureaucrat-specific that I cannot do as an admin. Renames are fine as they are, and interwiki things I haven't proposed yet (but a related task is on my to-do list). That leaves requests for _____, of which there are two active. Nutta/Nutty's RfR has been left hanging without a reply on Toom's part for most of a week, which is questionable (I would answer him with yes, seek another, clearer example). DF's RfA is new enough to warrant more time before a decision. The main issue I was noting lately was, as I stated above, the several withdrawn RfAs recently. Several were indeed skewed towards opposition, but yours in particular seemed to be withdrawn more due to delay than anything. Instances like that lead me to believe that having more than one bcrat would be beneficial. Miles (talk) 01:19, 1 November 2015 (EDT)

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