SmashWiki:Requests for bureaucratship/Serpent King

Serpent King (talk • contribs • edit count • passing RFA • RFB page)

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

Hey all, Serpent King here. So yeah, I figured I would throw my hat in the ring here, in part on inspiration from Crow's guide to applying for adminship (his bit about promotions not being about whether or not the wiki needs it or not being the part that stuck out, and I fully agree) and in (larger) part because I feel like I fit the role sufficiently well.

I have been a user since March, 2015, and an administrator since November, 2015. I have contributed truckloads (over 17,000 edits) towards this wiki, and while I understand this means little, I think it is important to point out my overall dedication towards the wiki.

Since gaining adminship, I have gone to great lengths to improve my dispute handling skills, which was something that a lot of people were saying needed work. I now believe that the skill has become one of the strongest tools I possess. I think I can speak for most users when I say that I have obtained the trust of our community, though I suppose the results of this will tell us that for sure.

As you guys probably know, bureaucrats gain 3 major new powers:

• Promotions: While RfR promotions are pretty clear cut, RfA/B promotions are obviously the hardest part of the job. I believe, however, that I am capable of making promotion decisions without bias and based on both consensus and, as the case may be, my own judge of character. I want to re-enforce the fact that, especially in promotions, making a decision based in part on judge of character is not a bad thing, not in the slightest, because a promotion is a long-standing change in the very workings of our project. This is not to say that crats should be deaf to consensus when making these decisions, but it is important that they understand exactly what they are doing by promoting a new staff member.
• Renames: Easy enough, we have a clear cut policy for that. I have never really been sure why admins don't have this power to be completely honest.
• Interwiki: Not a tool that I see myself using in the near future, true, but who knows?

I have never been good at bragging about myself or...well really even talking about myself without a prompt, so while I realize that the contents of this RfB may be minimal, I wish to really get the work done in responses to all of your questions, comments, and concerns. I will do my best to answer and address them accordingly. Thank you all for your consideration, and have a nice day.

Support

1. Support. With all the work he has done for our wiki to improve its quality, his great understanding of the writing language, his better abilities at handling disputes, and general activity, it would be dumb to not choose this guy eventually for bureaucratship. -- Beep (talk) 02:08, 20 July 2017 (EDT)

Oppose

1. ...

Neutral

1. Waiting for now. In order to see what people genuinely think about this and for some edit-history evidence to be presented, I am not going to show outright support until after some time has passed. Really, there is no reason for me not to support in my mind currently. After all, there is only one currently? Serpent King has been a well performed admin from my perspective. RobSir zx 03:16, 20 July 2017 (EDT)
2. Neutral with a lot of mixed feelings and a very weak lean towards oppose. To be honest, I'm not really sure where to go with a response to this RfB. Let me start with my reservations on the subject:

   • This may be nothing other than a weird mis-reading on my part, but it does seem like you occasionally play favorites. Going to a then-new user and saying they have "great promise" feels like you're deliberately trying to single out someone with atypical praise rather than simply the normal encouragement I'd expect.
   • I'm still leery about the Template:CharBar incident where you implemented a messy template without prior discussion, and users followed your lead into putting it on dozens of pages. While this was over a year ago and we've addressed the subject in SW:CONSENSUS recently, it still left a very bad taste in my mouth. Being the "popular" admin people see as a role model comes with the responsibility of setting an appropriate example, and that incident was the most concerning instance of users following your lead almost a little too eagerly.
   • A constant issue brought up every time someone pursues a bureaucratship request is "do we need another?" As you correctly identified, there are only three major powers associated with the position that you don't have already as admin, all of which are needed infrequently at most. With Toomai unambiguously active on a regular basis lately, there's no urgency to the position. Lack of need doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't, but it does discourage me from wanting to support your candidacy (or anyone else's, for that matter) at the moment.

   As for positives:

   • You've generally matured in your handling of user interactions. You reasonably pointed out examples of your participation in discussions, and are generally reasonable in your interactions recently so far as I've seen. The few instances where I remembered being uncomfortable with your behavior are further in the past than I had thought.
   • You're regularly online and, to my knowledge, have used admin powers reasonably and responsibly.
   • You've contributed heavily to both the front-end and back-end of the wiki, showing that you're clearly more committed to the site than merely surface-level contributions.

   It's a weird situation. I see the pros and cons and, to be honest, I end up feeling like almost everything cancels out. You haven't done anything that is a dealbreaker or enough to push me into full opposition, but I also see no pressing need nor a particularly convincing case to support you. I apologize if this is overly long-winded or confusing, but I did my best to express the feelings I have on the subject. Miles (talk) 04:49, 20 July 2017 (EDT)

Comments

One thing tho, try to extend in your RfB if possible, cause like you said, this seems minimal. I understand you have a lot of strong points to choose you as a bureaucrat, though it would be nice to "brag" a little more about them, at least the necessary to enrich your RfB, so that people who still have doubts about you, end up having NO doubts. Good luck on your RfB man ^.^ -- Beep (talk) 02:11, 20 July 2017 (EDT)

Thank you. As I said I have never been good at bragging about myself...Instead I brought up the concern most people had when voting on my RfA and detailed the difference between admin and crat powers and how I would use the new ones. Everything else should be able to be cleared up in responses to concerns and questions if you ask me. Serpent King 02:15, 20 July 2017 (EDT)

"Since gaining adminship, I have gone to great lengths to improve my dispute handling skills, which was something that a lot of people were saying needed work. I now believe that the skill has become one of the strongest tools I possess."

Could you please link some examples of disputes you handled that you think demonstrate this? Miles (talk) 02:54, 20 July 2017 (EDT)

Sure thing: there's this one that unfortunately went further on discord so you don't get to see the whole thing, Crow and I found a nice compromise here, not sure where the main discussion went for this, but we ended up with a decent compromise for the title of the competitive history articles, here I killed an edit summary dispute, I also broke up the favorite user list thing that started up a while back, then there was this debacle over a Palutena alt. There are probably more, better examples hiding among the heap of talk edits I have made over the years. This was significantly more difficult than for my RfA, just owing to the fact that I didn't have so much other crap (warnings, notices, etc) to sort through. Serpent King 03:43, 20 July 2017 (EDT)

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