Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2020/Candidates/CaptainEek

This is the talk page for discussing a candidate for election to the Arbitration Committee.
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v t e Arbitration Committee Election 2020 candidate: CaptainEek Candidate statement Questions for the candidate Discuss this candidate

• Really pleased to see CaptainEek step up when there was a real dearth of candidates nearing the deadline. Adminship was May 2020 so possibly a little soon after that to take on Arbcom. I was a borderline oppose at the RFA due to CaptainEek's use of humour could in my view get him into trouble in an admin situation however I have no clue if any such issue as arisen since CaptainEek became an admin. Again commended for stepping up when dearth of candidates. Djm-leighpark (talk) 12:22, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I believe, as I think most of us do, that Eek is a fundamentally good person and valuable editor. I thank them for stepping up and volunteering.

There are some things in Eek’s responses to my questions that give me pause when I try to envision how they’ll handle Arbcom cases. First, there is the question of follow-through on their RfA commitment: Eek had made a key pledge in the midst of their RfA to revisit their past AfC declines, and it appears from their answers that they did very little of that in the six months that followed. Eek indicates that were hundreds of drafts that they had declined or draftified, that they did not review until this week. I’m glad that they eventually got to those hundreds of drafts; I’m disappointed that it took an Arbcom candidacy Q&A to nudge them into getting it done.

Another issue is Eek’s continued defense of their decision to draftify or decline Danish collaborator trials and Kirchner v. Venus (1859). Both of these articles would have survived AfD, both are good for the encyclopedia, and neither showed any signs of COI. So why is it better for the encyclopedia if they are deleted? That, not whether there is a justification for deletion, is the question.

Finally, back to Eek’s draftication of Danish collaborator trials: Eek was surprised that when they draftified a 12-minute-old article, the article creator stopped working on it and the article ended up being G13d. Those were unintended consequences, but they are thoroughly foreseeable ones. Arbitrators have far-reaching influence over the dynamics of the project and need to be highly skilled in thinking through the unintended consequences of their decisions. Unintended consequences after well-meaning decisions are perhaps the main reason to value experience in Arbcom candidates.

I do believe Eek could possibly be a good arbitrator, but personally I’ll vote for a different seven candidates this time. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 06:02, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Considering that the Danish Collaborator Trials articles was written in mainspace without any references at all, I don't think anyone feels that unsourced articles are good for the encyclopedia. Nor is there any possibility for a NPP reviewer to source every unsourced article--all they can do, and all they need to do, and what Captain E did, was identify the problem. That they ended up deleted in G13 is the frequent failure of our system to get drafts further reviewed and improved, not the failure of the reviewer. DGG ( talk ) 05:36, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

DGG, Is there an extra "not" in your first sentence? If there is, perhaps I'm the first person who thinks that unsourced articles on notable topics might be good for the encyclopedia. But maybe I'm not the only person, because we have Template:Unreferenced on 209,000+ pages and we seem to be pretty patient in terms of not mass-deleting them.

What do we do with unsourced articles on notable topics (other than BLPs) if they're nominated for deletion? If an article would likely pass AfD, I would expect an NPP reviewer to apply whatever templates are appropriate and mark the article as reviewed. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 06:46, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed the not, from an earlier version.

It was rightly decided years ago not to mass delete older unsourced articles (and I remember being quite active in arguing against the proposal to mass delete them), and that unsourced by itself is not a reason for deletion unless there's a good faith effort to source them that doesn't find anything, because most of them can be sourced. And even the campaign to remover unsourced BLPs had a delay built in, during which most of them were sourced. But there is no reason to add to the number. I have never seen a completely unreferenced article pass afd. NPP is the first level screen, and if it catches anything, it ought to catch these. We don't speedy delete for having no references, not even BLPs, because they might be able to get fixed, but we do not keep them in mainspace unfixed. Unsourced BLPs go to prod, and about 1/3 of the time someone fixes them; other articles now go to Draft. It's essential that they get reviewed quickly while the original author is still around to fix them--that they often do not get spotted quickly is the first major defect , but it is not the system but the lack of sufficient active NPP reviewers. That often nobody gets around to improving them in draft space if the original author is no longer around or doesn't bother or doesn't notice is very much a defect in the system, because there is no organized way for looking at articles sent to draft but never submitted for moving to mainspace. The only way to catch them is just before they get deleted as G13, and that depends on a few of us who try to catch them there. If you want to help, see User:SDZeroBot/G13 soon sorting. DGG ( talk ) 07:57, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks DGG for explaining the state of things. I understand that written policy often lags behind policy-in-practice but I am surprised at the differences in this case. WP:New pages patrol#Sourcing_issues doesn't say to routinely draftify unsourced articles just for being unsourced. WP:AFDHOWTO says "if adequate sources do appear to exist, the fact that they are not yet present in the article is not a proper basis for a nomination." WP:New pages patrol#Sourcing_issues says that draftification is appropriate only if there is no evidence of a user actively working on it; for me when an article was created 12 minutes ago that's a sign that a user is actively working on it.

I can see how Eek's handling of this article may have been in line with norms for NPP volunteers, and I understand that the NPP and AfC systems have been overloaded for years, which itself leads to higher rates of poor results. I have to say that I still think these norms, while serving useful purposes, are probably one of Wikipedia's biggest problems in terms of retaining new editors. New editors, above all, feel welcome when their contributions become part of this site. Thanks for your work on the G13 queue - I'm not the kind of person who can spend hours looking at articles on random topics that I've never heard of, and I appreciate how rare those people are. I step my toes occasionally into Draftspace by looking there for articles to rescue about climate change. Good chatting with you. Take care, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 06:02, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you that this is a major problem with new editors--but half of new articles submitted to WP, ever since I began screening them in 2006, have been unacceptable enough to be deleted. AfC is an attempt to slow this down, to give new editors a chance, rather than a speedy deletion template. The problem now is that of these unsatisfactory articles, of the ones that aren't nonsense or non-English, about 9/10 are promotional paid editing. This has the inevitable effet of inclining reviews to considerable skepticism. Trying to pick out the potential good articles against this background is quite difficult. I've been doing it as long as anyone, and I make at least 5% mistakes in each direction. Examine any really active reviewer's deletions and declines, and you will find errors. The only way to decrease this error rate is to have multiple steps of review, which we do have--reviewers who are admins do not usually do their own deletions but leave them for another admin to check-- but that still gives many mistakes a day. All that can be done in practice is to try to teach the reviewers who make consistent or frequent errors, and there's only who have enough respect and tact to do that effectively. Additional idea are cetainly welcome--about once or twice a month I treat a good faith editor as a paid spammer, and I remember these, and I do not feel good about them. DGG ( talk ) 11:13, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

My interactions with CaptainEek have been completely positive. Under tense discussions, I have only seen this editor being impartial, rational, and very reasonable, which is exactly what ArbCom needs. ~ HAL333 23:40, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]