Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Sdkb

Sdkb

Voice your opinion on this candidate (talk page) (1/0/0); Scheduled to end 18:01, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Nomination

Sdkb (talk · contribs) – Dedicated, talented, friendly, knowledgeable, and prolific, Sdkb is one of our best editors and would make a fantastic administrator.

Sdkb has been editing Wikipedia seriously for over five years, since mid-2018. Their Wikipedia contributions in that time have run the gamut. Their content work is impeccable—most impressively at Pomona College, which they almost singlehandedly brought to FA, but there are many more articles I could mention. In addition to content work, Sdkb has a knack for doing the work nobody else wants to do, often when it's most important to do it. Sdkb is a talented technical contributor and runs SdkbBot. A friendly face at the Teahouse, you can often find Sdkb patiently fielding questions from new users. Speaking of new users, I've seen Sdkb work very hard to improve the editing experience for newcomers, and I'm not the only one—when Sdkb received the Editor of the Week last year, the citation highlighted their hard work in streamlining a lot of the templates used to welcome new editors.

I now want to take a moment to touch on the less measurable qualities that make a good sysop. I have watched for many years as Sdkb has developed as an editor and as a maintainer of this project, and Sdkb has grown to evince precisely the kind of judgment, character, and temperament I like to see in our administrators. When we've talked over the years, Sdkb has shown a willingness to stop, reflect, and change their mind, as well as an ability to thoughtfully consider and engage with new ideas and arguments.

Sdkb is a real joy to work alongside. It's quite a privilege to present Sdkb to the community for adminship. Best, KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 10:43, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Co-nomination statement

For every RfA participant out there who wants to see a candidate with a strong content record, I am thrilled to present Sdkb, a longtime editor who weighs in at over 40 DYKs, a good article for Jean Walton, a featured list for List of Pomona College people, and a featured article for Pomona College that reaches nearly 6,000 words. Much of their work runs the gamut on Pomona, from its alumni to its administration and faculty to related student organizations and even sister schools. But they've also taken on lots of other topics, including folk music, journalism, the arts, and various Eastern United States locations.

Now, lots of candidates can and do come through here with solid content records such as this one, where count and breadth alone make the candidate's content bona fides quite strong. But in terms of real quality writing, their FA of Pomona College is in a class by itself – quite literally, it is the only FA on an institution of higher education. Writing an FA in an area where no current article has that distinction requires a certain clarity of purpose and creativity in content; these are mental muscles that normal Wikipedia contributing doesn't require an editor to flex, but Sdkb has those talents in spades. In our conversations, I've always found them to be diligent, civil, and incredibly sharp – when we sparred over a niche application of sourcing guidelines for DYK, they brought a clear and convincing argument with evidence to back it up, and in the end, I was persuaded that they were right and that their article was good to go. A level-headed, dedicated, and, as my fine fellow nominators have laid out, all-around talented editor. With that, I am happy to offer Sdkb's name for the mop :) theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 10:44, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Co-nomination statement

I first encountered Sdkb in late 2020, seeing their name in edit requests and bot approvals. Since early on in our interactions, I've been struck by their deep attention towards the experiences of new editors, shown from their work improving our introduction pages and the article wizard, to over 700 edits at the Teahouse. In every interaction I've found them polite and conscientious, clueful about policy, and able to communicate clearly—all important qualities in admins, who often form the first impression of our community for new users.

As a technically minded editor, Sdkb has spearheaded high-visibility changes like improvements to the welcome template and talk page banners, but they are also happy to work on less glamorous maintenance tasks, like responding to edit requests, improving template readability, and operating their bot. Though I have interacted with Sdkb most in these areas, I know them best as a truly well-rounded editor, and as an admin, I expect them to help out with exactly these kinds of important but understated maintenance tasks that make up so much of the admin workload. It's my pleasure to co-nominate them for adminship. — The Earwig (talk) 13:51, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here: I accept the nomination, with gratitude to my three nominators as well as everyone else who has helped lay the foundation for my candidacy. I’d also like to thank the community for taking the time to review and evaluate my contributions. The standard disclosures can be found on my user page. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 17:55, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia as an administrator. Please answer these questions to provide guidance for participants:

1. Why are you interested in becoming an administrator?

A: Fundamentally, I'm interested because I support Wikipedia's aspiration to build an encyclopedia that makes information accessible to everyone, and the admin tools would allow me to help out. I have been approached a few times over the years with nomination offers, and I feel I’m at a point now where I’m ready to expand my work into administrative areas to help out with some of the sizable backlogs there.

I have worked in many different non-admin areas, seeking variety and searching for areas of need. I will bring this knowledge base and approach to my work as an admin, exploring different tasks — dabbling cautiously at first while I familiarize myself — to figure out where I can be the most useful. More concretely, I could see myself initially using the tools to close XfDs and other discussions that require admin action (here's an example of a close I made), making edits to full-protected templates when consensus has been established (e.g. stuff like this), viewing deleted contributions of newcomers seeking help at the Teahouse, and applying my professional copy editing background to correct errors on the Main Page (e.g. stuff like this on this TFA, or this on this TFA).

2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?

A: I am most proud of my work to improve help resources for newcomers. To document the full scope of the world's knowledge, we desperately need to expand and diversify our ranks. I regularly respond to queries as an active host at the Teahouse, but my efficacy is limited when offering personalized help to individuals because I can only assist one editor at a time. Therefore, I have focused on improving help pages and templates that can reach thousands of editors. In 2020, I proposed changes to the standard welcome template that simplified it to make it less overwhelming. I also did a full revamp to improve the roughly 60 pages in the Help:Introduction tutorial series. More recently, I have collaborated with the WMF's Growth team to inform the development of their features to aid newcomers. For instance, my vision for a better Article Wizard is being used as a model at their project on article creation for new editors.

My second area of focus is usability and templates, another realm with the potential for large-scale impact. I've launched successful proposals on things like revamping the left sidebar, merging {{Auto Archive Notice}} into {{Talk Header}} (i.e. why this banner is no longer cluttering talk pages), removing portal links from the top of the Main Page, and streamlining the wording of the universal editnotice. I've worked on numerous editnotices and template documentations, revamped talk page messages like {{uw-ewsoft}}, and added automatic short descriptions to the 70,000 transclusions of {{Infobox song}}.

Lastly, in the area of content, my biggest achievement is taking Pomona College through FAC. Colleges are complex and multifaceted topics, which makes them hard to improve to FA level. When I nominated it, no article on a contemporary higher education institution had passed FAC in more than a decade, which compounded the challenge — since there were no good precedents, the reviewers and I had to formulate and agree on standards for what college FAs should look like at every turn. I also sometimes help out at FAC (Inuit clothing, Red panda, and Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication are examples of my reviews), and I was one of the main editors at COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. I have about 40 DYK credits, a mix of Pomona-related topics and articles in politics, journalism, sociology, the arts, and other assorted areas. I have also written a handful of essays.

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

A: I find that heated responses to a situation almost never help, so I avoid them. Since I care about Wikipedia, I occasionally find it stressful when I believe the project is making a mistake, but I can always put on some classical music and take a step back to breathe, and I retain faith in the consensus process to work everything out in the end.

Given how actively I edit, including in controversial areas, I've naturally encountered conflict every so often. I find it's helpful to stay calm and adhere to WP:CIVIL and other guidance designed to minimize conflicts. Being human, I haven't always lived up to the standards I set for myself, but on the whole I like to think I'm fairly good at de-escalation. Some examples where I think I interacted well with editors disagreeing with me are here, here, here, here, and here.

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Discussion

• Links for Sdkb: Sdkb (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)
• Edit summary usage for Sdkb can be found here.

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Please keep discussion constructive and civil. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review their contributions before commenting.

Support

1. As nominator. KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 18:04, 9 February 2024 (UTC)