Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Crzrussian 2

This is a bit of an unusual RfA, in that I am an elected administrator who was asked by six editors in good standing to re-confirm his admin status in another RfA pursuant to my membership in Category:Administrators open to recall. (I voluntarily chose to do this two months hence.) The following Q&A with the candidate should help everyone make an educated decision about whether to affirm my sysop rights.

1. So what happened, in short?

   I made one stupid sarcastic comment to Yas121 (talk • contribs • page moves • block log), someone I had previously blocked. A fellow administrator saw it and blocked me for 24 hours. I immediately unblocked myself and went to talk about it at the admin's talk page and at WP:ANI. People started yelling at me for unblocking myself, so I offered them to recall me, and within 48 hours six people requested I step down, based mostly on the self-unblock, so I stepped down.

   ANI Archive

   My user talk archive

2. All right. So now tell us about your history with Yas.

   I keep a bunch of habitually controversial pages on my watchlist. One of them is Meir Kahane, the late banned leader of an über-nationalistic political party and its affiliated terrorist organization in Israel. On July 30 Yas did this which I reverted as an unnecessary injection of POV (I have also reverted oodles of pro-Kahane POV changes before, see history). I also reverted Yas' edits to Baruch Goldstein and Ann Coulter. Yas persisted on all three articles. After my third revert in a couple of days I warned him on his talk page [1] and then in an edit summary [2]. After he added the categories for a fourth time, I blocked him for 24 hours "for repeated disruption to Meir Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, Ann Coulter" and left an appropriate note on his talk page. A request for unblock was denied by someone else. Then another user decided to vent on Yas' talk page about the Zionist domination of wikipedia, obviously in response in part to my block, since I am Jewish [3]. After Yas responded [4] I decided to defuse the situation and expose the idiocy of Jewish conspiracy line of thinking by introducing a little levity [5] for which Fred Bauder (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) promptly blocked me [6].

3. And then you unblocked yourself.

   Yeah, 5 minutes hence [7]. My next two edits were to Bauder's talk [8] [9] and to AN/I [10] in response to Bauder's posting there. There people started yelling at me for unblocking myself, plus a few accused me with edit warring with Yas, while most said the block to Yas should have been handled by someone else. I offered them to recall me if they felt so strongly about it, and to my astonishment, they did. Four came through immediately and two more 48 hours after the fact

4. So what were you thinking, w/r/t unblocking? Didn't you know it was wrong??

   Oh, I should have known it was wrong. It's explicit in policy, WP:BLOCK#Unblocking, which I was never consciously aware of. It makes sense. Apparently there have been some highly visible cases of admins desysopped for doing so, and some users expressed strong disbelief that I was not aware of that. I was not. I have never participated in any RfC or RfAr before July and have never paid attention. Besides, as was pointed out on AN/I by Geogre [11], it's not like I unblocked myself to go do more damage - rather, to talk about it, including an explicit note to Bauder to the same effect, diff above. My misdeed is therefore procedural, not substantive, which ought to make it a lot more palatable to all of you. Finally, it was a heat of the moment kind of thing - happens to the best of us.

5. All right, we get it. You did some stupid sh*t, and you're contrite. Enough groveling. Tell about the good things.

   Well, the good thing about this re-RfA is that the nominee has a two month track record of using them tools, so editors don't need to use proxies to estimate the risk of misuse - actual historical data is available here: Crzrussian (talk • contribs • blocks • protects • deletions • moves). I was mostly engaged in (un)deletions, of which I have 1938 in less than two months. I worked hard on prod's, CSD's, AfD's, Special:Shortpages, and non-compliant images. I have 65 (un)blocks (which helps explain my relative unfamiliarity with the details of that policy) and even fewer (un)protects outside of my userspace. I have never used my powers where I edited, I have studiously stayed out of conflicts of interest, and I have been extremely careful with deletions, declining hundreds of CSD and Prod candidates, which is of course not reflected in these stats. I was taken to WP:DRV a couple of times - naturally - where my closures were affirmed. All in all, I have worked very hard on thankless administrative tasks, and have remarkably few complaints to show for it.

6. If this passes, will you be available for recall again?

   Yes I will.

Mea Culpa

(copied from the WP:ANI archives) Here goes:

• While I am certain my comment to Yas was not a personal attack, I apologize to s/him or anyone whose feelings may have been hurt by its inappropriateness. I don't believe s/he was offended.
• I acknowledge once again that the self-unblock was wrong. It resulted from ignorance of that portion of the unblock policy and from the heat of the moment. It's pretty damn clear that I will not do anything of the sort again.
• I stand by the block to Yas a week ago, and emphatically deny the charge of edit warring. I acknowledge, however, the contructive criticism on how that block was handled.
• Given all this, I'll be happy to stand down if two more editors believe that my de-mopping will be a net benefit to this project.

Thanks all. - CrazyRussian talk/email 17:03, 7 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed the links provided in User:KimvdLinde's oppose vote, and I'd like to comment on a couple of them. Regarding [12], you said Crzrussian's edits reflect a "lack of understanding of NPOV". I'm not sure how "massacre" could be considered more neutral a term than "battle" or "incident", so perhaps you could better explain that. Secondly, your comment on the Longtail stingray thing ([13]) really looks like a desperate grasp for straws, as the page history shows a the application of a WP:CSD#G7 tag in a way that completely conforms to the criterion as written (and, of course, the whole thing is moot now that a separate article has been written atop the redirect). Thirdly, I admit that I myself am not a prolific uploader of images and may lack certain perspective, but my gut feelings tell me that if I was, and if they were all being orphaned and/or deleted, I'd sure as hell like to be informed of it (we have templates for that, by the way), and I'd probably be a little bit upset (though I'd get over it). If I had serially been making improper use of copyrighted images, I'd also appreciate some specific tips to avoid repeating such mistakes. I realize I have not addressed the entirety of Kim's opposition (that wasn't my goal to begin with) but I do believe I've identified some weak areas of it. —freak(talk) 05:32, Oct. 4, 2006 (UTC)

Response to Freakofnurture: NPOV is not equivalent to usage of neutral words. A war is a war, a massacre is a massacre and using neutral words can be very POV (replace Srebrenica massacre with Srebrenica incident?). In hindside, this was exactly what was happening at this page, and instead of just commenting to the issue at hand, he immediatly started to question the motives of the messenger (we never had an interaction before as far as I can recall), and effectively tries to tell me to piss off because I have a different idea than he has.

As for the G7. People male mistakes, no problem, admit that. The original redirect was valid, an alternative name for a species, which we all the time make redirects for. In cases of unwarranted page blanking, we normally restore the previous version. But it is the reaction afterwards that I have the most issues with. Starts with appeal to authority: I've been working Special:Shortpages about as long as you've been a Wikipedian[14]. But more, for someone so experienced, I would expect him to check the page history, see a old redirect and check it. It would have taken two clicks to find out that the original redirect was correct. Effectively, the tagging, deleting etc has taken way more time than just do a basic check. And Nishkid is still green[15] is incorrect, as his actions where better than CrazyRussian.

As for the images, the community (and especially Jimbo) do not write guidelines for nothing, so, instead of fuming at the messenger, he could have had a look, and see if it was indeed a guideline and go from there. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 13:10, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Deir Yassin renaming was an awful idea by Ms. van der Linde herself. I totally stand by the G7 on the Stingray, and I completely stand behind all my comments on the Promophoto Massacre. Another user reverted Ed's unannounced unilateral actions, anyway. - CrazyRussian talk/email 05:37, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is again a telling response of Crzrussian to critisism: shoot the messenger. If you still stand that Battle of Deir Yassin is a more correct name for Deir Yassin massacre, you have a serious problem with writing neutral articles, as the latter is only promoted by the group that was part of the troops that commited the massacre and some related denialists. The battle by itself is completely irrelevant, it was the massacre, the exageration of it, and the usage as a propaganda tool that make the massacre a noteworthy historical event in light of the Palestinian refugee problem. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 13:10, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I objected to the your WP:POINT violation in making these contentious nominations. I've opposed pro-Israeli proposals as well, even when solicited to support. I forget which - ask Humus, he remembers. It may have been "Allegations of Israeli apartheid" or something else. - CrazyRussian talk/email 13:23, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Did I say that you voted always in favour of pro-israel proposals? If anything at all, this was a pro-israel proposal, so where does that contention come from? Is trying to rectify historical revisionism a WP:POINT violation? -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 13:31, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hummm, no answer? I would appreciate if you, after accusing me, that you answer these questions. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 04:29, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm tired of this, Kim. No, you did not I always voted for pro-Israeli proposals, No, I have no idea whether moving "Battle of Deir Yassin" to "Deir Yassin Massacre" was a pro-Israeli proposal, and No, trying to rectify historical revisionism is not a WP:POINT violation. What you did was start yet another bitter contentious destructive debate with lots of vote-solicitation and bad blood on both sides, esp. so soon after the God-forsaken "Allegations of Israeli apartheid" fiasco. But this RfA is not about what you did. - CrazyRussian talk/email 04:47, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In monitoring the progress of my own RfA I ran across some bot generated statistic pages such as this one. The poor bot has been having problems parsing, or in one case detecting, a few RfA's which I've been trying to clear up. This one is odd in that the report is showing the page name rather than the user. My belief right now is that the problem is in the first line of the file. This one has the line listed as:

===<font size="4">[[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Crzrussian 2|Crzrussian]]</font><br />===

Nothing looked out of place at first, but then I compared it to a few others:

===[[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/StuffOfInterest 2|StuffOfInterest]]===

===[[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Adambiswanger1|Adambiswanger1]]===

===[[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Rory096 2|Rory096]]===

Note that Cruzrussian's has a font tag (open and close) and a line break tag in the header. I believe this is confusing the bot. Being that changing this could have a visual impact on the page I'm hesitant to do it, but if someone else feels like removing the extra bits I believe the bot will generate a clean report. --StuffOfInterest 23:31, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I saw no advantage from the font formatting tags, so I removed them to unconfuse the poor bot. Zocky | picture popups 23:45, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Not my idea... - CrazyRussian talk/email 23:49, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Dear everyone,

I am going away for a couple of days, and will return no earlier than late Sunday night. Any further questions will be answered then. I wish all the Jews a happy Sukkot, all the Gentiles a great weekend, and all the Americans an extra-great long weekend. See y'all later. - CrazyRussian talk/email 18:18, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Could someone please explain why a version of this RfA has been deleted? -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 19:44, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to know this as well, i notice know mention by Yanksox here and so this could be interpreted as "rigging". thanks/Fenton, Matthew Lexic Dark 52278 Alpha 771 19:54, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I can. I had accidentally edited the RfA without logging in in a way that was pretty obviously me. The WHOIS on that IP address reveals my employer, which would be generally an awful thing for a number of reasons. Therefore, as soon as I realized the lapse, I asked a friendly sysop off-wiki to zap that revision forthwith. - CrazyRussian talk/email 21:31, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Perfectly good enough explanation (-: thanks/Fenton, Matthew Lexic Dark 52278 Alpha 771 21:33, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Two of the neutral votes are indented and therefore not counted. Was this intentional? Agathoclea 15:06, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A few hours before close, I would like to express my appreciation for everyone's thoughtful comments, with a select few exceptions. More or less, I admit I've let down my guard since I first became a sysop and become more of a loose cannon. (Metaphor alert!) I am most useful to this project in deletions, and I will make it my business to stick to that. I am thinking now that a self-imposed block moratorium on non-IP users would make everyone feel better. From now on indefinitely (until I feel more comfortable again) I will not block non-IP users for more than an hour until/unless I have a second opinion from another sysop. I'll try, anyway. I apologize to all those who may have felt slighted as a result of my actions, including, but not limited to, Yas, Ed g2s, Nishkid, Malber, KillerChihuahua (bark!), Arthur Ellis (only barely!), and the Palestinian people. Thanks for all your support. - CrazyRussian talk/email 21:44, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

See User:Crzrussian/Accountability - CrazyRussian talk/email 05:09, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In lieu of spamming: User:Crzrussian/RfA_Thanks - CrazyRussian talk/email 06:18, 11 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]