| Account
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Leaderboard (talk • meta edits • global user summary • CA)
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| Candidate details
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- Languages:
- Region: MENA
- Active wikis: en.wikibooks and meta primarily
- Wikimedian since: 2013
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| Selected home wiki
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English Wikibooks
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| Type of seat (regional; community-at-large; or both) (division of regional seats)
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Community-at-large only
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| Candidate Introduction
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| Introductory statement / Application summary (maximum 200 words): Why are you running for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee? What would you contribute?
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I'm Leaderboard, an admin at en.wikibooks and MediaWiki. I believe that my technical strengths and general experience (both local and cross-wiki) would be very valuable in UCoC, and additionally have spent significant time observing how projects work cross-wiki, and how the UCoC could help such projects.
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| Please describe your Wikimedia experience (such as contributions to the Wikimedia projects, memberships in Wikimedia organizations or affiliates, experience working on conduct issues in your community, activities as a Wikimedia movement organizer, or participation in building Wikimedia policies).
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I'm an admin at two WMF wikis, an abuse filter helper, and also a maintainer of a bot running at Meta-Wiki and Commons. In addition, I help users (both at my home-wiki and elsewhere) with technical issues, and also have in the past helped other wikis with abuse filters to fight vandalism.
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| Professional Experience, Skills and Education
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| Please briefly describe 3 situations that show how you worked on, or advised others on, a complex conduct or policy issue. How did you work with others to address the situations?
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In 2021, one of my goals was to foster cross-wiki collaboration by allowing global sysops to work on more wikis and be less restricted, in general. Unfortunately, I didn't handle this quite well at this time. To begin with, my initial attempt at en.wikivoyage worked, and I helped answers users' queries about how global sysops worked, and eased their concerns about GS potentially "overriding" their wiki. Naturally, I then tried expanding this to other wikis, and that's when things went wrong. For instance, en.wikisource was rather cold, and en.wikinews didn't seem to care either despite my best attempts to explain. Looking back at this experience, I should have not tried to do this as a "one-man" mission, and instead tried to collaborate with the global community at an earlier stage. There were also some criticism that I was unable to determine "when to stop", and I've tried to be better there as well. I should note that I've also tried updating the global sysops policy to be less vague and more clear (since I usually see users be very conservative in their interpretation), but I didn't get enough support for that. Another example was codifying the global rights policy, including a Wikimedia-first example of explicitly allowing stewards to process non-CheckUser requests (which involved discussing with other users). Also see answer to the next question.
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| Leadership Experience
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| Can you describe a policy, on wiki or off, that you helped to create or change? What did you learn from this experience?
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I helped lift a seemingly-arbitrary restriction in February 2022, by helping create https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Strategy_guides and helping enact the proposal at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Reading_room/Proposals/2022/February#Start_allowing_game_strategies. What I learned form the experience was that even long-standing policies can be changed with community support, and the importance of allowing every user to speak up and voice their opinion, irrespective of their experience level.
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| How have you been able to empower people to make their voices heard?
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I've given one example above. Another example was at Incubator: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incubator:Requests_for_deletions/Archive_4#c-Leaderboard-2022-05-01T14:06:00.000Z-Slava_Ukraini_Heroyam_Slava_123-2022-05-01T13:00:00.000Z where I spoke out against a user that was constantly harassing (for the lack of a better word) another user just for legitimately creating another account (at that time) - in other words, I try to speak up to allow people to freely contribute without unnecessary hinderance.
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| Sometimes in professional situations, there are personality conflicts. Explain how you remain productive even with personality conflicts.
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By taking a break. Conflicts happen; it's how we respond that matter. I've had my fair share of conflicts, and my experience is that just stepping back and doing nothing has helped in diffusing the situation and preventing it from being worse.
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| Strategic Thinking
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| In your opinion, how can the U4C be a positive influence in the Wikimedia movement?
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By empowering smaller wikis and providing them with a mechanism to report any conduct issues easily.
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| How would you help the Universal Code of Conduct develop and improve over time?
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By suggesting suitable improvements, and importantly staying active in the committee (and giving up my rights if I cannot), to prevent a situation where not enough people are there to contribute to the group (like what happened with the Ombuds in the past).
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