Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Optional candidate poll

"WP:RFAP" redirects here. For requesting the autopatrolled right, see WP:Requests for permissions/Autopatrolled.

This optional polling page is for experienced editors who intend to request administrative privileges (RfA) or run in an admin election in the near future and wish to receive feedback on their chances of succeeding in their request.

This page is not intended to provide general reviews of editors. To seek feedback on what you can do to improve your contributions to Wikipedia, ask a friendly, experienced editor on the editor's talk page for help.

Disclaimer: Before proceeding, please read advice pages such as Advice for RfA candidates or Advice for admin elections candidates. The result of a poll may differ greatly from an actual RfA or election, so before proceeding, you should evaluate your contributions based on the advice there as well as recent successful and failed requests. Look at past polls in the archives and consider the risk of having a similar list of shortcomings about yourself to which anyone can refer. You may want to consider instead asking an editor experienced at RfA, such as those listed at Wikipedia:Request an RfA nomination, their thoughts privately.

Instructions

Potential candidates

To request an evaluation of your chances of passing a request for adminship in the next 3 to 6 months, add your name below and wait for feedback. Please read Wikipedia:Not now before adding your name to this list.

Responders

Responders, please provide feedback on the potential candidate's likelihood of passing an RfA at this time. Please be understanding of those who volunteer without fully appreciating what is expected of an administrator, and always phrase your comments in an encouraging manner. You can optionally express the probability of passing as a score from 0 to 10; a helper script is available to let you give a one-click rating. For more detailed or strongly critical feedback, please consider contacting the editor directly.

Closure

Potential candidates may opt to close or withdraw their ORCP assessment request at any time. Polls are normally closed without any closing statement after seven days (and are archived seven days after being closed). They may be closed earlier if there is unanimous agreement that the candidate has no chance at being granted administrative privileges.

Sample entry

==Example==
{{User-orcp|Example}}
*5/10 - Edit count seems okay, but there will be opposers saying you need more AfD participation. ~~~~

ShadowBallX: September 26, 2026

ShadowBallX (talk · contribs · logs · block log · page moves · count · edit summaries · non-automated edits · articles created · BLP edits · AfD votes · XfD votes · admin score (beta) · no prior RfA)

I was considering running in the upcoming admin elections (haven't fully decided if I will or not yet), and by the suggestion of Femke in the discord server, I thought I'd come here to get a second opinion. I know that my total amount of edits is lower than what most people would probably want or expect out of an RFA/AELECT nominee, however I do have experience with admin tools as I've been a sysop on the Simple English Wikipedia for almost 10 months now. The main thing I wanted to get a second opinion on here is if my admin experience over on Simple English would be enough to satisfy at least some concern over a lack of experience here (moreso relating to my edit count), or if this is a WP:Not quite yet and I should just hold off until the next election. ShadowBallX (talk) 23:46, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

At the moment, you have slightly under 5000 edits. The lowest edit total for any successful AELECT candidate is 7700. AFAICT, you don’t have any GAs as of now and there’s isn’t much of a track record at AFD. Your admin experience at Simple English Wiki helps you, but you’ve only been an admin there for ten months. As of now, it’s still WP:Not quite yet for me. EaglesFan37 (talk) 01:31, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Editors here expect the following from RfA candidates:

• a demonstrated need for the tools - you haven't actually stated why you want the tools
• some admin-adjacent experience that's relevant - that would be things like voting in deletion discussions (where your track record is so low to be meaningless); Simple Wiki adminship may help you a wee bit, but it won't get you over the line
• quality content creation - I suggest that you bring some of your B-class articles to GA and that should get you covered
• experience as measured by edit count - as EaglesFan points out, you are below what most people here think is needed
• being transparent as an editor - your very low use of edit summaries alone will get you many opposes; you really need to get on top of that. Aim for 100% edit summaries (you can turn this on in preferences that an edit summary must be present before you can save an edit).

Overall, it's too soon. Work on the above. Come back when it looks a bit more promising. Schwede66 07:01, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Hello Shadowball. Happy to see you're interested. Adding to schwede's points (agree this aelect is too early)

You indicate on your user page that you find anti-vandalism scary on enwiki. It's not :). A lot of editors with less experience than you do help in anti-vandal work. It might be a bit too easy for you, but there is a WP:Counter-Vandalism Unit/Academy, where you can get started and learn the ins and outs.

The general wisdom is that you want to be able to show experience in two different areas. Maybe anti-vandalism like on simple, as well as an area that stems from your NPP work like CSD and/or AfD? In solidarity, —Femke (talk) 🐦 08:19, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Just saw the responses now (I completely forgot to add the page to my watchlist, and only just remembered), and fair enough, I'll hold off for now. Some things I will note though:

• All three of my B-class articles are currently awaiting some form of review (one's currently undergoing a PR, while the other two are awaiting a GA review (pretty sure I nominated one of them back in late February, and simply no one's gotten around to it))
• I did not know about the edit summary option within preferences, thanks for that.
• It's less that I find anti-vandalism scary here (the "I'm not brave enough" quote was just a Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith reference I thought was funny back when I added it), but moreso that it just doesn't really interest me here as much as it does on Simple (there was a period of around two months before my Simple RfA where there was often no admins on at night for usually 4-6 hours, and some nights I'd average around 3-4 VIP reports (our version of AIV) because one wouldn't usually show up until around 3–4am EST. It's gotten better now nowadays, but seeing how bad it was regularly was the reason I decided to run on Simple in the first place.)

Thanks again for the feedback, gonna probably leave this open for another day in case someone wants to add anything else. ShadowBallX (talk) 06:51, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

If you nominated a GA back in February and it still hasn't been picked up, chances are high it doesn't actually meet the criteria. No one really likes failing GANs, so if it's not an obvious pass or fail it tends to hang around. You may want to put some more work into it. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 01:30, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

I've had a quick look at the America's tour article, and don't see any obvious flaws. Quite often, articles do not get picked up for no good reason whatsoever. Sometimes it's because people haven't done reviews themselves. I can recommend doing a review of an article from an experienced nominator who can help you if you need any help with the review. I've failed some articles at the very end of the queue, but being somewhere in the middle isn't that good an indicator of quality. In solidarity, —Femke (talk) 🐦 05:26, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

Agreed. Speaking from personal experience, my last GA languished for almost a year before I eventually decided to put it in at GARC (@ShadowBallX, I would highly recommend trying it). That article is now an FA. There are many other reasons an article might be getting avoided by reviewers, including a longer length, subject area niche-ness, and a low review to nomination counts, to name but a few. UpTheOctave! • 8^va? 17:50, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

Hi ShadowBallX, and thanks for considering a run. The original reason for standards inflation taking the tenure requirement beyond a year was experience of some longterm abuse accounts that managed to operate a goodfaith account for about a year, obviously you have been a Wikipedia for far longer than that. Currently your userpage says that you are mainly a Simple Wikipedia person, and you want to know how much weight we give such experience here on EN WP. To be honest, and I have looked at hundreds of RFAs over the last 18 years, people who quote experience on other wikis are rare at RFA. I'm not active at Simple, but I'd assume vandalism is still vandalism. !voters here would expect you to have familarised yourself with our policies and norms re frequencies of warnings etc and to be able to explain how similar or otherwise our treatment of vandalism is compared to Simple's. You may find some !voters who are reluctant to support a candidate until that candidate is comfortable saying that they now find themselves spending significant amounts of time both here and on Simple. There is also an expectation here that admin candidates should have created content as well as wanting to use the mop, and in particular that RFA candidates need to have mastered the art of making inline citations to reliable sources; however your DYK work should be more than enough to satisfy most !voters on that score. So by all means run, though my reccommendation would be to consider a conventional RFA as that gives you more specific feedback, so !voters could discuss relevance of Simple admin experience. Best of luck whichever way you choose to go. ϢereSpielChequers 14:10, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Gommeh: September 29, 2026

Gommeh (talk · contribs · logs · block log · page moves · count · edit summaries · non-automated edits · articles created · BLP edits · AfD votes · XfD votes · admin score (beta) · CSD log · PROD log · no prior RfA)

Hello everyone, I am considering throwing my hat in the ring within the next several months or so. I spend a decent amount of my time on anti-vandalism work as well as AFD, and would like to help out in those areas if given the tools. I did ask for feedback at this page last July (thread) where people brought up a number of issues with my editing. I think I've made some progress since then, namely that I've adjusted my priorities and improved my XFD statistics. My AFD stats have a 92.6% accuracy rating as of writing this, a vast improvement, and I have largely cut down on participation at drama-boards such as ANI compared to what I was doing back then. (Honestly, I'm not proud of some of the things I said or did back when I used to constantly lurk on ANI...) I have switched my focus to other things such as AFD participation instead of drama. My record at UAA or RFPP was not great back then; for the latter, I think the reason why my record there wasn't very clean was because I misunderstood what the increasing levels of protection were. While I haven't had too many opportunities to request protection for a page since then, I have at least read up on the relevant policies and guidelines.

I've also put a higher amount of emphasis on making sure my closures of AFDs are (in my opinion) non-contentious, and only one of the countless closures I've done there has been overturned. I've also been making an effort to "slow down" my editing as others have told me, making a conscious effort to not rush things. My biggest accomplishment since I last asked for feedback here, though, has by far been content creation. I have well over 30 GAs and 1 FA to my name, most of which have to do with miHoYo's games and characters. In the process of improving those articles, I have familiarized myself with a lot of processes and guidelines. There were concerns raised about WP:V and source-text integrity, and I have taken steps to minimize those issues. As an example of this, I would point to my recent GA nomination, Sandrone (Genshin Impact); it's not perfect, but it's also a far cry from the number of sourcing issues I had at my Genshin Impact FAC percentage-wise, which is a great improvement. I don't feel as much of a rush to get articles to GA as I used to, as I now realize that it's important to give myself and others time to improve them before submitting them to GAN. Please let me know your thoughts. In solidarity, Gommeh ^{(talk 🎮 sign)} 20:23, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Ok, I've re-read the previous discussion. I've read what you said above. I haven't looked at anything else. Under that proviso, I must say I really like what you present. We give feedback. You listen to it and put it into practice. And not just a little bit, but a lot. To go in 14 months from one failed GA attempt to thirty GAs and one FA is rather impressive. I'll take a closer look soon but this sounds rather promising. Schwede66 21:30, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Why do you want to be an admin? That's a big question I don't see addressed above. As for your credentials, my impressions of you are only from DYK and AfD, and they are positive. You are an editor who adds value in the areas where our contributions overlap. At DYK, if you were to get involved in promoting hooks (and, eventually, queuing them), that would help you demonstrate a valuable use for the tools, and it would strengthen your content capabilities even more. I will dig deeper and may offer additional comments either here or via email. Dclemens1971 (talk) 21:53, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Well I believed it would be rather obvious from context, but looking back I don't think my wording was as clear as it could have been. I would like to become admin in part because I'd like to help out with AFD and protect Wikipedia against disruptive editing. In short, having the tools would allow me to close AFDs as delete when the consensus is to do so, and it would also allow me to issue sanctions such as blocks when needed. In solidarity, Gommeh ^{(talk 🎮 sign)} 22:45, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Helpful explanation and a good reason—I probably could have guessed it, but it’s good to have it made clear. Thanks! Dclemens1971 (talk) 23:09, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Gommeh, I know you from video game content creation and AfD. I have reviewed a few of your GA nominations and I did not spot any issues with these nominations. Of course, not every review ends up the same, others might bring up issues that others might not notice. Your recent contributions have also shown us that you've informed yourself on key administrative things. You're also clear about what you want to tackle as an administrator. But, if you ask me, there is one issue that remains "unsolved" here, at least what I've noticed, and other repliers might have not! I really dislike seeing users using AI on Wikipedia, you know. This comes from someone who is a software engineer and in an area where AI is slowly replacing us. And, I did notice you using AI a few times, I notified you about it once, after which you left an AI disclaimer on your userpage (it is no longer there, though). So, my question to you is, or maybe a couple of questions... 1) Why did you use AI? 2) When did you use AI? 3) Where did you use AI? 4) Do you still use AI? I really cannot support, or nominate, an editor for adminiship that has used AI in violation of WP:NOLLM. Whether in present, or in past. Of course, if you ended up not violating WP:NOLLM, then I don't think that there'd be any issues with your usage of AI. I think that clarifying this would help not just me, but also others, when considering your nomination for adminship. Cheers, Vacant0 (talk • contribs) 21:39, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Oh, indeed. AI use is a showstopper. Important that you clarify the situation. Schwede66 22:07, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

All the LLM stuff was done in compliance with WP:LLMTRANSLATE, even before that policy had come into existence. Quite a few of the video game articles I have made were translated over using AI, but I was able to verify the translations' accuracy myself using language dictionaries and my own knowledge of the subject matter, with some assistance from editors who speak other languages (mostly Chinese) natively. Using AI simply made it easier to spot potential issues in translation I may need to look out for. I never used it to generate content (that, as we all know, is against policy). Anything I did add, I made an effort to check its accuracy myself.

I also used it to organize my notes on sources, triple checking everything to make sure each and every claim was accurately cited to a reliable source to prevent hallucinations. Other than that, I have no real reason to use AI for Wikipedia anymore, so there it is. In short, I took every reasonable step to ensure I was fully in compliance with LLM guidance on Wikipedia such as WP:NOLLM.

As a side note, I also wrote not one but two humorous essays advising against the use of AI to write content from scratch (hallucinations, etc.). In my view it would have been very hypocritical of me to do that if I had myself broken policy. Happy to answer any questions you have. In solidarity, Gommeh ^{(talk 🎮 sign)} 22:24, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Forgot to add - the warning on my user page was removed as I no longer view it as very accurate to how I edit nowadays. I was worried it may mislead people about the level of AI use in my current editing, so I removed it and told myself I'd clarify if people asked. In solidarity, Gommeh ^{(talk 🎮 sign)} 22:28, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Okay, good to know. In my view, you're in a fine situation. If I was you, I would either wait for the upcoming AELECT in March or run for a RfA any time during the upcoming year. My suggestion is that, if you're serious about running for adminship, is to start looking for co-noms on time. For example, I've contacted Vanamonde I think in August or September 2025 (maybe even in July?!) and later I contacted Schwede after. And I ended up running in January! I can't tell for others, though. Some candidates might have sorted out everything in a week, a month, or maybe even more. Good luck! Vacant0 (talk • contribs) 23:04, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliment! I actually had you and Dclemens as candidates on my "ask-for-nomination" shortlist, and will likely add more based on my experiences. Additionally while I am thinking about it I should add that I've made contributing to foreign-language translations of articles I have written and ensuring accuracy a priority; to that note, there are people who are sysops on other versions of Wikipedia who can at least vouch for my contributions there as well if needed. Although they are not admins here, there is a decent chance I will consider asking them for nominations anyway, since one or two of them are semi-regular contributors here. In solidarity, Gommeh ^{(talk 🎮 sign)} 00:01, 3 October 2026 (UTC)