Firefly @ RfA

Editors, Admins and Bureaucrats blecch!
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Jake Is A Sellout
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Firefly @ RfA

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Sun Mar 06, 2022 8:11 pm

I was quite confused when reading the RfA nomination statement for Firefly.
.....Friendly, talented, and dedicated, Firefly has been a trusted community member for a long time – he’s been editing since 2005.....With his good judgment and expert grasp on Wikipedia policy and practice, I am confident that Firefly will serve the project well as one of our best administrators
How could I not have heard of such an amazing candidate?

How could he not have been unearthed, as people have been searching high and low these last few years for qualified candidates to stem the bleeding in the Admin ranks?

Easy. The community are being lied to.

Firefly is, in reality, someone who has only edited Wikipedia in three distinct blocks...

* 2005 and 2009 (~7,000 edits)

In this first block, Firefly exhibits classic non-committal behaviour. He dips his toe, edits sporadically, and certainly doesn't get addicted. Indeed, he finds Wikipedia so uninteresting he can be away from it for months on end. And yet he was interested enough to put in his two longest and largest bursts of activity toward the end, on Spring 2008 and Winter 2009, before disappearing abruptly.

* April - July 2018 (~2,000 edits)

After nearly a decade, Firefly is back, but only for three months, in a classic bell curve of slowly growing interest and similarly slow decline in interest. He does make slightly more total edits in this period than than his Winter 2009 burst, but with slightly less peak interest.

* February 2021 - present (~9,700 edits)

In his third stint, Firefly is unrecognisable, and straight off the bat, and for every single month, racks up impressive edit counts. Not as high as his prior peak months, but consistently close to his prior best months in his prior two stints.

The community are of course, ignoring the red flags here.

They are taking it on trust that this bizarre history is down to real world work commitments as he claims, and not asking themselves how or why Firefly apparently doesn't foresee this being an issue in future (without having stating he is retired or permanently incapacitated).

Maybe this is nothing.

It certainly isn't as sold. A dedicated editor who has edited since 2005, this is not.

Why lie? Certainly about something so easily checked.

I just find it far too convenient that this third and final block looks as if he returned to Wikipedia in February 2021 with the precise intention of a run for Admin. Most people taking 10,000 edits over one year to be the bare minimum to even consider a rookie.

How do they even know this is the same guy, would be the big question.

Such is their desperation for Admins, and indeed straight after Eostrix, here they are again, exercising seemingly no due diligence whatsoever.

Good.

:twisted:

HTD.

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