But aside from the issue of low volume, is this new wave of processional coronations even guaranteeing a high quality crop of mall cops? This will be crucial, if they're to be doing the workload of ten in the coming years, due to retirements, firings and even death. The latest promotion doesn't inspire confidence.
I'll start by making the obvious point - to be a good Wikipedia admin, you need to be a well adjusted, perfectly normal, emotionally mature human being. You need perspective. Wikipedia isn't attractive to normal people, so as close to normal as is possible, is the best they can do.
So, meet Lourdes, who just passed 2017-3-1. By all accounts, she's a fantastic candidate, perfectly suited. But are the Wikipedians themselves, especially in this current climate, really the best judges of such things? I know nothing of her record, and can't be bothered to look. I can only report on what I happened to notice due to events after her passing, which seem to suggest she isn't all that well adjusted. If it's that easy to spot warning signs, it suggests others buried in her detailed record have been missed, or worse, deliberately ignored.
First off, there's the fact she had already failed one RfA, and had apparently been unable to spot this would happen, given it was a self nomination. Reasons to oppose were lack of experience, overly literal interpretations of policy, and issues of tone. Perhaps most worryingly, unless she's a re-tread, her profile was very atypical for a new user, showing signs of addition/obsession. So, even by Wikipedian's standards, she's been marked out as being a bit odd, perhaps a little unbalanced, either caused by, or a symptom of, her evident enthusiasm with all things Wikipedia.
Very disturbingly, her sheer joy at finally passing a second time, has manifested in a most bizarre sight, something I don't recall ever seeing before. On the RfA page, she posted what amounts to some kind of Oscar style acceptance speech, thanking a whole host of voters by name. It is most vomit inducing, it really needs to be read in its horrific entirety. This is a clear sign she's got no real perspective.
I mean Jesus, if this is how she reacts to the relatively trivial event of passing RfA, can you imagine what she'd be like at her graduation (no way can she be over 23), the birth of her first child, or even their graduation? It doesn't bear thinking about. She'd fit in at the Oscars no problem, the key difference being that is at least an actual worthwhile achievement in one's life, and the profession is predisposed to the overly emotional.
Her user page contains further clues at her lack of perspective. She of course has an alternative account named "❤️", and she of course uses it to spread her appreciation of her fellow editors. Sheesh.
Now we come to a most amusing incident, which spilled over into a most hilarious spat at the Bureaucrat's Noticeboard. See both sections here....
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =828036436
As it turns out, she was intending to travel before she would have passed her RfA, and because she had promised to lend her laptop to a church group, she posted a request asking that the flipping of the switch be delayed until her return, when she would, of course, be installing 2FA, as all sensible admins should be doing these days (most don't, and you can draw the inevitable conclusions).
This, in of itself, was a bizarre sign of a lack of perspective. She wanted this rare thing to be done, involving all crats, for a very trivial risk. It's not a nuclear suitcase girl, Jesus. People got better shit to be doing than pandering to your paranoia.
But that isn't even the best part. Naturally, Wikipedia being what it is, namely dysfunctional, the bureaucracy could neither agree to do this in sufficient time, nor was the request even noticed before one of them had simply promoted her anyway. Panicked, and this is fucked up, she relays how, when a group of kids, yes KIDS, turned up at her door asking for the promised laptop, she told them to buzz off, keeping the laptop safely locked in the house, as she rushed out to catch her plane.
How messed up is that? Seriously, how paranoid do you need to be, how utterly devoid of any kind of perspective, to believe that what could have happened in this scenario, is that the kids would have taken the laptop to church, and using social engineering, hacked her Wikipedia account, just so they could delete a few Wikipedia articles and block a few users. A more likely scenario there, surely, if this church is really that bad of a place, is her losing real money. Evidently this wasn't a concern.
I suppose she might have feared it being stolen, but seriously, it is quite obvious to anyone with a real grounding on planet Earth, that 2FA wasn't introduced to Wikipedia to avoid that sort of compromise. And again, if that happened, she'd have bigger concerns, and so likely wouldn't be lending it out at all, surely?
Finally, there's the issue Andrew identified. She was quite improperly making gnome edits which merely adjusted white space. That she wasn't aware this is an issue, is a troubling sign for her suitability as an admin on basic knowledge grounds. I can't see how any addict would be unaware of this, given it was renewed as a big issue this past year or so. That she immediately rolled over and promised to never ever do it again, shows how desperate she was to become an admin.
That she didn't explain how it could be that she was ignorant of this policy, evidently didn't raise any concern for the watching Wikipedians. But the most remarkable thing was the reason she gave for why she does/did it. Her answer to question 10 was......
Seriously? Who does that? Who is so addicted to Wikipedia, they do this, even if it only ends up shuffling white space? Undoubtedly this work needs to be done, albeit only by actually making beneficial edits, but it is better done systematically, by people with sufficient knowledge and experience to do it (it says a lot that such people have almost zero chance of being rewarded with that admin userright, even though it shows a more enlightened and balanced approach to Wikipedia as a hobby cum charitable endevour than what she's doing).These are simple gnomish formatting edits I undertake from time to time on articles that I get using the random article link. Thanks.
All told, it's clear Lourdes isn't really all there, she has severe issues with a lack of real world perspective, things which probably explain the observations in their first RfA. This all speaks to a potential lack of judgement. Perhaps not in everyday settings, but absolutely in a high pressure situation when a mistep could cause huge drama and grave damage. It is clear Wikipedia has either screwed with her brain chemistry, or she was already a bit odd, and has naturally gravited to the home of the odd. And once there, the inbuilt systems which reward odd people, are doing what they do best.
She's female, but also a coder, so not the sort of woman they're looking for increased participation from. She has three FAs, one article on a legal case, and two lists about motorsport and cricket respectively. Other articles worked on are about male coders. Dare I say she may not even be a female, she may be one of those addicts so desperate to become a Wikipedia admin, they may have just adopted a female persona to achieve a PC boost for their candidacy from folks too dumb to look any further than their name. The bizarre Oscar speech and alt account might just be ham-fisted attempts to appear be a stereotypical emotional woman.