Rusalkii (talk·contribs) – Rusalkii has been doing unobtrusively excellent work on Wikipedia for more than four years, during which she has accumulated more than 30,000 edits. She has expanded and improved a number of articles, on topics such as a popular science book about dinosaurs, an African shrew, and a US Marine Corps mascot, and has a GA and 13 DYKs to her name. Rusalkii has also been a diligent participant at RfD – a perennially backlogged venue – and at AfC, where she will be able to make productive use of the admin tools. Equally to her credit, she has only 8 edits to the cesspool. Her talk page and AfC contributions evince helpfulness, CLUE, and patience in spades, and she would make a great addition to the administrator corps. Vanamonde93 (talk) 05:07, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Co-nomination statement
I am delighted to co-nominate Rusalkii for adminship. A bit more than three years ago, she and I were both starting out at AfC, where she was easily noticeable for her kind demeanour, her tendency to ask the questions we were all wondering about, and her readiness to help where where needed. Oh, and for her ruthless slaughtering of the backlog. (By the way, she wrote this handy explainer on sources for drafts.) I see that, since then, she's brought her humility, determination, and willingness to learn to other parts of the project, including NPP and COI edit requests. I'm confident that she'll approach unfamiliar admin tasks in the same way. We can always use more quick-study admins who are willing to admit that they don't know the answer, and anyone who can handle COI cases for a year without becoming the Joker absolutely has the right temperament. I hope you all agree. asilvering (talk) 19:32, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here: Thank you both. I accept the nomination. I have never edited for pay, and have never had any other accounts. Rusalkii (talk) 06:41, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Questions for the candidate
Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia as an administrator. Please answer these questions to provide guidance for participants:
1. Why are you interested in becoming an administrator?
A: I'm active at RfD, which almost always has a large admin backlog. I've closed a few obvious "keeps", but anything where deletion is remotely on the table should be closed by someone with the ability to action that close, and I'd like to be able to do that. The tools can also help out at AfC, where I periodically need to speedy a draft for vandalism, copyvio, or other issues, or delete a redirect to make way for an incoming draft.
I also just have a tendency to see a backlog and get personally offended by it. That's how I started working in most of the areas I'm active in the first place. I expect I'll branch out into other admin works as I get more comfortable with the tools, learn the norms of those areas, and see more places in which I could be helpful.
2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?
A: I think traditionally this is where I point to content I've written, but a lot of my work has been on various review process, from AfC to NPP to COI edit requests. It's difficult to point to any individual actions there: if you're doing it right, this kind of review can blend into the background. Once, however, someone whose AfC draft I left some comments on (I think it was a decline, even!) told me that "In one year of editing Wikipedia, your feedback has been the most detailed and helpful to improve". It's very, very easy in all these review processes to forget that you are the face of Wikipedia for people who have never heard of any of these acronyms and ideas that are being thrown at them, and I sincerely hope that this person is at least somewhat representative of the impact that I have in that role.
A more traditional answer is Johnlock. I really enjoyed getting to work on this kind of weird and traditionally "unencyclopedic" topic where it turns out there were actually quite a few strong academic sources. Collaborating with my GA reviewer DaniloDaysOfOurLives and Gråbergs Gråa Sång helped make the article much stronger. I'm also rather fond of Pulaski's Masterpiece, a fun little article about a dog I stumbled on while doing research for something tangentially related. It may not be my most exhaustive work, but it's my most popular DYK to date (crime sells!).
3. Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or have other users caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?
A: Overall, I tend to avoid stressful areas: Wikipedia is a hobby, and if you're regularly upset by it that's a sign that something is going wrong. If I notice myself getting stressed by some person or process, I drop that and go somewhere else: there's a lot of encyclopedia and there's no need to keep working at things that are unpleasant to you. Occasionally I do end up in a situation where I don't feel like I can easily leave it, whether because I think there's a really serious issue that no one else is aware of, or because I'm already committed in a way where I can't just bow out.
In one such conflict, once I noticed that I was really starting to take it personally, I tried taking at least an hour before responding to any message, not just dashing off the first satisfying-sounding thing I could think of. I think it's really important to notice the urge to say something pointed or that'll-show-them: that's very rarely constructive and tends to escalate rather than calm down issues, and I find if I take some time on my reply I'm much more likely to avoid that and end up actually taking into account their perspective on the issue. A useful question here is "what if they were right?". I also find it helpful to try to get an outside perspective relatively quickly, before a conflict starts going in circles and getting more acrimonious.
You may ask optional questions below. There is a limit of two questions per editor. Multi-part questions are disallowed, but you are allowed to ask follow-up questions related to previous questions.
4. Are there any areas of admin work you don't plan to get involved in, due to inexperience or lack of interest? If you later decided to volunteer in those areas, how would you ensure you have the necessary knowledge and skills?
A: There's nothing I'm absolutely sure I'll never do - if you'd asked me a year ago if I'd get into answering COI edit requests I would've said absolutely not - but there's plenty of areas I don't have any current plans to participate in and would need a lot of time to feel comfortable in. Some examples off the top of my head of areas I don't expect to branch out to are WP:CfD, WP:SPI, and DYK admin work. If I did plan to get into them I'd start by carefully reading the relevant policies, getting active in the area without doing anything that requires the tools, watch the existing admins working in that area, and then start on the most straightforward admin tasks and work my way up. For DYK, for instance, I've already nominated some hooks, so I'd probably start with reading the set prep guides, prepare some sets for others to promote, and then work my way up to promoting the sets myself when I feel like I understand the how things work.
5. As an AFC reviewer, do you reject or decline AI-generated articles and why?
A: Decline. In my view, rejects are for cases where it's clear the submitter is not going to improve the article further. Unless I'm very, very confident that a subject isn't notable or the submitter is obviously trolling, I will always decline the first time to give them a chance to improve. For an AI generated article, this might require starting completely from scratch, but there's still no need to bite them with the giant stop sign instead of explaining how to fix the issue.
6. Aside from the articles you've mentioned above, what topics of Wikipedia do you prefer to edit?
A: Content-wise, I don't think of myself as having much of a topic preference, but empirically I have tended to work on dog breeds and other dog related subjects, fandom-related topics, and most recently various obscure species stubs. I have some vague aspirations of branching out to history, which I enjoy, but have edited mostly superficially in that area. Otherwise, I gnome (I like adding short descriptions, deorphaning articles, and sourcing completely unrefrenced articles), and in addition to the backend work I talked about above I am a redirect patroller, do recent changes patrolling when I'm on mobile, and sometimes just bounce around random articles fixing minor issues as I notice them.
7. Further, what topics/administrative areas would you feel uncomfortable or not touch with a ten-foot pole?
A: Well, as I said above there's nothing I'm absolutely confident I'm not going to touch, but some areas I would be surprised to find myself working in are SPI, CCI, and DYK admin work.
8. Can you point me to somewhere where you've defended either content you've written or a policy-based decision you've made? (Examples might include an AfD of an article you wrote or a challenged RfC close but really I'm looking for anything where you've had to defend a decision on a policy basis)
A: The first one that comes to mind is this discussion at Talk:Johnlock#Not sure about these sources. I used a Master's thesis as a source and another editor pushed back on it. I felt the source was usable in this case because it had been cited in several other works (not that many numerically, but it's a very small field), which WP:SCHOLARSHIP calls out as an important criteria for when theses are more likely to be reliable.
9. Thank you for your willingness to mop up. My actions as sysop do not always cover me with glory. My two queries are about what you're thinking when things go wrong. What's your process if you realize you've made an error in judgement?
A: I'd say the majority of my errors in judgment don't rise to the point of needing a "process" per se: I notice a mistake, I go "sorry, my bad" where appropriate, and try to keep this in mind the next time I end up in a similar situation. To the extent that there's any process to it I think it's in keeping an eye out for when I've made an error in judgment at all, and adjusting using the small mistakes so that they don't turn into big ones. This happens all the time: if one of my RfD nominations gets kept I think about whether I made a mistake nominating, if someone makes substantial adjustments to text I wrote I think about whether I should've written the way they did it, etc. Sometimes I did make a mistake, and sometimes I didn't, but in all cases I think it's very important to approach these situations from the starting point of "what can I take away from this" even if in the end the answer is that I don't think I should change how I'm doing that particular thing.
10. Would you be willing to illustrate your thinking with one example of self-correction and what you learned correcting yourself in that situation?
A: Having said all that about how overall I think most such cases should be small course corrections rather than big incidents, I'm going to talk about a somewhat bigger one. When I was a couple months into reviewing at AfC, I was at my most prolific, and I got feedback from Liz that they thought I was moving way too fast: they noticed several declined drafts spaced very close together, and thought I wasn't taking enough time on them. I thought about that one for a while, and ended up formulating my personal rule for this kind of thing: any time a draft has already gotten one templated decline, I have to write a specific, personal message pointing out issues with the draft and how it might be improved. Liz's feedback caused me to think a lot about the perspective of submitters getting these rapid-fire form declines, and where and how we as reviewers should focus our time and effort to help them. I still have Liz's comments in my head occasionally when I'm tempted to just slap a template on a draft and move on, and I think this helped me really think about how - the newbies aren't a hive mind. I may get frustrated the twentieth time in an hour I've seen this particular issue and get sick of explaining it, but this is their first time, and it isn't fair to them to not take the same time explaining the twentieth time that I did the first. If I'm not in the right headspace to do that, then I should take a break and go do something else until I can again.
11. Under what conditions would you block a new user indefinitely?
A: The account being used exclusively for blatant vandalism or spam, egregious personal attacks that any user should expect to understand are beyond the pale even if unfamiliar with Wikipedia policies, legal threats, or blatant violations of the username policy (in which case they should be clearly told the issue with the username and how to fix it). In all cases, ideally after a final warning, though in particularly bad and obviously bad faith cases of vandalism or similar I may block without warnings.
A:DonaldTrump (talk·contribs): Depending on their behavior, either block on sight as obvious impersonation, or leave a talk page message requesting a change. Either way, explain the problem and instruct the user on how to change their username. Wikiedotr22 (talk·contribs): if there's something wrong with this one it's going over my head, welcome them if they seem to be editing and otherwise ignore it. DrunkEditor3 (talk·contribs): I'm not familiar with how the username policy is applied in edge cases like this. I can see an argument for this being potentially problematic, but currently I would ignore. If I did decide it was problematic, I'd leave them a talk page message about it instead of blocking.
Edit summary usage for Rusalkii can be found here.
Please keep discussion constructive and civil. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review her contributions before commenting.
Numerated (#) "votes" in the "Support", "Oppose", and "Neutral" sections may only be placed by editors with an extended confirmed account. All other comments are welcome in the "general comments" section.
Crossed paths with her on-Wiki yesterday and was literally thinking "how isn't she already an admin?" Then saw that this was in the works and got very happy. Always a pleasure to see her around, please count me in as very happy to support. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋19:52, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Support: Strikes me as a well-rounded editor with sound content, maintenance, and technical experience. I can't help but also appreciate the species articles. ~ Pbritti (talk) 20:07, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Support I know them mostly through their solid work at AfC and the related help desk. Knows their stuff, overall good egg, no concerns. S0091 (talk) 20:25, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Support Besides my trust in the nominators, she has a broad range of experience and content creation, but the most important thing that she has is a willingness to accept correction, as evidenced by her talk page. ❤HistoryTheorist❤22:05, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
Support. Have seen her around. I recall a recent AfD where she went the extra mile to evaluate sources carefully, then revisited conclusions as new sources became available. Perceptive and communicative -- just what we want in an admin. Dclemens1971 (talk) 02:39, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
Support Not somebody I've come across before, but I did a look through their contributions and everything looks fine to me. I'm particularly impressed with the cheat sheet for AfC sources and the patience they had reviewing FloridaArmy's AfC submissions, which seem to have been a long-time controversial subject. Ritchie333(talk)(cont)09:16, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
Support -- I am impressed. A clearly competent and well-rounded editor. And their talk page replies and discussions have remained the same -- from their first editing day through today -- courteous, informative, good-humored and a willingness to learn or to accept a possible mistake. Rusalkii will do well as an Admin. — CactusWriter (talk)14:38, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
Support Someone with the maturity to not only own up to their mistakes, but to do it in the RFA request, is definitely deserving of the mop -- Grapefanatic (Talk) 17:21, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
Support, the nominee seems trustworthy and I have no concerns. Other than her avoidance of the cesspool, which I totally get, but in all seriousness the nominee isn't a jerk, has a clue (and sufficient content-creation and administrative experience), and is willing to change her viewpoint and admit mistakes. – Epicgenius (talk) 17:56, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
Support As Ritchie333 noted, the source cheatsheet Rusalkii has shows excellent working knowledge about differentiating notability from mere ref-bombing. I feel almost silly voting, as this is already a pretty lop-sided polling result, but the African ginger comment cemented my vote. As much for the personality shown as the support of plants. — rsjaffe🗣️21:31, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
Support. An excellent candidate: smart and articulate, knows her way around content expectations, and understands dispute resolution without wasting time acting as a wannabe. While I'm here, a suggestion to her and to future candidates: when you mention past disputes in answering Q3, provide a blue link or a diff, so other editors can look at it. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:45, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
Yes. Useful, alert, responsive, polite - the sort of person we want as an admin. I like to look at a candidate's talkpages, especially the early days, to see what sort of issues come up, and how they are dealt with - I like the professional way Rusalkii dealt with the early comments: User_talk:Rusalkii/Archives/2021/November - helpful, calm, polite, informative, assured. It's a yes from me. SilkTork (talk) 02:33, 18 April 2025 (UTC)
Support. Post nubila Phoebus, in the immediate wake of two RFAs that have not been shining (ahem) moments for this process. Here there is no doubt apparent on the community's part. I do not appear to have interacted with this editor much, so I can't say anything from personal experience. But many other people I trust and respect are here vouching for her. And it will certainly be nice to have yet another Russian-fluent admin in the ranks to share the burden of taking abuse like this. Daniel Case (talk) 04:41, 18 April 2025 (UTC)
Support. She has helped handle a few COI requests for my articles. Hope these new rights will help her perform duties even better esp in COI.- ImcdcContact07:52, 18 April 2025 (UTC)
The answer to my question was almost exactly what I was looking for. It shows a keen understanding of both the letter and spirit of policies and guidelines, and the ability to cooly explain a decision. That's why prospective admins benefit from some involvement with the encyclopaedia. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts?18:00, 18 April 2025 (UTC)
Support I don't think a lack of edits to ANI is necessarily a good attribute for an admin, but as the candidate is not an admin yet, that may change going forward. I'm not seeing any concerning behavior, and there seems to be good communication by the candidate, which is one of the most important attributes for me. – notwally (talk) 18:58, 18 April 2025 (UTC)
Support. Clueful, thoughtful, good communication, well-rounded. As others have previously said "no concerns". Happily support. - Shearonink (talk) 13:04, 19 April 2025 (UTC)
(Moved from neutral.) Just ran across this interaction which occurred about a month ago. I forgot about this until today when I was looking through the RfD backlog. I now know where I now stand on this RfA; the comment chain shows a real good sense of self-reflection and self-correction, which ... is exactly a great quality to have in an admin ... one that is cordial and always learning from their experiences and willing to hear feedback. Steel1943 (talk) 21:36, 19 April 2025 (UTC)
Support Competent, good communication skills, willingness to learn from mistakes; and not least, someone who excels at gnomish tasks... Have the tools, please! Renerpho (talk) 00:17, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
Support. Definitely seems to be a diligent and reliable editor who, as well as being a good writer, does a lot of necessary maintenance work. Great candidate. Spartathenian (talk) 12:30, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
Support - First, it's always a good sign when two editors I highly respect nominate someone. Second, in my work at NPP, until they got the autopatrolled right, it was always a joy to review an article which she had accepted at AfC. In other areas she has also had a very positive contribution to the project. Will make a very good Admin.Onel5969TT me12:36, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
Support. No red flags, I can see, the answers to the questions are good and demonstrate some wisdom. The content work is good and diverse, and the candidate is already doing admin-leaning work without displaying any "give me a gun and a badge" attitude. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 19:37, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
Support - A good fit for administration - trustworthy, even temperament, good communicator, and skillful. Thanks for volunteering. Netherzone (talk) 23:13, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
Support - This is a strong candidate for admin on so many levels: communication, temperament, WP:CLUE, and some content creation. I'm happy to pile on. - tucoxn\talk12:07, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
Support –– Happy to jump on this bandwagon. From everything I'm seeing, Rusalkii looks like an ideal candidate. I hope she enjoys the mop! Generalrelative (talk) 19:53, 22 April 2025 (UTC)
Support Haven't interacted with this user, however she seems to be an upstanding contributor and would be a good fit for administrator. Tylermack999 (talk) 12:10, 23 April 2025 (UTC)
Support Sliding in just under the cut-off; i don't know the candidate, but nothing i have seen since the start of the RfA raises any questions ~ LindsayHello19:15, 23 April 2025 (UTC)
Neutral. I've had to clean up their RfD nomination formattings more than I care to remember. Editor also has a bit of a repetitive habit of not signing their comments. It's enough for me to not support, but too pedantic for me to oppose. Steel1943 (talk) 02:58, 17 April 2025 (UTC) (Moved to support.) Steel1943 (talk) 21:36, 19 April 2025 (UTC)
This isn't a point against the nominee but a response to the nomination statement: it rubs me the wrong way when someone touts "hasn't edited ANI" as a virtue, because it can just as easily mean "lets problems fester instead of addressing them, and avoids standing up for editors who are being bit". Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸20:49, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
I wrote that, and I'll take responsibility for it. You are correct that ANI is a necessary evil: we need a generic place to go for administrator attention. It's also true that the average non-administrator's comment on a topic they are uninvolved in isn't very helpful. There is a very good reason why the community has historically been disapproving of non-admin clerking at ANI, and of too much time at the "drama boards" in a candidate for adminship. Unless I see evidence of a candidate actively avoiding a problem that needed to go to AN/ANI, I will continue to see it as evidence that they are on Wikipedia for the right reasons, and therefore as a strong positive. I could perhaps have been less flippant about it, but after all if there's one thing Wikipedians agree on, it's the unpleasantness of ANI. Vanamonde93 (talk) 21:03, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
I strongly second that - many times what makes a conflict harder to resolve is not those who start it, but when others get involved. In general, I think we should welcome those that demonstrate a capacity to deescalate, rather than rush into the breach. Regards, Goldsztajn (talk) 22:31, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
+1. It gives me pause when I see a candidate who has spent significant time clerking or even commenting heavily at ANI. Not a deal breaker, but definitely not a plus for me. Valereee (talk) 11:01, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
"the average non-administrator's comment on a topic they are uninvolved in isn't very helpful [at ANI]" is rather contrary to the entire purpose of ANI (and RfC, and RM, and XfD, and other centralized processes), which is specifically to gather input from the community beyond the circular back-and-forth of the directly involved parties. While it is true that randos who don't know what they're talking about policy-wise, and who do not bother looking into the context of the dispute, tend to be unhelpful noise, it is not actually the case the input at ANI, etc., from more sensible editors who are not participants in the dispute is somehow a bad thing. We actually depend on it heavily. I won't say further on this here, since it's not germane to the RfA. More on-topic: I definitely agree with "There is a very good reason why the community has historically been disapproving of ... too much time at the 'drama boards' in a candidate for adminship." — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 19:24, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
The above adminship discussion is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the talk page of either this nomination or the nominated user). No further edits should be made to this page.