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Wikipedia:Administrator elections/July 2025/Candidates/Hilst

< Wikipedia:Administrator elections | July 2025 | Candidates
(Redirected from Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Hilst)
Latest comment: 28 days ago by DreamRimmer
The following discussion is preserved as an archive of an administrator election candidacy that did not succeed. Please do not modify it.

Final (233/191/117) (S/A/O); See official results (non-admin closure) – DreamRimmer ■ 12:25, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

Nomination

Hilst (talk · contribs) – Hello! I'm Helena, better known here as Hilst. I'm a Brazilian editor, and my pronouns are she/her. I have previously edited under the usernames TotallyJimmyFallon and MaterialWorks. I've been a regular editor since 2023.

I've been active in various areas over the years, including but not limited to anti-vandalism, clerking at WP:RM, writing GAs, making scripts, promoting hooks at WP:DYK, etc. I'd consider myself a WP:GNOME, as I'm most comfortable doing repetitive, maintenance-oriented tasks.

I do not intend on working on a single admin area. If elected, I'd work on reducing the administrative backlog where needed, without prejudice.

I have never been blocked and never have illegitimately socked (I have two alternative accounts, User:Hlist, a doppëlganger, and User:HilstBot, a bot). I am aware that my monthly edit count has dwindled recently. I was dealing with some mental health issues, and I intend on picking up the pace as soon as I can. – 🌻 Hilst (talk | contribs) 21:13, 13 July 2025 (UTC)

Please disclose whether you have ever edited Wikipedia for pay: I have never edited Wikipedia for pay.

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 interested in becoming an administrator in order to help clear out frequently backlogged areas such as WP:RPP. I don't intend to stay in one specific area (sorry, I'm just not wired that way), and I would try to help out wherever I can. I believe I'm very proficient at gnoming work, and would be able to contribute well to the encyclopedia in places where I normally wouldn't be able to. Wikipedia needs more administrators, and I'd love to strengthen up our corpus of janitors.
2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?
A: I believe my best contribution to Wikipedia content-wise would be Suicidal Tour, my (as of now) only FA. I'm also proud of my other two good articles, Hilda Hilst and Adelir Antônio de Carli, and the articles I've translated from ptwiki this year, Tim Maia Racional and Narco-Pentecostalism. As for non-content work, I've written two scripts, promoted hundreds of hooks to DYK, closed I-don't-know how many move requests, patrolled over a hundred articles, merged Template:Old moves and Template:Old move, as well as Template:Automatic archive navigator and Template:Archive.
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: I have not been in any major conflicts over editing in the past. Wikipedia rarely gives me stress, but whenever it does happen, be it from a differing opinion or a heated thread, I try to remember the human on the other side of the conversation and understand their point of view.

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. Make sure to use level 4 section headers, not bold face. (4 equal signs)

Optional question from Ganesha811

4. Are there any areas of adminship you do not plan to participate in, due to unfamiliarity or lack of technical knowledge? If you later decided you wanted to help in these areas, what would be your plan to become an effective admin in those areas?
A: I don't plan on participating in unblock requests or block-related areas (such as SPI), at least not at first. As a brand new admin, I wouldn't be comfortable immediately swinging the hammer at other editors. If I do decide to help out in those areas in the future, I'd start by slowly working on non-controversial cases, asking more established regulars for advice whenever needed, until I can be considered an effective admin by the community and my own standards.

Optional question from Rjjiii

5. What are some kinds of content that would need to be pulled from the main page? Many editors create the material at TFA, ITN, DYK, OTD, TFL, and TFP that eventually appears on Wikipedia's main page. Only admins can alter or remove it. Non-admin editors who are "promoting hooks at WP:DYK" create content that eventually appears on the main page. From that experience, could you give any examples of material that was unsuitable?
A: Out of the processes you named, I only have experience at DYK, so I cannot comment on the pulling criteria for the others. For DYK, the content that gets pulled usually has problems that can't be easily fixed, such as being wholly or predominantly nonfactual, not being verifiable by citations in the article, and not following external content policies in general, such as WP:NPOV, WP:CLOP, WP:BLP, etc. I'm not active at WP:ERRORS, so I can't recall any examples off the top of my head, sorry.

Optional questions from BusterD

6. Thank you for putting yourself forward as an administrator candidate. In what situations, if any, do you believe an administrator should invoke ignore all rules when justifying the use of advanced permissions?
A: I believe admins should rarely, if ever, invoke IAR. Wikipedia's policies are very solid, and an administrator should be expected to follow them as closely as possible. However, we're also not bureaucrats, and some common sense is useful in moderation to prevent unnecessary waste of editor time, say, when a discussion has a consensus for a good change, but is being bogged down by minute details. That's the situation where I think IAR should be invoked: when red tape and strict adherence to the rules would distract us from improving the encyclopedia.
7. Since the last admin election, the community has authorized and established a recall process. How has the addition of the recall petition affected your choices when choosing to run for the mop?
A: It hasn't affected my choices at all. I've been wanting to apply for adminship ever since the first elections, I just needed to find the right time for it. That being said, having a recall process is great for transparency, and I'd gladly run for RRfA if the community ever needs to hold me accountable for my actions.

Optional question from CosXZ

8. How would you address a good faith editor who made a honest mistake?
A: I'd try to quickly fix the mistake and civilly explain the reasoning for the change in the edit summary. If they were a newcomer, I'd drop a message in their talk page to notify them that they committed a mistake, explain why whatever they did could be considered a mistake, and advise them on how not to commit the same mistake in the future.

Optional question from Carrite

9. What is your perspective on Artificial Intelligence (AI) as it relates to Wikipedia?
A: While I don't believe AI will ever be the Wikipedia-killer (be it through slop-ifying all of our articles or stealing our traffic) that was proposed back in 2022/23, when WP:LLM was still in its infancy. I strongly believe that the AI bubble will pop sooner rather than later. That being said, AI usage, at least pertaining to content generation, should still be strongly, strongly discouraged on Wikipedia. It's a waste of editor time and energy having to check edits for biased, deficient, or simply hallucinated slop. With that said, I think models like the ones served by LiftWing, which perform tasks that don't face the average reader and serve only to speed up maintenance or provide useful information, are a good way to incorporate AI into Wikipedia without causing more harm than good.

Optional question from Guerillero

10. You never mention it, but you do you have any interest in working as a DYK admin or at ERRORS? Those areas just intersect with where you have previously worked.
A: As a DYK admin, probably not. I've tried promoting prep sets to queues before as a regular template editor, and I've found the whole verification process and its required checks to be very exhausting. Working at ERRORS, though? Sure, why not!

Optional question from usernamekiran

11. Just out of curiosity, are you related to Hilda Hist? Please feel free to decline to answer if you want to maintain privacy. —usernamekiran (talk) 00:59, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
A: I'm not, actually! I was very interested in her works back in late 2023, and just thought her surname that would make for a better username than the one I had at that time.


Discussion

Please keep discussion constructive and civil. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review her contributions before commenting.

  • WP:AFD notes: n=10, all deletes, eight of which were nominations, and none of which were in the past year. Nominations are brief but clear; all green flags. Example: [1]. This isn't much to go on, but what we do have reflects well on this candidate. -- asilvering (talk) 02:15, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
  • I've generally been impressed with Hilst's work in the world of requested moves (378 edits to WP:RM/TR; ~675 RM closures). The answers to some of the questions (e.g., Q3) are not the greatest, and I'm not seeing an awful lot of experience in the administrative areas she'd be working in, but a track record of diligent work ought to count for something, particularly when there's also some high-quality content creation. A bit of an edge case, but I suspect she'd be a net positive, at least unless there are issues I'm not aware of. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 09:47, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
  • (Sorry for the late comment, but I think that with things like elections, things are better said than left unsaid.) Given the vagueness of the answer to Q1 and the candidate's stated anti-vandalism experience, I'm surprised that she's only made three RfPP reports and two AIV reports in 2024/25. That doesn't really show a recent demonstrated competence in those areas. Sdrqaz (talk) 23:56, 22 July 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.
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