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Wikipedia:Administrator elections/July 2025/Candidates/Hinnk

< Wikipedia:Administrator elections | July 2025 | Candidates
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Latest comment: 28 days ago by DreamRimmer
The following discussion is preserved as an archive of a successful administrator election candidacy. Please do not modify it.

Final (260/181/100) (S/A/O); See official results (non-admin closure) – DreamRimmer ■ 12:24, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

Nomination

Hinnk (talk · contribs) – Hi, I'm hinnk. I got started editing twelve years ago, doing some music articles, and since the mid-2010s I've been working on articles on experimental cinema. I got going as a more regular editor in 2023, after several many years of popping in and out to create/expand articles and submit DYKs. I've been doing a lot of filespace maintenance work, including undeletion requests for public ___domain images, and I'm participating in the administrator election because I think having the tools would help with that. hinnk (talk) 19:52, 14 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: Most of my contributions on Wikipedia have been about cinema, and I do a bunch of filespace work around finding authorship information for non-U.S. images and updating copyright statuses for files (usually things like film posters) which have entered the public ___domain or will in the near future. This often means identifying images that were F5 deletions after being replaced with low-resolution copies, and because of that I've ended up being one of the most active editors at Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion. This area doesn't get a lot of attention outside of Public Domain Day, so it'd be great to increase our capacity to process requests. Related areas where I'd like to help would the backlog at Category:Copy to Wikimedia Commons with hidden file revisions, which has tended to go unreviewed for long periods of time, and restoration of F8 deletions that later get rejected from Commons as {{PD-USonly}}, which happens less frequently but can get complicated if not handled swiftly.
2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?
A: So, my "best" contribution is probably Flaming Creatures, which I first expanded back in 2016 as a DYK entry. I ended up going back to it last year and shepherding it through the GA process as a way to get feedback, since we have so few quality articles in this topic area to use as examples. It ended up being meaningful for me because as part of the original expansion I ended up adding some information about Barbara Rubin's role in the censorship controversy, and a little bit later I came across another editor's personal essay I really appreciate, which brings up Rubin and that article in the context of gender bias on Wikipedia. The article also makes for an interesting read; it's got an Andy Warhol cameo, police raids, a negative lost by the distributor, and a censorship case.
My favorite contribution though is an expansion I've been working on this year at Wavelength (1967 film), which is one of our Core film articles. Most of my mainspace work has been about avant-garde film, where one of the challenges about putting together an article is that sometimes a work's most noteworthy features fall outside the usual conventions we have for writing about cinema. There was a bit of a eureka moment while fleshing out that article, which hopefully I'll be able to apply to some other articles about similar films. A few fun ones from when I used to be more DYK-focused are Fireworks (1947 film), The Ascension (Glenn Branca album), Zorns Lemma, House of Jealous Lovers*, and Serene Velocity.
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: There's really only been one conflict I had where I felt stressed, which was a few years ago when I was doing my second/third AfD nominations. It seemed clear-cut to me, since the subjects didn't have any significant coverage in independent sources. But I was pretty surprised when the articles' creator and an uninvolved editor each took me to task for a pattern of bias, not doing a WP:BEFORE check, and even vandalism. Turns out? Both sockpuppets, operated by the subject of the article. Having never dealt with that before, I asked for guidance at the COI noticeboard and ended up creating my first sockpuppet investigation. Other uninvolved editors in the AfDs also clocked the notability issues, and the accounts were later blocked.
Looking back on those AfDs with a bit more experience now, I'm sure I felt a strong need to defend myself, and I'm glad I didn't pop off the way I'm sure I wanted to at the time. And had I instead taken the bait and escalated right away, other editors arriving to the discussion probably would've been faced with a long argument full of personal attacks to read through before evaluating the article. I've had other disagreements since then, as is to be expected in a collaborative project, and I think that particular experience shaped how I approach XfDs, or disputes in general, in that assuming good faith means being able to treat a discussion as a collaborative process where we can locate our areas of disagreement and make it easier for the community to build a consensus on how to approach them.

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 mean, I expect my participation would be pretty focused, even within the areas I do have experience in. If given the tool set, the game plan would be to spend this year doing the same kind of janitorial work I'm already doing, but without filing hundreds of notices at Requests for undeletion; taking that time learning how to clean up any problems that might come up along the way; and then once we have the annual January 1 file backlogs to get through, working through those while learning to coordinate that with the other admins and editors who tend to pop in during that time.
Areas where I would not expect to contribute specifically for lack of technical knowledge would be things like history merges (so complex!), abuse filters (so much code!), or template editing (very risky, lots of sandboxing!), but I think the most salient ones are the lack of expertise with enforcement actions like blocks and page protections. I haven't wandered into high-conflict areas much but I have had to go through these processes before, and I'm pretty familiar with the policies on the different levels of protection or like when an indef may be warranted. Still, these are areas where admins use more discretion and tacit knowledge, where action is more time-sensitive, and where poor judgment can do more damage. I would want to preemptively find another admin with involvement in those areas who's willing to consult, to make sure if I ever ended up needing to use those permissions at some point down the line, I don't end up making misguided decisions for lack of experience or oversight. hinnk (talk) 04:24, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

Optional questions from BusterD

5. 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: IAR is a policy that helps us ensure that the rules serve to benefit the community and not the other way around, but because of the effort required to review and undo admin actions, admins should not be using IAR as a justification unless the community would indisputably have found consensus to support an action and waiting for consensus would have been detrimental to the project in some way. A recent-ish example where I encouraged an IAR was the Luigi Mangione AfD, where the closest criteria used by many editors was CSK#2 (disruptive nomination) and I additionally supported the suggestion to close more along the lines of CSK#4 (block evasion by the nominator). It arguably maybe didn't meet the exact letter of either speedy keep criterion, but the closing admin was still making a textbook early snow close, because it wouldn't have served anyone's interest to spend time conducting a sockpuppet investigation, or evaluating whether the original nomination was frivolous or just misguided, or debating whether the one delete comment from an IP editor prevents a speedy keep from happening. hinnk (talk) 01:47, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
6. 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: I haven't participated in the discussions around creating the process or the recalls that have happened, but the existence of a recall process did indirectly make me more willing to run. Having a formal recall process means candidates aren't designing their own non-binding processes on a per-user basis, and I wonder if some of the behavior that the admin election process was designed to address came out of the increased pressure of not getting it wrong. Plus, if however long from now I do something that damages the community's trust, I imagine it would be much healthier to learn that from the community instead of being in a protracted dispute until it works its way up to the Arbitration Committee. Anyway, I hope the community will continue to review and refine the new process to suit its needs. hinnk (talk) 20:27, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

Optional question from CosXZ

7. How would you address a good faith editor who made a honest mistake?
A: I'm going to assume we're talking about the kind of mistake that needs addressing by talking to the editor and not a small revert with an edit summary or something. If it's an inexperienced editor making the kind of errors that commonly happen while becoming familiar with our policies and guidelines, then a simple level 1 warning to non-judgmentally explain the problem and how to approach it in the future may suffice. A more experienced editor will require more specific feedback that considers how familiar they are with the relevant policies and guidelines or the topic area in question.
As it pertains to the kind of filespace work I do, being able to work through mistakes is a pretty important skill for editors of all experience levels. Contributing productively may require wading through U.S. copyright law, any number of other countries' copyright laws, their international agreements, provenance research specific to individual works, the policies and guidelines of Wikimedia projects, or changes in consensus around how to apply those. It can be a lot, and even editors with way more experience than me continue to pick up things they didn't know, or things they didn't know they didn't know. I've benefited greatly from other editors being informative or patient with me at some point, and I think approaching issues with a shared interest in finding answers and an openness to learn from other editors makes dealing with potentially frustrating situations much easier. hinnk (talk) 02:13, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
You have assumed correctly. Cos (X + Z) 14:03, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

Optional questions from ChildrenWillListen

8. Do you feel that copyright takes too long to expire?
A: The Mickey Mouse Protection Act type of stuff does strike me as kind of wild. Or sometimes it's just socially weird to end up in a discussion where you have to basically say, "Yes, this dates back to the nineteenth century but the person who made it lived a long life so we can't really keep this on Commons." (Once somebody uploaded a screenshot of one such comment I made, as a form of...targeted critique?, which I found funny more than anything.) Mostly though, it's not a question I dwell on. I'm not in a position to change copyright law, but I can help people who reuse Wikimedia-hosted content better understand what rights and restrictions exist around it, and we can definitely put Wikimedia projects in a position to advocate legal change from a place of strength. hinnk (talk) 02:33, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
9. If you stumble across a plot summary that was clearly generated using an LLM, what would you do to it, if anything?
A: Well, the most clear signs I've seen in non-compliant LLM-generated articles are fictitious sources, "referenced" information that doesn't match the given source, or unusual, ill-suited article structures. A plot summary on its own might be a little harder to spot, since it has a simple structure and tends not to include citations. Working backward from the premise, I imagine the signs would be a lack of detail or clear inaccuracies that don't match verifiable information about the plot or cast. If that's the case, then we'd need to deal with the fabricated content by removing it with an edit summary identifying the issue, checking the article history to see if there's something usable there, and notifying whoever added it, in a context-appropriate manner, so that the editor understands the firm expectations around verifying/fixing LLM output and so other editors are equipped to respond to any continued disruption. hinnk (talk) 07:14, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

Optional question from Carrite

10. What is your perspective on Artificial Intelligence (AI) as it relates to Wikipedia?
A: As it currently stands, a lot of disruption is happening when editors attempt to use AI to contribute beyond their own capabilities or as a substitute for using their own skills, and LLM-generated text misrepresents its source material so regularly that editors need to be super on top of it if they're gonna use it. I expect there may be viable uses for AI, perhaps around tools or automated tasks, but I'd like to see the community establish extremely clear boundaries around all content that readers expect to have been created by people.
I'll speak a bit to what we're seeing in filespace, since that's most relevant to my contributions. AI does get used by editors on Wikimedia projects, and it's also showing up now in off-wiki sources. Because images often come from external user-edited sites like Flickr, IMDb, or other databases, we're dependent on editors to exercise good judgment in reviewing these before uploading, but that doesn't always work. It's potentially exacerbated by the relationship between individual projects and Wikimedia Commons, where editors delegate responsibility to another project and let things fall through the cracks. Internally, AI gets used to efficiently upscale, colorize, or otherwise "enhance" images and video. The thing is, historical images in particular perform an indexical function, and adding speculative color choices or inadvertently removing grain or brushwork patterns can interfere with our ability to provide a historical record and may remove the visual cues that readers use to understand the origin and history of an image. Plus, some just look a mess. I've had to request a couple of undeletions where F8 had been used to delete images that had been replaced with inferior AI upscaled copies on Commons, which I think is a good reminder to keep an eye out when using that criterion on images that aren't 100% exact matches. hinnk (talk) 20:33, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

Optional question from Let'srun

11. How would you handle a situation where a user accused you in good faith of being WP:INVOLVED?
A: I'd take a look at the claim, and if there's any plausible reason to think I may have be involved in the dispute, I'd step back and ask at a relevant noticeboard that another admin step in. It's much easier to have one uninvolved admin review a dispute than to expand the dispute and make a bunch of people deal with it at a noticeboard like ANI. And whether I think I can overcome my own bias to adjudicate an issue is less important than whether other editors are likely to think there was an apparent conflict of interest, because failure to properly recuse sends a message to the involved parties and to the broader community that they can't expect their good faith efforts to be treated fairly. hinnk (talk) 23:43, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

Optional question from Femke

12. Not a biggy, but I noticed your user page is quite empty. Would you be willing to expand it, to make it more welcoming to shy new editors to ask you a question?
A: Totally! I tried sandboxing something more personalized a while back but couldn't get the markup right. I'll have to take another crack at it. hinnk (talk) 23:55, 20 July 2025 (UTC)


Discussion

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

  • WP:AFD notes: n=97; frequently makes use of ATDs, such as redirect and merge. A really good AfD record, with a particular interest on films (naturally). Some highlights: an accurate speedy delete !vote (these are rare) [1], a reasonable call for WP:SALT [2], makes and calmly acknowledges mistakes [3], a nose for promo [4], just a very thoughtful and empathetic !vote [5]. This record reflects really well on the candidate. -- asilvering (talk) 22:40, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
  • Definitely well equipped to help out with file-related grunt work (an area that does need more admins pretty badly), but judging from the excellent answers to questions, high-quality AfD work (per Asilvering), and solid content, I think hinnk has the temperament, communication skills, etc. to be a great sysop even outside that area of specialization. Very impressed. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 03:55, 19 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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