Hi all, I am nominating @otters61 for election. A solid editor (with over 100,000 edits) for over 10 years with a good knowledge of the guidelines, and regular voter, I think this is long overdue.
https://musicbrainz.org/election/298
P.S. I asked him and he’s happy to be put forward for this.
This has the required two seconders, so voting is now open.
+1
and (“Post must be at least 20 characters”). meh. 
It’s probably first time I’ll be voting strongly against someone, but I guess this is the time.
I believe that autoeditors should “lead by example”, and follow best editing practices in their own edits. However, what I see in edits done by otters61, is, well, “not the best” to put it mildly. A few examples:
When looking at Add Artist edits by otters61, I see that he almost never specifies a comment and relevant references. From my point of view, that is unacceptable. “Artists” are one of the core entities of the database, and adding each one should be motivated by something. At the very least (if that’s some minor contributor that only appeared on one album liner notes), it’s worth mentioning that album and that it’s info and spelling from these liner notes. I’m totally ok with adding non-complete information, but adding every non-trivial bit (such as “Disambiguation”, or “Birth date”, or “Birth place”, etc), should be justified with a reference. In fact, this is especially important for persons, as errors there could be treated as a case of defamation. When using “Disambiguation”, at the very least, I expect to see a line or two about why exactly editor has decided that this new entry is different from existing entry with the same name — there definitely should be some rationale, like “Existing person X is from the country Y, while this person X is from the country Z”.
Almost all the same goes for Add Place edits: otters61 almost never lists sources of added information, which is especially important for things like coordinates, addresses, begin / end dates, etc.
Add Cover Art type of edits is frequently commentless as well. I’d really appreciate when people tell me where they’ve got this particular scan (especially when dealing with rare CD scans, when there are only a few CD scans flying around the 'net, and some of them are broken, and this needs to be dealt with —
identifying source of the image helps immersively in such situations).
His Add Release edits are not as terrible as previous example (probably due to the fact that JavaScript aggressively insists on entering at least some comment there), but it quickly catches my eye that he copies a lot of information from Discogs without additional checks. Discogs, being a user-edited resource just as MB, is, unfortunately, known to have considerably lower quality of the data. It’s ok to copy Discogs information to save typestrokes, but at the very least I expect it to be verified. otters61 edit comments show no signs of additional verification being done. Comments like “Information added by Jaikoz 8.4.1 from digitised music files” is even worse, it means that the sole source of information is some MP3 tag contents from some arbitrarily random MP3s. No attempts to check that this album indeed exists.
This is a perfect example of where this path leads to — you might have noticed from the first glance that all CDs on this label have “RRK-something” in their catalog numbers, and, in fact, there is a huge reminder from artysmokes that this is not Marillion’s Racket label, it is German electronic music label. Guess who added Marillion’s British-released albums there, with clearly different style of catalog numbers, different country and ignoring all that annotations?
All that editing practices is not something I’d expect from an auto-editor. I presume that otters61 works in somewhat isolated areas of MB: while his edit counts are exceptionally high, his work is mostly unreviewed, and thus he feels like it’s ok to do like he’s doing so far.
So, my vote is, unfortunately, a strong “no”, and I urge everyone to consider examples that I’ve provided. If otters61 will slow down and would go for quality, not quantity of edits in the nearest months, I’d be glad to vote for him.