Phoenix-wiki ( talk • contribs • non-automated contribs • wikichecker • count • total • logs • page moves • block log • email)
|
Hello,
Just thought I'd tell you the stuff I've already looked at. I've followed most of the links in the
Guidelines, help, and resources section of the community portal and I've read everything on my
useful links page. I visit the village pump regularly. Thats about it. Can't wait to get started on the coaching--
Pheonix15 14:42, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
Would it be okay for me to adopt a user. User:Earthshift is seeking adoption.
I'd also like your opinion on WP:INDENT. Is it ready to be proposed as a guideline?. There was already a small discussion (4 threadds) about it-- Pheonix15 10:23, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
I've adopted User:ArcTech!-- Phoenix 15 20:36, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Someone posted a note about you on my talk page concerning some incedents you were involved in.
Admins have to be calm and cordial. Wikipedia would fall apart if they were not.
It's easy to jump to conclusions and not assume good faith, but it is extremely important to avoid this. Not only does it hurt the project directly, it also denies Wikipedia the benefit of a valuable resource: you as an admin. Every time you get into a spat of any kind with anyone, or ruffle anyone's feathers, you rack up a potential opposer who may vote against you at RfA. They fulfill a very important function on Wikipedia: they make sure the community does not forget the problems you have caused. They can make incedents very difficult to live down.
I've racked up over 26,000 edits. Far more than one usually needs to become an admin. But because of various incedents I caused, I've been unable to pass RfA. I'm about 1.5 years late on becoming an admin. How many more years will it take? That's up to the community to decide, and upon whether or not I rack up more incedents in the meantime.
It took me a long while not to get (as) emotional over issues concerning articles I'm interested in. But I still do, from time to time. A few days ago it seemed pretty obvious to me that someone had locked a move. Nothing upsets me more. But by assuming he did it on purpose, I made him mad at me. Really mad. So mad he told me never to talk to him again. Even if he did do it on purpose, I fucked up. Diplomacy is the key to making Wikipedia run more smoothly.
The key is to remain unemotional. Look at things calmly and be polite at all times. You have plenty of time -- it's all in print! See WP:FAITH and WP:COOL.
Well, enough ranting. I need to go and apologize to the person I just mentioned. Thank you for making me think about this. The Transhumanist 01:20, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
Couldn't think of a better title, anyway, I now use irc. I've got to know most of the other irc users well. I adopted User:ArcTech and proposed WP:INDENT as a guideline. Hopefully it'll get accepted. I've actually gotten to know a lot of users off irc pretty well also, even the ones I've had disagreements with in the past. I did a load of WP:MEDCAB work. I succesfully closed one case and I'm going well with two others-- Phoenix 15 20:17, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
It's been a while since my last comment. I've kinda adopted Benito Mussolini as my main article. It's a highly controversial article but we studied him in history class recently and I know a lot about him.
The RFA noming business didn't go too well; most of the users I was going to nom retired, got bad editor reviews or couldn't be nominated for some other reason. I was actually wondering whether you wanted nominating.
I found Wikipedia:WikiProject History in a very bad state and revived it. I'm the (self appointed and de-facto!) coordinator, which means I organise the project pages, rather than articles within our scope. Added to the fact that I edit WikiProject Biography's newsletter along with Phycless means I have a lot of work to do. WikiProject History only has 8 members so it would be great if you joined. It's huge scope means that it should really be one of the largest projects but unfortunately it's not.
I almost forgot to mention that I'm back editing daily now. The weekday business has been sorted out. I got mobile broadband and cancelled my old dial-up connection that caused me a lot of trouble. I'll email you-- Phoenix 15 ( Talk) 19:15, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm happy to see you've taken the initiative to get History going again.
Your biggest challenge will be to recruit active members.
One way to "get the word out" about a Wikiproject, is through its "part of" template. That's the template which is placed on the talk page of articles in that subject area. See Template:WikiProject History.
Note that Template:WikiProject History is lackluster and borrrrrring. You could redesign it to catch the eye, and rewrite it to draw interest. Note that it is an ideal place to put a key announcement for maximum exposure.
Go to the template, and click on "What links here" on Wikipedia's toolbox menu. Count the articles that it is on.
There's a lot more history articles on Wikipedia than that. Each of them could have the template transcluded on their talk page. Do you have WP:AWB? It's ideal for placing templates.
But how to find history articles?
One way is to build an article index. The topic lists serve this purpose. List of history topics is history's index, but it is currently redirected. You should remove the redirect and get the page started.
You could collect links from around Wikipedia, and I recommend that...
...but a complementary and far more comprehensive approach to building a topic list is to collect history terms on the web. There are entire pages of them (glossaries, dictionaries, etc). Gather them, combine them, and strip out everything else but the terms themselves. During this process (look for opportunities to use search/replace to) add article link delimiters to each term. Once they are linkified, create a page on Wikipedia and copy and paste your list of links onto it. You may be absolutely shocked by how many of those links turn out blue! Even more shocking is how fast an almost completely red link list turns blue. It's as if people use the redlinks as a task list for article creation.
The above method is how List of psychology topics was created. When it was started, it was almost entirely red. Now look at it! :)
A closer look at that list will reveal that some of the links are simply misnamed, such as the plural terms. As the list turns mostly blue, it becomes more and more feasible to check each redlink for correction (see if each topic referred to has an article with a slightly different name, and then correct the link to point to it).
After you are done building your term list from the web, you could gather links from around wikipedia that would unlikely be found in glossaries on the web, like Wikipedia's "timeline" and "history of" articles. Google is good for finding those (use it's domain specific advanced search feature). You'll most likely find that your list is far more comprehensive than Wikipedia's categories, but a comparison may turn up some terms on there that aren't in your list. Of course, add them in. ;-)
And now for the punchline...
Copy and paste the page to a wordprocessor, and using search/replace, change "[[" to "[[Talk:]]" and then plug your huge list into AWB, and use AWB to semi-automatically add the history project's template to each article's talk page. That will boost exposure of your project from about 350 articles to thousands.
I hope the above tips help.
Good luck.
The Transhumanist 06:06, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
P.S.: Be sure to run the list through a sort program. The Transhumanist 06:10, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
The template has been fixed by Kirill Lokshin (You know you're doing well when you get arbitrators to do stuff for you!). As for me being the, ahem, "Head Honcho", My work with Kirill at WikiProject Military history has taught me coordinatorship is even less a deal than adminship. It's onee of the less-enviable jobs around. It doesn't mean I have any power but means that I organise the project, rather than work on articles.
The current format of WikiProject History is a compromise between many different ideas thought up by the coordinators of WikiProject Military history, people from irc and other contacts of mine. I'm going to ask for a wikipedia ad, like I did with Wikipedia:WikiProject Introductions. won't do it yet though because I'd like to finish everything before I start recruiting.
You might want to ask User:Kirill Lokshin to make a banner for WikiProject Geography, he's brilliant with those intricate parser functions-- Phoenix 15 ( Talk) 17:28, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
Hey again!
I've set up accounts under my new name on all of our sister projects:
Meta · Wikipedia · Commons · Wikibooks · Wiktionary · Wikisource · Wikiquote · Wikiversity · Wikinews · Wikispecies
I've started working on List of history topics and hope to get it to featured status. It'll take a while because the list should be huge. I've also joined your wikiproject, List of basic projects.
Speaking of projects, I've expanded WikiProject History onto Wikibooks. I think we're one of the first ever cross-project WikiProjects.
I forgot to tell you before that I'm on the mailing list. I've been on it for about a month now and it's great for news and events happening on wikipedia-- Phoenix-wiki ( talk · contribs) 12:39, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
Who is coaching who here!? :-) I've followed your example, and have secured my account name on the other Wikis, just like you have above.
Nice job so far on the List of history topics. I've changed it's link on Lists of topics to point to it now. It's nice to see history represented on there with it's own list (it used to lead to List of basic history topics.
On the building of major lists, keep in mind that sorting programs are your best friends. There's one that comes with Window's
command shell, called "Sort". Click on command prompt from Window's accessories menu, and then type help sort
for the syntax guide on the command. Unfortunately, you'll have to place headings and entries with piped links by hand, so to avoid doing that more than once, it's best to build the list to as large as you can first, then sort it, and then edit the order of entries for final placement.
Since your list will be too large to be a single page, be sure to study how the List of mathematics articles has been expanded/constructed as multiple pages. Mathematicians were separated out from the rest of the topics, because there were so many of them. So you'll probably want to save historians to a seperate text file during your link hunt (see below).
So your first step is a link hunt, where you cut and paste key terms from every place you can possibly imagine to a text file (word-processed document) (in another window). Glossaries on the web are a good source for entries to a comprehensive topic list, though you'll have to strip out all extraneous text and add link delimiters ( [[ ]] ) to the remaining entries to linkify them. But also keep in mind that you should grab links from everywhere on Wikipedia as well. WP:AWB is extremely useful for lifting links off of pages. It can build link lists from almost every type of page. You'll want to use it on List of basic history topics, and every page on history in the category system that you can find. Cut and paste them from AWB into your text file. Don't worry about duplicates in your link list -- you can strip those out after you have sorted the list. My guess is that there are north of 150,000 history topics on Wikipedia.
For now it would be best to keep the name List of history topics, and not use List of history articles, because you will have plenty of redlinks. Redlinked "topics" are fine, because they reveal Wikipedia's coverage of the overall subject and because they represent tasks (for the creation of those pages), but redlinked "articles" are just dead links. Don't you love semantics?
Kudos on the cross-wiki project. Be careful that other projects don't lose their own identity by becoming Wikipedia-ized. The tendency is for Wikipedians to assert the policies of Wikipedia on other wikis, even when they don't fit the objectives of those wikis. For example, while allowing original research might be detrimental to Wikipedia, disallowing it from Wikibooks would be a major mistake, as the best how to books are written from personal experience by master craftsmen who learned their trade hands-on. Each wiki has its own mission, and their policies should reflect that.
Nice tools list. There's 3 on there I haven't used yet. I'll be sure to check those out when I find the time.
Did you create that banner? I'm really interested in how that was done.
The Transhumanist 18:00, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
I've sorta adopted Wikipedia:WikiProject Technology now-- Phoenix-wiki ( talk · contribs) 23:23, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
Hi everyone, I'm thinking of nominating Phoenix for the mop. Is there anything he needs to touch up on before I do? The Transhumanist 03:27, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
(outdent)I would wait awhile but don't be deceived, people will not forget. What you will have to do is overcome any possible negatives with plenty of positives. We all have some things out there that are less than wonderful, but you just have to be able to say that the bad was in the past and look at all the things that I have done since. Above, Qst was pretty firm with you but your response about his adminship was unnecessary and argues against your qualifications. Very thick skin is essential. I'm not sure if there is some history between you guys but I would suspect he was invited here as was I. It might be in your interest to tighten up a bit and let the comments roll off. Just my thoughts. - JodyB talk 22:54, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
(copied from my (TT's) talk page):
Hmmm... not sure. There's been an awful lot of what looks like botwork on his account. If it's not a bot, it's still artificially inflating the editcounts, making this candidate very inexperienced from an editcountitis perspective.
My suggestion is that you invite him/her to contribute to a bunch of XfD debates, ensuring they're the first respondent and continuing to contribute to some of the more difficult debates, as well as some PRs and FACs. That'll help demonstrate understanding of policy and what Wikipedia is really all about, regardless of any editcount.
Theoretically, (yes, bear with me) a candidate with 0 mainspace edits could pass RfA if they could only persuade those not fixated on counts that they understand the issues. It seems this person's just about ready, but you want them to show it.
Incidentally, I see they're thinking of getting an article to FA. That'd do nicely. (with the XfDs) -- Dweller ( talk) 12:41, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
First, I'd like to thank Qst for coming forward. That type of feedback is very helpful. Thank you Qst.
Phoenix, you should consider apologizing to each person you've been in a conflict with, especially recent conflicts. You should also seek further feedback, and advice, from Qst throughout your preparation for adminship. If you can convince him by your actions over the next few months that you are ready, then you probably are. I recommend you invite him to be one of your co-coaches.
Qst, I hope you accept Phoenix's invitation.
Phoenix, I'm not quite sure what to make of your mass creations of one-line village stubs. I think there are better uses of your time. I daydreamed what it would take to create such a stub for every village in the world, and began to wonder if that would really be worth it. The only piece of information that each one presents is the general location of the place. It would be a lot faster to just include village names/links on a list for the country they are in (under regional headings) - this would also reveal where they are, without having to repeat it for each. A one-line stub defeats the usefulness of bluelinks and redlinks: users are expecting to find an article when they click on a bluelink, but such a stub is closer to having no article at all, and a redlink may have been better. Just my impression. With lists, you get the benefit of presenting the location while retaining the redlinks for those for which we have no further information.
Good work on the History WikiProject.
I believe if you divide your time roughly equally between article development (content contribution and copy-editing) and administrative work (XfD participation, closing deletion discussions, reverting vandalism and warning vandals (along with WP:AIV reports), reporting bad usernames at WP:UAA, helping at request pages, and participating in dispute resolution) you'll be ready for adminship fairly soon (maybe 3,000 more edits, and 3 to 6 months). And one thing is for sure, such a variety of activities won't be boring. :-) The Transhumanist 03:16, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the coaching TT, I've learned a lot. I'll have to work on controlling my temper, but apart from that I think I've made a lot of progress. I'd like to get involved in the coaching of another student here at the virtual classroom. Maybe I could take our next applicant? I know you're really busy with 6 other students and all. That would really complete my coaching here.-- Phoenix - wiki 01:45, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
Phoenix-wiki,
April/May sounds about right. My guess is that you should at least double your contributions (edits) before your next RfA (maybe even tripple or quadruple your article edits). Many participants at RfA would consider your current main namespace contributions too low.
You should also post yourself at WP:ER.
Though I hate to distract you from your article editing, you should take a look at my coaching page. Anthony posted his advice for me on prepping for adminship. It looks like his wise advice applies to you as well.
Teaching is one of the best methods of learning. I highly recommend that you coach. Note that the coaching here isn't exclusive, that is, it's all co-coaching (though most of the VC coaches have been rather inactive lately). Feel free to participate in the coaching of any or all of the students. The two students I recommend you help with are Juliancolton, and me. I've failed 3 RfAs so far, and if you want a tough case, I think I qualify. The main objections at my last RfA were that I'm "too bureaucratic/formal" and that I haven't addressed the concerns of the previous RfAs. How do you think I should go about addressing them? I look forward to your comments on my coaching page.
Also, feel free to bring in new students of your own. Users request coaches at Wikipedia:Admin coaching/Requests for Coaching and sometimes at User:The Transhumanist/Virtual classroom#Requests for coaching - by coincidence, there's one there now! Remember, you will be accepting coaching assignments on behalf of all of us (we work together as a team). See the suggested instructions at Wikipedia:Admin coaching/Coaching methods.
The Transhumanist 21:42, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
...good luck. :) I'll be sure to jump in too, so don't worry. And when the time comes, be sure to contact all the VC coaches for an RfA consultation to decide whether or not he's ready to be nominated. The Transhumanist 05:03, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
I noticed you signed up to write 5 tutorials for the Signpost Tutorial project.
Wow.
What inspired you?
Once you're done with those, you'll be way overdue for RfA.
Good luck.
The Transhumanist 11:26, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm pushing a collaboration to complete the list of basic space exploration topics.
Should be fun. Drop on by. ;)
Also, see my post to User talk:Quiddity#Basic topic lists if you want to delve in deeper.
The Transhumanist 09:10, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
I resign.
I've moved this page to your userspace for safekeeping.
The Transhumanist 09:10, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
Phoenix-wiki ( talk • contribs • non-automated contribs • wikichecker • count • total • logs • page moves • block log • email)
|
Hello,
Just thought I'd tell you the stuff I've already looked at. I've followed most of the links in the
Guidelines, help, and resources section of the community portal and I've read everything on my
useful links page. I visit the village pump regularly. Thats about it. Can't wait to get started on the coaching--
Pheonix15 14:42, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
Would it be okay for me to adopt a user. User:Earthshift is seeking adoption.
I'd also like your opinion on WP:INDENT. Is it ready to be proposed as a guideline?. There was already a small discussion (4 threadds) about it-- Pheonix15 10:23, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
I've adopted User:ArcTech!-- Phoenix 15 20:36, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Someone posted a note about you on my talk page concerning some incedents you were involved in.
Admins have to be calm and cordial. Wikipedia would fall apart if they were not.
It's easy to jump to conclusions and not assume good faith, but it is extremely important to avoid this. Not only does it hurt the project directly, it also denies Wikipedia the benefit of a valuable resource: you as an admin. Every time you get into a spat of any kind with anyone, or ruffle anyone's feathers, you rack up a potential opposer who may vote against you at RfA. They fulfill a very important function on Wikipedia: they make sure the community does not forget the problems you have caused. They can make incedents very difficult to live down.
I've racked up over 26,000 edits. Far more than one usually needs to become an admin. But because of various incedents I caused, I've been unable to pass RfA. I'm about 1.5 years late on becoming an admin. How many more years will it take? That's up to the community to decide, and upon whether or not I rack up more incedents in the meantime.
It took me a long while not to get (as) emotional over issues concerning articles I'm interested in. But I still do, from time to time. A few days ago it seemed pretty obvious to me that someone had locked a move. Nothing upsets me more. But by assuming he did it on purpose, I made him mad at me. Really mad. So mad he told me never to talk to him again. Even if he did do it on purpose, I fucked up. Diplomacy is the key to making Wikipedia run more smoothly.
The key is to remain unemotional. Look at things calmly and be polite at all times. You have plenty of time -- it's all in print! See WP:FAITH and WP:COOL.
Well, enough ranting. I need to go and apologize to the person I just mentioned. Thank you for making me think about this. The Transhumanist 01:20, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
Couldn't think of a better title, anyway, I now use irc. I've got to know most of the other irc users well. I adopted User:ArcTech and proposed WP:INDENT as a guideline. Hopefully it'll get accepted. I've actually gotten to know a lot of users off irc pretty well also, even the ones I've had disagreements with in the past. I did a load of WP:MEDCAB work. I succesfully closed one case and I'm going well with two others-- Phoenix 15 20:17, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
It's been a while since my last comment. I've kinda adopted Benito Mussolini as my main article. It's a highly controversial article but we studied him in history class recently and I know a lot about him.
The RFA noming business didn't go too well; most of the users I was going to nom retired, got bad editor reviews or couldn't be nominated for some other reason. I was actually wondering whether you wanted nominating.
I found Wikipedia:WikiProject History in a very bad state and revived it. I'm the (self appointed and de-facto!) coordinator, which means I organise the project pages, rather than articles within our scope. Added to the fact that I edit WikiProject Biography's newsletter along with Phycless means I have a lot of work to do. WikiProject History only has 8 members so it would be great if you joined. It's huge scope means that it should really be one of the largest projects but unfortunately it's not.
I almost forgot to mention that I'm back editing daily now. The weekday business has been sorted out. I got mobile broadband and cancelled my old dial-up connection that caused me a lot of trouble. I'll email you-- Phoenix 15 ( Talk) 19:15, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm happy to see you've taken the initiative to get History going again.
Your biggest challenge will be to recruit active members.
One way to "get the word out" about a Wikiproject, is through its "part of" template. That's the template which is placed on the talk page of articles in that subject area. See Template:WikiProject History.
Note that Template:WikiProject History is lackluster and borrrrrring. You could redesign it to catch the eye, and rewrite it to draw interest. Note that it is an ideal place to put a key announcement for maximum exposure.
Go to the template, and click on "What links here" on Wikipedia's toolbox menu. Count the articles that it is on.
There's a lot more history articles on Wikipedia than that. Each of them could have the template transcluded on their talk page. Do you have WP:AWB? It's ideal for placing templates.
But how to find history articles?
One way is to build an article index. The topic lists serve this purpose. List of history topics is history's index, but it is currently redirected. You should remove the redirect and get the page started.
You could collect links from around Wikipedia, and I recommend that...
...but a complementary and far more comprehensive approach to building a topic list is to collect history terms on the web. There are entire pages of them (glossaries, dictionaries, etc). Gather them, combine them, and strip out everything else but the terms themselves. During this process (look for opportunities to use search/replace to) add article link delimiters to each term. Once they are linkified, create a page on Wikipedia and copy and paste your list of links onto it. You may be absolutely shocked by how many of those links turn out blue! Even more shocking is how fast an almost completely red link list turns blue. It's as if people use the redlinks as a task list for article creation.
The above method is how List of psychology topics was created. When it was started, it was almost entirely red. Now look at it! :)
A closer look at that list will reveal that some of the links are simply misnamed, such as the plural terms. As the list turns mostly blue, it becomes more and more feasible to check each redlink for correction (see if each topic referred to has an article with a slightly different name, and then correct the link to point to it).
After you are done building your term list from the web, you could gather links from around wikipedia that would unlikely be found in glossaries on the web, like Wikipedia's "timeline" and "history of" articles. Google is good for finding those (use it's domain specific advanced search feature). You'll most likely find that your list is far more comprehensive than Wikipedia's categories, but a comparison may turn up some terms on there that aren't in your list. Of course, add them in. ;-)
And now for the punchline...
Copy and paste the page to a wordprocessor, and using search/replace, change "[[" to "[[Talk:]]" and then plug your huge list into AWB, and use AWB to semi-automatically add the history project's template to each article's talk page. That will boost exposure of your project from about 350 articles to thousands.
I hope the above tips help.
Good luck.
The Transhumanist 06:06, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
P.S.: Be sure to run the list through a sort program. The Transhumanist 06:10, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
The template has been fixed by Kirill Lokshin (You know you're doing well when you get arbitrators to do stuff for you!). As for me being the, ahem, "Head Honcho", My work with Kirill at WikiProject Military history has taught me coordinatorship is even less a deal than adminship. It's onee of the less-enviable jobs around. It doesn't mean I have any power but means that I organise the project, rather than work on articles.
The current format of WikiProject History is a compromise between many different ideas thought up by the coordinators of WikiProject Military history, people from irc and other contacts of mine. I'm going to ask for a wikipedia ad, like I did with Wikipedia:WikiProject Introductions. won't do it yet though because I'd like to finish everything before I start recruiting.
You might want to ask User:Kirill Lokshin to make a banner for WikiProject Geography, he's brilliant with those intricate parser functions-- Phoenix 15 ( Talk) 17:28, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
Hey again!
I've set up accounts under my new name on all of our sister projects:
Meta · Wikipedia · Commons · Wikibooks · Wiktionary · Wikisource · Wikiquote · Wikiversity · Wikinews · Wikispecies
I've started working on List of history topics and hope to get it to featured status. It'll take a while because the list should be huge. I've also joined your wikiproject, List of basic projects.
Speaking of projects, I've expanded WikiProject History onto Wikibooks. I think we're one of the first ever cross-project WikiProjects.
I forgot to tell you before that I'm on the mailing list. I've been on it for about a month now and it's great for news and events happening on wikipedia-- Phoenix-wiki ( talk · contribs) 12:39, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
Who is coaching who here!? :-) I've followed your example, and have secured my account name on the other Wikis, just like you have above.
Nice job so far on the List of history topics. I've changed it's link on Lists of topics to point to it now. It's nice to see history represented on there with it's own list (it used to lead to List of basic history topics.
On the building of major lists, keep in mind that sorting programs are your best friends. There's one that comes with Window's
command shell, called "Sort". Click on command prompt from Window's accessories menu, and then type help sort
for the syntax guide on the command. Unfortunately, you'll have to place headings and entries with piped links by hand, so to avoid doing that more than once, it's best to build the list to as large as you can first, then sort it, and then edit the order of entries for final placement.
Since your list will be too large to be a single page, be sure to study how the List of mathematics articles has been expanded/constructed as multiple pages. Mathematicians were separated out from the rest of the topics, because there were so many of them. So you'll probably want to save historians to a seperate text file during your link hunt (see below).
So your first step is a link hunt, where you cut and paste key terms from every place you can possibly imagine to a text file (word-processed document) (in another window). Glossaries on the web are a good source for entries to a comprehensive topic list, though you'll have to strip out all extraneous text and add link delimiters ( [[ ]] ) to the remaining entries to linkify them. But also keep in mind that you should grab links from everywhere on Wikipedia as well. WP:AWB is extremely useful for lifting links off of pages. It can build link lists from almost every type of page. You'll want to use it on List of basic history topics, and every page on history in the category system that you can find. Cut and paste them from AWB into your text file. Don't worry about duplicates in your link list -- you can strip those out after you have sorted the list. My guess is that there are north of 150,000 history topics on Wikipedia.
For now it would be best to keep the name List of history topics, and not use List of history articles, because you will have plenty of redlinks. Redlinked "topics" are fine, because they reveal Wikipedia's coverage of the overall subject and because they represent tasks (for the creation of those pages), but redlinked "articles" are just dead links. Don't you love semantics?
Kudos on the cross-wiki project. Be careful that other projects don't lose their own identity by becoming Wikipedia-ized. The tendency is for Wikipedians to assert the policies of Wikipedia on other wikis, even when they don't fit the objectives of those wikis. For example, while allowing original research might be detrimental to Wikipedia, disallowing it from Wikibooks would be a major mistake, as the best how to books are written from personal experience by master craftsmen who learned their trade hands-on. Each wiki has its own mission, and their policies should reflect that.
Nice tools list. There's 3 on there I haven't used yet. I'll be sure to check those out when I find the time.
Did you create that banner? I'm really interested in how that was done.
The Transhumanist 18:00, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
I've sorta adopted Wikipedia:WikiProject Technology now-- Phoenix-wiki ( talk · contribs) 23:23, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
Hi everyone, I'm thinking of nominating Phoenix for the mop. Is there anything he needs to touch up on before I do? The Transhumanist 03:27, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
(outdent)I would wait awhile but don't be deceived, people will not forget. What you will have to do is overcome any possible negatives with plenty of positives. We all have some things out there that are less than wonderful, but you just have to be able to say that the bad was in the past and look at all the things that I have done since. Above, Qst was pretty firm with you but your response about his adminship was unnecessary and argues against your qualifications. Very thick skin is essential. I'm not sure if there is some history between you guys but I would suspect he was invited here as was I. It might be in your interest to tighten up a bit and let the comments roll off. Just my thoughts. - JodyB talk 22:54, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
(copied from my (TT's) talk page):
Hmmm... not sure. There's been an awful lot of what looks like botwork on his account. If it's not a bot, it's still artificially inflating the editcounts, making this candidate very inexperienced from an editcountitis perspective.
My suggestion is that you invite him/her to contribute to a bunch of XfD debates, ensuring they're the first respondent and continuing to contribute to some of the more difficult debates, as well as some PRs and FACs. That'll help demonstrate understanding of policy and what Wikipedia is really all about, regardless of any editcount.
Theoretically, (yes, bear with me) a candidate with 0 mainspace edits could pass RfA if they could only persuade those not fixated on counts that they understand the issues. It seems this person's just about ready, but you want them to show it.
Incidentally, I see they're thinking of getting an article to FA. That'd do nicely. (with the XfDs) -- Dweller ( talk) 12:41, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
First, I'd like to thank Qst for coming forward. That type of feedback is very helpful. Thank you Qst.
Phoenix, you should consider apologizing to each person you've been in a conflict with, especially recent conflicts. You should also seek further feedback, and advice, from Qst throughout your preparation for adminship. If you can convince him by your actions over the next few months that you are ready, then you probably are. I recommend you invite him to be one of your co-coaches.
Qst, I hope you accept Phoenix's invitation.
Phoenix, I'm not quite sure what to make of your mass creations of one-line village stubs. I think there are better uses of your time. I daydreamed what it would take to create such a stub for every village in the world, and began to wonder if that would really be worth it. The only piece of information that each one presents is the general location of the place. It would be a lot faster to just include village names/links on a list for the country they are in (under regional headings) - this would also reveal where they are, without having to repeat it for each. A one-line stub defeats the usefulness of bluelinks and redlinks: users are expecting to find an article when they click on a bluelink, but such a stub is closer to having no article at all, and a redlink may have been better. Just my impression. With lists, you get the benefit of presenting the location while retaining the redlinks for those for which we have no further information.
Good work on the History WikiProject.
I believe if you divide your time roughly equally between article development (content contribution and copy-editing) and administrative work (XfD participation, closing deletion discussions, reverting vandalism and warning vandals (along with WP:AIV reports), reporting bad usernames at WP:UAA, helping at request pages, and participating in dispute resolution) you'll be ready for adminship fairly soon (maybe 3,000 more edits, and 3 to 6 months). And one thing is for sure, such a variety of activities won't be boring. :-) The Transhumanist 03:16, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the coaching TT, I've learned a lot. I'll have to work on controlling my temper, but apart from that I think I've made a lot of progress. I'd like to get involved in the coaching of another student here at the virtual classroom. Maybe I could take our next applicant? I know you're really busy with 6 other students and all. That would really complete my coaching here.-- Phoenix - wiki 01:45, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
Phoenix-wiki,
April/May sounds about right. My guess is that you should at least double your contributions (edits) before your next RfA (maybe even tripple or quadruple your article edits). Many participants at RfA would consider your current main namespace contributions too low.
You should also post yourself at WP:ER.
Though I hate to distract you from your article editing, you should take a look at my coaching page. Anthony posted his advice for me on prepping for adminship. It looks like his wise advice applies to you as well.
Teaching is one of the best methods of learning. I highly recommend that you coach. Note that the coaching here isn't exclusive, that is, it's all co-coaching (though most of the VC coaches have been rather inactive lately). Feel free to participate in the coaching of any or all of the students. The two students I recommend you help with are Juliancolton, and me. I've failed 3 RfAs so far, and if you want a tough case, I think I qualify. The main objections at my last RfA were that I'm "too bureaucratic/formal" and that I haven't addressed the concerns of the previous RfAs. How do you think I should go about addressing them? I look forward to your comments on my coaching page.
Also, feel free to bring in new students of your own. Users request coaches at Wikipedia:Admin coaching/Requests for Coaching and sometimes at User:The Transhumanist/Virtual classroom#Requests for coaching - by coincidence, there's one there now! Remember, you will be accepting coaching assignments on behalf of all of us (we work together as a team). See the suggested instructions at Wikipedia:Admin coaching/Coaching methods.
The Transhumanist 21:42, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
...good luck. :) I'll be sure to jump in too, so don't worry. And when the time comes, be sure to contact all the VC coaches for an RfA consultation to decide whether or not he's ready to be nominated. The Transhumanist 05:03, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
I noticed you signed up to write 5 tutorials for the Signpost Tutorial project.
Wow.
What inspired you?
Once you're done with those, you'll be way overdue for RfA.
Good luck.
The Transhumanist 11:26, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm pushing a collaboration to complete the list of basic space exploration topics.
Should be fun. Drop on by. ;)
Also, see my post to User talk:Quiddity#Basic topic lists if you want to delve in deeper.
The Transhumanist 09:10, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
I resign.
I've moved this page to your userspace for safekeeping.
The Transhumanist 09:10, 6 February 2008 (UTC)