Final (65/0/1); Ended Fri, 30 Mar 2007 18:13:42 (UTC)
ais523 ( talk · contribs) - I've been on Wikipedia since 7 June 2006 (over 8 months now), and editing other MediaWiki wikis as far back as 30 April 2006 [1]. I believe I have the technical knowledge to use the tools (I'm an admin on a private wiki, as well as on the non-Wikimedia Esolang, where I made my first wiki edit), as well as the policy knowledge, and I believe I also have a need. With respect to Wikipedia, I have been here for a while and spend much time in technical, policy, and assistance areas. I used to do much new page patrol, although I do less of that nowadays (nowadays I'm more careful to warn users and avoid placing speedy-delete tags on things lightning-fast, though, so I'm a better NP patroller nowadays when I do do the patrol); I also infrequently do recent changes patrol, usually when WikiDefCon indicates a problem that non-admins can deal with and I'm not concentrating on other things, but I've only made 4 reports to AIV in my last 2000 edits as a result, so it's not really a recent occurence. (I have had good experience with warning templates; often users will stop and sometimes even apologise after a few warnings.) Much of my recent contributions (over 14% of the last 2000 edits) have been helping users at the Help Desk; I also help users in other areas of Wikipedia, such as the technical village pump, the new contributor's help page, and {{ helpme}} anywhere, and have written several user scripts to help streamline Wikipedia for me and for other editors (I'm a WikiProject User scripts member). I also participate in discussions about policy (particularly new proposals and on Wikipedia talk:-space pages) and in several Wikipedia processes ( AfD, TfD, MfD, RfD, DRv, other user's RfAs (as well as my own, now), BRFA (although I'm not a BAG member), and CAT:PER, having helped with the development of some processes (for instance, speedy-delete templates; I helped sort out the fallout from the TfD of {{ delete}} by making {{ db-reason}} into a redirect target that worked with 0 parameters, and created {{ db-blankcsd}}, {{ db-emptyportal}}, {{ db-disambig}} and {{ db-authora}} for situations within the speedy-delete criteria that didn't have explicit templates (and I've had occasion to use all of them)). I also do a lot of admin-type work that non-admins are allowed to do already; I have had occasion to comment on the administrative noticeboard and incident noticeboard on several occasions, and I've been known to perform non-admin closes to deletion debates and to sort out malformed debates (I use {{ db-g6}} more often than most users, I suspect.) Although admin tools would be somewhat useful for all of this (I'll elaborate in the answer to Q1), the main reason I'm requesting adminship is for technical work. There have been several situations in which I've made changes to templates, high-risk-protected processes (I wrote the original process for categorising AfDs; although it wasn't perfect to start with, it was quickly improved in a way that shows the power of a wiki to improve things quickly), and even interface messages; in many of these cases, I've had to request admin assistance to make changes I didn't have the permissions for to make changes myself. I've also requested protection of high-risk pages that could cause problems if vandalised (although mostly people are good at noticing these, so this doesn't come up all that often). As for edit count: although edit counts can be misleading (for instance, my User:-space edit count has been inflated), just before filing this RfA I had 5996 non-deleted edits on the ais523 account, as well as 7 edits assisting my bot via its account (and it's gone on to decategorise 1637 AfDs so far); see the Talk page of this RfA for more details about my edit count. One last thing I'd like to point out: my article-space participation is much lower than that of many other users who have been here as long as I have. I agree that creating an encyclopedia is what we're here for, but in response to the question I suspect is likely to come up, I think that support and admin-type activities (what I've been doing) and admin-tool-requiring-activities are there to help maintain an environment in which the encyclopedia can reasonably be expanded; I appreciate the people who can help add knowledge and information (preferably sourced, of course) to Wikipedia, but the subjects in which I'm most proficient either have enough information already that I'd have difficulty expanding them, or are fields in which nearly all research is original and sources are few and far between (and so are inappropriate on Wikipedia; I have many information-adding article-space contributions on Esolang, for instance, which has different policies). -- ais523 17:09, 23 March 2007 ( U T C)
Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia in this capacity. Please take the time to answer a few generic questions to provide guidance for participants:
Please keep criticism constructive and polite.
Discussion
Support
Oppose
Neutral
Final (65/0/1); Ended Fri, 30 Mar 2007 18:13:42 (UTC)
ais523 ( talk · contribs) - I've been on Wikipedia since 7 June 2006 (over 8 months now), and editing other MediaWiki wikis as far back as 30 April 2006 [1]. I believe I have the technical knowledge to use the tools (I'm an admin on a private wiki, as well as on the non-Wikimedia Esolang, where I made my first wiki edit), as well as the policy knowledge, and I believe I also have a need. With respect to Wikipedia, I have been here for a while and spend much time in technical, policy, and assistance areas. I used to do much new page patrol, although I do less of that nowadays (nowadays I'm more careful to warn users and avoid placing speedy-delete tags on things lightning-fast, though, so I'm a better NP patroller nowadays when I do do the patrol); I also infrequently do recent changes patrol, usually when WikiDefCon indicates a problem that non-admins can deal with and I'm not concentrating on other things, but I've only made 4 reports to AIV in my last 2000 edits as a result, so it's not really a recent occurence. (I have had good experience with warning templates; often users will stop and sometimes even apologise after a few warnings.) Much of my recent contributions (over 14% of the last 2000 edits) have been helping users at the Help Desk; I also help users in other areas of Wikipedia, such as the technical village pump, the new contributor's help page, and {{ helpme}} anywhere, and have written several user scripts to help streamline Wikipedia for me and for other editors (I'm a WikiProject User scripts member). I also participate in discussions about policy (particularly new proposals and on Wikipedia talk:-space pages) and in several Wikipedia processes ( AfD, TfD, MfD, RfD, DRv, other user's RfAs (as well as my own, now), BRFA (although I'm not a BAG member), and CAT:PER, having helped with the development of some processes (for instance, speedy-delete templates; I helped sort out the fallout from the TfD of {{ delete}} by making {{ db-reason}} into a redirect target that worked with 0 parameters, and created {{ db-blankcsd}}, {{ db-emptyportal}}, {{ db-disambig}} and {{ db-authora}} for situations within the speedy-delete criteria that didn't have explicit templates (and I've had occasion to use all of them)). I also do a lot of admin-type work that non-admins are allowed to do already; I have had occasion to comment on the administrative noticeboard and incident noticeboard on several occasions, and I've been known to perform non-admin closes to deletion debates and to sort out malformed debates (I use {{ db-g6}} more often than most users, I suspect.) Although admin tools would be somewhat useful for all of this (I'll elaborate in the answer to Q1), the main reason I'm requesting adminship is for technical work. There have been several situations in which I've made changes to templates, high-risk-protected processes (I wrote the original process for categorising AfDs; although it wasn't perfect to start with, it was quickly improved in a way that shows the power of a wiki to improve things quickly), and even interface messages; in many of these cases, I've had to request admin assistance to make changes I didn't have the permissions for to make changes myself. I've also requested protection of high-risk pages that could cause problems if vandalised (although mostly people are good at noticing these, so this doesn't come up all that often). As for edit count: although edit counts can be misleading (for instance, my User:-space edit count has been inflated), just before filing this RfA I had 5996 non-deleted edits on the ais523 account, as well as 7 edits assisting my bot via its account (and it's gone on to decategorise 1637 AfDs so far); see the Talk page of this RfA for more details about my edit count. One last thing I'd like to point out: my article-space participation is much lower than that of many other users who have been here as long as I have. I agree that creating an encyclopedia is what we're here for, but in response to the question I suspect is likely to come up, I think that support and admin-type activities (what I've been doing) and admin-tool-requiring-activities are there to help maintain an environment in which the encyclopedia can reasonably be expanded; I appreciate the people who can help add knowledge and information (preferably sourced, of course) to Wikipedia, but the subjects in which I'm most proficient either have enough information already that I'd have difficulty expanding them, or are fields in which nearly all research is original and sources are few and far between (and so are inappropriate on Wikipedia; I have many information-adding article-space contributions on Esolang, for instance, which has different policies). -- ais523 17:09, 23 March 2007 ( U T C)
Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia in this capacity. Please take the time to answer a few generic questions to provide guidance for participants:
Please keep criticism constructive and polite.
Discussion
Support
Oppose
Neutral