Cryptic (
talk·contribs) – Cryptic has been a member of the Wikipedia community for approximately a year and a half (one year as anon, and five months as registered). As a registered user he has accumulated 5600+ edits over a broad distribution of namespaces. He has been very active in vandal fighting with more than 500 reversion edits. He has also been active in copyright issues, transwiki issues,
WP:TFD, and discussions on criteria for speedy deletion (each with more than 100 edits). As he describes himself, he does not stress easily (
[1]), he is polite (
[2],
[3],
[4]), and offers carefully crafted advice to admins on a regular basis (
[5]). Where most of you have probably seen his work has been in
WP:AFD where he has contributed more than 1,000 edits. He is possibly one of the most, if not the most, active contributor in that arena. He is devoted to the AFD process and has even crafted the bot
Crypticbot to locate orphaned AFDs which he has used to great effect. It is my great pleasure to nominate this very deserving candidate. --
Durin13:34, 4 November 2005 (UTC)reply
I was so shocked that Cryptic was not an admin I nearly fell out of my chair. Very strong support. Thanks for doing this, Durin.
encephalon13:47, 4 November 2005 (UTC)reply
Support after viewing "worst edit ever". If that is the worst, and you're concerned enough about it to mention it here, that is commendable for both its transparancy and taking Wikipedia standards seriously enough to regret it.
Jkelly23:19, 5 November 2005 (UTC)reply
Support. Someone who actually transwikis articles. It was a great relief when he started helping out with that (and I feel more than a little guilty about having stopped altogether).
Dmcdevit·
t22:19, 6 November 2005 (UTC)reply
Support, support, a thousand times support. Maybe two thousand times. One of the most clearcut should-be admins since
Jimbo. A taste extravagansa at a reasonable price. Four an a half stars out of five. Coming soon to theatres near you.
Lord Bob16:48, 8 November 2005 (UTC)reply
Support. Lets see now, voting down near the end of this ballotting would make me a "low hanging fruit" but just the opposite by Durin's POV. Whatever, it is a pleasure to pile-on for this excellent candidate. --
hydnjotalk19:27, 11 November 2005 (UTC)reply
A. Now that Crypticbot's reduced the time it takes for me to find and list orphaned afds from about an hour and a half to fifteen minutes a day, I intend to go back to what I was mainly doing before getting involved there - new pages patrol. Being able to speedy the worst of the nonarticles that show up instead of just tagging them will be a relief. I also intend to help out with the perpetual backlog at
copyright problems, instead of just adding to it.
Unlike many other new admins, I don't see myself clearing out afds in the foreseeable future, unless the backlog gets to be really ridiculous. Afd bothers me, and part of the reason I wrote Crypticbot was so I'd feel less obligated to comment on the orphans I find. It's very easy to fall into a spiral of "Delete, unverifiable", "Delete, self-promotion", "Delete, fancruft", "Delete, I saw a typo in it a couple revisions back" if you don't watch yourself, and as someone who's added very little content to Wikipedia, it's troubling to find myself voting to delete others' contributions. Afd's also one of the least friendly places on Wikipedia, and it's contagious.
2. Of your articles or contributions to Wikipedia, are there any about which you are particularly pleased, and why?
A. I'm certainly glad that orphaned afds get listed within a day now, instead of hanging around for literally months as they sometimes used to. As my frequent "No opinion"s on relisting them show (pre-bot, anyway), I may not care if a given article is kept or not, but I do have an interest in keeping them from having a permanent afd tag stuck to them, scaring off would-be contributors. This was also my motivation to
clear out a six-month backlog in the
post-VFD transwiki queue (something else I've been neglecting lately, alas).
I do want to make it clear that, though my main namespace edits may look impressive to editcountitis sufferers, there isn't much substance to them - largely typo fixes, occasional wikification, and even more occasional cleanup. My most recent edits to articlespace are flooded by a spurt of cleaning out {{R from title without diacritics}}, which could have been done just as easily by a bot. Edits contributing new information are all but nonexistent; if I was less of an ignorant lout, I wouldn't have kept coming back to Wikipedia in the first place.
3. Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or do you feel other users have caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?
A. I don't get stressed by things on the wiki. I come here to relax, and I actively avoid conflict.
A conflict I could have dealt better with was with
Halibutt over the re-creation of
Template:Support (see
here and
here). After seeing that he had already called the template's redeletion an abuse of admin rights on
talk, and that it had been mentioned on his talk page, I assumed bad faith and just continued to tag the template without engaging in dialogue. As the dispute eventually spread to
ANI,
DRV, and several subpages of
FPC, despite several users reverting him and deleting the template, I don't think anything I said could have calmed him down, but I should have at least tried.
If you're looking for my worst edit ever, though, it's
this personal attack. I can only plead lack of sleep and frustration with my browser suddenly crashing every fifteen minutes.
The above 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 article's talk page. No further edits should be made to this page.
Cryptic (
talk·contribs) – Cryptic has been a member of the Wikipedia community for approximately a year and a half (one year as anon, and five months as registered). As a registered user he has accumulated 5600+ edits over a broad distribution of namespaces. He has been very active in vandal fighting with more than 500 reversion edits. He has also been active in copyright issues, transwiki issues,
WP:TFD, and discussions on criteria for speedy deletion (each with more than 100 edits). As he describes himself, he does not stress easily (
[1]), he is polite (
[2],
[3],
[4]), and offers carefully crafted advice to admins on a regular basis (
[5]). Where most of you have probably seen his work has been in
WP:AFD where he has contributed more than 1,000 edits. He is possibly one of the most, if not the most, active contributor in that arena. He is devoted to the AFD process and has even crafted the bot
Crypticbot to locate orphaned AFDs which he has used to great effect. It is my great pleasure to nominate this very deserving candidate. --
Durin13:34, 4 November 2005 (UTC)reply
I was so shocked that Cryptic was not an admin I nearly fell out of my chair. Very strong support. Thanks for doing this, Durin.
encephalon13:47, 4 November 2005 (UTC)reply
Support after viewing "worst edit ever". If that is the worst, and you're concerned enough about it to mention it here, that is commendable for both its transparancy and taking Wikipedia standards seriously enough to regret it.
Jkelly23:19, 5 November 2005 (UTC)reply
Support. Someone who actually transwikis articles. It was a great relief when he started helping out with that (and I feel more than a little guilty about having stopped altogether).
Dmcdevit·
t22:19, 6 November 2005 (UTC)reply
Support, support, a thousand times support. Maybe two thousand times. One of the most clearcut should-be admins since
Jimbo. A taste extravagansa at a reasonable price. Four an a half stars out of five. Coming soon to theatres near you.
Lord Bob16:48, 8 November 2005 (UTC)reply
Support. Lets see now, voting down near the end of this ballotting would make me a "low hanging fruit" but just the opposite by Durin's POV. Whatever, it is a pleasure to pile-on for this excellent candidate. --
hydnjotalk19:27, 11 November 2005 (UTC)reply
A. Now that Crypticbot's reduced the time it takes for me to find and list orphaned afds from about an hour and a half to fifteen minutes a day, I intend to go back to what I was mainly doing before getting involved there - new pages patrol. Being able to speedy the worst of the nonarticles that show up instead of just tagging them will be a relief. I also intend to help out with the perpetual backlog at
copyright problems, instead of just adding to it.
Unlike many other new admins, I don't see myself clearing out afds in the foreseeable future, unless the backlog gets to be really ridiculous. Afd bothers me, and part of the reason I wrote Crypticbot was so I'd feel less obligated to comment on the orphans I find. It's very easy to fall into a spiral of "Delete, unverifiable", "Delete, self-promotion", "Delete, fancruft", "Delete, I saw a typo in it a couple revisions back" if you don't watch yourself, and as someone who's added very little content to Wikipedia, it's troubling to find myself voting to delete others' contributions. Afd's also one of the least friendly places on Wikipedia, and it's contagious.
2. Of your articles or contributions to Wikipedia, are there any about which you are particularly pleased, and why?
A. I'm certainly glad that orphaned afds get listed within a day now, instead of hanging around for literally months as they sometimes used to. As my frequent "No opinion"s on relisting them show (pre-bot, anyway), I may not care if a given article is kept or not, but I do have an interest in keeping them from having a permanent afd tag stuck to them, scaring off would-be contributors. This was also my motivation to
clear out a six-month backlog in the
post-VFD transwiki queue (something else I've been neglecting lately, alas).
I do want to make it clear that, though my main namespace edits may look impressive to editcountitis sufferers, there isn't much substance to them - largely typo fixes, occasional wikification, and even more occasional cleanup. My most recent edits to articlespace are flooded by a spurt of cleaning out {{R from title without diacritics}}, which could have been done just as easily by a bot. Edits contributing new information are all but nonexistent; if I was less of an ignorant lout, I wouldn't have kept coming back to Wikipedia in the first place.
3. Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or do you feel other users have caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?
A. I don't get stressed by things on the wiki. I come here to relax, and I actively avoid conflict.
A conflict I could have dealt better with was with
Halibutt over the re-creation of
Template:Support (see
here and
here). After seeing that he had already called the template's redeletion an abuse of admin rights on
talk, and that it had been mentioned on his talk page, I assumed bad faith and just continued to tag the template without engaging in dialogue. As the dispute eventually spread to
ANI,
DRV, and several subpages of
FPC, despite several users reverting him and deleting the template, I don't think anything I said could have calmed him down, but I should have at least tried.
If you're looking for my worst edit ever, though, it's
this personal attack. I can only plead lack of sleep and frustration with my browser suddenly crashing every fifteen minutes.
The above 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 article's talk page. No further edits should be made to this page.