Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/CapitalR

CapitalR

Voice your opinion (talk page) (0/0/0); Scheduled to end 17:24, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

CapitalR (talk · contribs)

Nomination from Balloonman

Prior to yesterday I had never heard of CapitalR. Davidgothberg, however, indicated on the WT:RFA page that he knew an excellent candidate for admin, but didn't feel comfortable nominating the candidate himself. Honestly, I was a little dubious. I mean, if the candidate is qualified why not nominate him yourself? But I decided to check out CapitalR anyways. CapitalR has almost 25,000 edits. Now most of those are the results of bots, which I usually frown upon. But the reason why I frown upon the use of bots is because we generally see their use from people who want to fight vandalism and want the tools to block people and delete pages---areas where one's policy and interaction with others is crucial. In those cases, the bots don't help establish the user's credentials with policies/guidelines. CapitalR's use of bots is completely different. CapitalR works in two unusual areas.

First, he creates bots---particularly, he wrote one of the bot he uses---CapitalBot. According to the description, CapitalBot moves through all cities/towns/villages/etc in the United States and adds or updates {{Infobox Settlement}} using information from government databases. It is a manually-assisted bot, meaning that all edits are checked by its operator before saving. CapitalR wrote the bot and compiled the 50MB database that the bot uses. If you look at CapitalR's edit history, you will notice a break in activity from Wikipedia. According to CapitalR, this break was the result of his working this database and bot.

Second, CapitalR is a specialist in an unusual niche where having the admin tools will help him contribute to Wikipedia in a way that excites him---Templates. He is not seeking the tools to block people or delete pages, but rather to continue doing what he does best. He's a template specialist. He helps update and fix templates. Unfortunately, as templates are often vandalized and appear on hundreds of articles, he has difficulty working on his creations because they are often protected. Personally, I like specialist admins because we have too many "generalist" who don't know anything about these niches. An admin who specializes with templates, can only be a good thing.

But what most impresses me about CapitalR is his civility. Last year he faced some severe hostility from a user who's initial contact included the warning, it simply doesn't belong. Period. End of debate. Discontinue this or I will report this bot and have it disabled on wikipedia CapitalR maintained his composure and his edits were eventually supported by the wikiproject in question. In other cases, people approached him about various problems with his templates or bots, in each case he assessed the issue and fixed it without getting defensive or upset. Many of these people then thanked him for listening to their concerns and doing such a great job. I don't think CapitalR will be one of our more active admins, in traditional admin functions, but I definitely see him having a need for the tools to continue to do the job he does so well.

CapitalR already acts like an admin. I see no reason to believe that he will abuse or misuse the tools. We need to evaluate CapitalR on his strengths and his clear need for the tools, not based upon some preconceived notion of what we think admin's do. Balloonman (talk) 08:05, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Co-nomination from David Göthberg

I first ran into CapitalR last summer. At the time CapitalR was busy cleaning up all the different navboxes that we had back then and standardise them down to a single very versatile {{navbox}}. I noticed that he communicated well with all the people who had a myriad of questions about those boxes. And he worked carefully and tested his templates properly and discussed them with people before he deployed them. And he even handled it very well when I barged in and suggested major changes and totally new ways to code things. (But in the end I realised that his code probably was the best.) But not only did he make the navboxes way better, he single-handedly did many thousands of edits to update pages to use the new better navboxes.

However, I noticed there was one single problem. CapitalR's templates were locked as high-risk and thus he could not edit them himself. (No wonder since for instance his {{navbox/core}} is used on 615,000 pages.) He had to update them per remote control by using {{editprotected}} requests. So I pretty soon realised that he really needs to become an admin so he can continue to manage his templates in an efficient manner. Problem was that I had no familiarity with the RfA process. So this sentence has been on my to-do list on my user page ever since: "Nominate CapitalR for adminship." I have bumped into him every now and then since then, and every time has only increased my belief that CapitalR is of great service to Wikipedia and would be a very responsible user of the admin buttons.

Some days ago people were discussing over at WT:RFA that we need more admins. So I took the chance and mentioned that CapitalR would be a prime candidate. And thankfully Balloonman took it on himself to check up on and nominate CapitalR.

--David Göthberg (talk) 14:53, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here:

I accept. --CapitalR (talk) 11:28, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia as an administrator. It is recommended that you answer these optional questions to provide guidance for participants:

1. What admin work do you intend to take part in?

A: I expect my primary admin work will be editing protected templates, fulfilling editprotected requests on templates, and keeping a close eye on high-risk templates (protecting/un-protecting when necessary). A number of templates that I created or substantially edited were later protected, and as an admin I would be in a better position to maintain them. I also expect/hope to be useful and more active in the MediaWiki space, particularly for edits and questions related to collapsible tables and navboxes (which just got new CSS that I wrote). I do not expect to do much admin work in WP:AIV, WP:XFD, user blocking, or other "traditional" admin related activities, but think I will be a useful specialist admin for the community because of my extensive template work. If I ever find an instance where admin tools are required for processes I am unfamiliar or unexperienced in, I will not hesitate to ask for assistance from another administrator.

2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?

A: My first major contribution was the standardization of nearly all navboxes into the {{Navbox}} standard. You may remember that not even a year ago there were about a dozen competing navbox templates and styles, many of which didn't have the collapsible feature, which led to huge and/or ugly navbox sections in articles. I combined the best features from them all together and designed {{Navbox}} and {{Navbox/core}}, and then proceeded to convert nearly every template using all the other designs to the new standard (about 10,000 conversions). There are now around 30,000 templates using {{Navbox}}, making for consistent styles and easier code maintenance (it's actually the 6th/7th most used template on Wikipedia now). I have also recently re-written the code for {{Navbox}}, adding many new features and fixing some of the common problems. This work has taken months, but is finally scheduled to go live on May 1 (a date set to give new CSS classes ample time to settle). In addition, I spend lots of my editing time fixing up other templates that use {{Navbox}} to make sure they work properly, and to keep the styles somewhat standard across all of Wikipedia. I believe that when users create new Navbox templates, they first find one with a style they like, and then modify its code. Thus, by promoting clean and consistent Navbox code and styles now, I'm helping ensure that we will have a lot less work to do in the future to clean up templates with problems.

My second major contribution was CapitalBot, which added {{Infobox Settlement}} to about 30,000 articles on US cities and towns. This was no easy task, and it took hundreds of hours (literally) to compile the government databases, map the data to Wikipedia articles, and then code the bot (I compiled the databases offline in the spring and early summer of '07, which explains my editing lull, and then coded the bot in late summer '07, and ran it in early autumn '07).

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: Oh, of course, but nothing too major that didn't eventually work itself out. Because I've done some large scale projects (CapitalBot and navbox standardization), I have attracted plenty of criticism from others who disagreed with certain aspects. However, I find that when I stay calm and clearly explain my reasoning, I can quickly work the problems out in a civilized manner. I regularly get involved in minor style disputes (a common issue with templates); if they cannot be worked out through a quick discussion I find that third parties are always a good idea to help out. As for stress, I occasionally get a little worked up personally, but try hard not to let that reflect in my comments and actions. At worst, I just walk away from a situation and let other editors sort things out; when I check back weeks or months later I'm generally satisfied with resolutions.

Optional questions from jc37

4. While I am impressed by the template work of the candidate, there are more tools in the admin's tool box than just the ability to edit protected pages. Just to illustrate that you have at least a passing knowledge/understanding of more of the tools and responsibilities could you describe/summarise:

• 4a. Generally, why and when should someone be blocked?

• A:

• 4b. When would it be appropriate to protect a page?

• A:

• 4c. When would it be appropriate to speedily delete a page?

• A:

• 4d. How does one determine consensus? And how may it be determined differently on a talk page discussion, an WP:XFD discussion, a WP:DRV discussion, and an WP:RM discussion.

• A:

• 4e. User:JohnQ leaves you a message on your talk page that User:JohnDoe and User:JaneRoe have been reverting an article back and forth, each to their own preferred version. What steps would you take?

• A:

General comments

• See CapitalR's edit summary usage with mathbot's tool. For the edit count, see the talk page.

• Links for CapitalR: CapitalR (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)

---

Please keep discussion constructive and civil. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review Special:Contributions/CapitalR before commenting.

Discussion

• I'm holding off on submitting this to the live RFA queue until Monday or Tuesday when I have more time to answer any questions. --CapitalR (talk) 11:28, 19 April 2008 (UTC)