Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Alan De Smet

Alan De Smet

Voice your opinion (talk page) (0/0/0); Scheduled to end 06:08, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Alan De Smet (talk · contribs) - Alan De Smet has been around for a while and has made a lot of edits. He would make a great admin. February 15, 2009 (talk) 04:27, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here:

I accept this nomination. — Alan De Smet | Talk 06:06, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Anyone considering my nomination should know: the time I have to spend working on Wikipedia is already overwhelmed with work to be done. I have a backlog of work to be done. As a result, I don't foresee spending much time doing tasks requiring access to the administrator tools. But maybe just a little bit of time, maybe my directly doing painfully obvious deletions or protections, will help just a little bit and be worth elevating. If it's not worth the overhead of having another administrator who will contribute so little, so be it.

Furthermore, I am an inclusionist at heart, tempered by an understanding that most deletionists are simply trying to hold Wikipedia to high standards so that it can be great and not just another heap of unfiltered garbage on the internet. But it twists my heart to delete sincere contributions, and tortures me to see things deleted on technicalities. I mention this because it will come up in answers below.

— Alan De Smet | Talk 06:06, 27 October 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 administrative work do you intend to take part in?

A: Very little. Quick deletions of painfully obvious new copyright violations or other obvious Prod/CSD work. I will err extremely on the side of not using these tools; both out of general caution with powerful tools and because of my inclusionist tendencies. I do appreciate that my inclusionist tendencies will tend to bias me toward restoring things, and as such I intend to be extremely careful in using those tools as well.

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

A: T. John Ward was originally authored by me, and I believe the lion's share of the content remains authored by me. While perhaps not the most eloquent prose, it's extremely carefully cited and I believe conveys the key points about this man. Naturally I'm proud of it.

It's tiresome work, but I work to add citations to articles wherever I can; sometimes fully fleshed out, but sometimes just a quick link to a web page, which is better than no citation at all. ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5]) I strive to flesh out or better format citations whenever possible, be they my own added earlier in haste, or others. ([6] [7]). No individual edit is much, but I'm proud of the collective result.

I also do what I can to add suitable images to articles and to improve the images present. Full upload log]. I've uploaded a number of photos of my own creation of people who have articles, (ex: 1 2 3), a few other relevant photos of article subjects (ex: 1 2). I've created a few original illustrations (ex: 1 2 3), and converted a few others (ex: 1) 2). I've taken some graphs and created them using gnuplot, which gives okay, if unexceptional, SVG output but more importantly is really easy for other people to update with new information. (ex) None of my image work is brilliant, but I believe I'm filling holes and making things better for it and I'm proud it.

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: I'm involved enough with Wikipedia that conflicts are inevitable. I try to bite my tongue and wait if necessary before replying. Of course, disagreements go to Talk pages, not into edit wars. I strive to use logic and defer to the policies and guidelines. While perhaps not flattering to me this pretty well documents the most recent serious stress causing incident. I know there have been one or two other incidents that caused me similar levels of stress, but they escape me at the moment. The more strict editors and robots (User:BetacommandBot being one obvious one) are also an ongoing source of stress. I respect the need to keep Wikipedia to the highest verifiable standards, but I am inclusionist in my heart. I strive to not let my preferences taint my actions, but I'll admit that many of the fair use claims I've added for images are perhaps unnecessarily wise-ass.

(Late addition) I should note that on occasion I go and write angry things about all sorts of things. Of course I'm going to rant about Wikipedia. 1, [2]. Both rants are more than a bit out of date, and don't entirely match my current views. But they are out there. — Alan De Smet | Talk 06:16, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

General comments

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

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