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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Larry laptop (talk | contribs) at 20:30, 19 January 2007 (fixed formating (I think)). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Dev920

Voice your opinion (20/2/3); Scheduled to end 07:10, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Dev920 (talk · contribs) – I was surprised to find that User:Dev920 is not yet an admin. She has brought 3 articles to featured status, has over 5000 edits, and is active in several WikiProjects. Dev920 is a model of civility and the spirit of collaboration. She is also the author of what may become one of the most famous miscellany for deletion nominations ever. If she has faults, I have not run into them. What I have seen is someone who can be trusted with the admin tools, and someone who has proven that she can successfully take on a difficult and controversial tasks. Samuel Wantman 07:10, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here: I'm deeply honoured to accept. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 08:30, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Questions for the candidate

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 voters:

1. What sysop chores do you anticipate helping with? Please check out Category:Wikipedia backlog and Category:Administrative backlog, and read the page about administrators and the administrators' reading list.
A: I want to go where admins are needed most – I have noticed there are plenty of admins blocking users, not so many clearing the CSD backlog on a regular basis. I would also like to help out at page semi/un/protection, having been grateful in the past to the admins who do this. I want my time as an administrator to focus more on the article side of things – protection, deletion, that sort of thing, stuff that often piles up very quickly.
2. Of your articles or contributions to Wikipedia, are there any with which you are particularly pleased, and why?
A: I would have to say that my greatest achievement is my nomination of Esperanza for deletion. Not my best achievement, but definitely the one that has had the greatest impact. I am much more proud of my successful proposal to reduce the size of talk page templates, which has now been added to Wikipedia:Talk page templates and implemented across Wikipedia. You can see the discussion here. Personally, I am most pleased with my FAs Jake Gyllenhaal, and Latter Days, in particular Latter Days, which I wrote virtually single-handedly. I remain phenomenally proud of my ongoing conversion of List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people/A-E to a referenced informational table, complete with missing entries cross-referenced from List of LGBT composers, List of LGBT Jews, and List of bisexual people. Since I joined in November 2006 and began a “revival”, I’ve also developed much of the look and infrastructure for WikiProject LGBT studies, resulting in a tripling of the membership which I am very happy about.
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: Conflict is not something I enjoy, but I’m willing to stand up, be counted and enter the fray if the encyclopedia needs it. I try to keep my cool, and I think I mainly succeed, though, like most editors, I have fallen down on occasion. I am absolutely willing to admit when I am wrong, such as my argument over Shi’a View of Ali, which turned out to have been my fault for not fully understanding WP:MERGE. When a conflict has been resolved and/or dropped, I try to maintain a good editing relationship with the other editors concerned, such as my dispute at the proposed LGBT Barnstar, where Badbilltucker maintained I was attacking other editors when I wasn’t. We now get on quite well, and he even joined the LGBT WikiProject at my invitation (and I joined the WikiProject Council at his). So far, I’ve found actually reading the policies people quote at you usually crushes their own argument. If you stick to policy, however much they bang at the door of your talk page in frustration, you are always going to be in the right.
My userpage says "Cum recte vivis, ne cures verba malorum", which very loosely means, "If you're doing the right thing, don't worry about negative criticism." When Wikipedia or other editors have got me down, I try to remember that.

Optional questions from Larry laptop (talk · contribs)

4. Towards the end of last year, you set up Userproject:Conservatives (the project is gone but interested editors can seem some of the debate on the matter here) - a project that had the aim of producing NPOV but comprehensive articles, assist the Tories in winning elections. There was a rather heated discussion about it, you refered to other editors as "fools" at one stage - my question about the matter is as follows:
No-one but admins can actually see the page in question, so I’d like to address this before I answer the questions. I set up Userproject:Conservatives because I wanted to be able to admit my own bias. I simply wanted to be honest about my reasons for editing Tory articles. For that reason, it was not possible, or desirable, to start a WikiProject. I had no intention whatsoever of using it as some sort of campaign to introduce POV into Tory articles, and as any admin can confirm, I put caveats and disclaimers all over the project to that effect, lest any other editor come to the project with less pure motives than mine. Also, as I pointed out on the AN discussion, the purpose was to bring Conservative-related articles to FA status – a task that would have resulted in any POV, intentional or otherwise, immediately being stomped on. I also had a NPOV checking department to which any concerned Wikipedian could add themselves to ensure that we kept to this aim. I feel I simply couldn’t have put in any more safeguards than I did against POV warriors hijacking the project.
As I said on AN, anyone who wasn’t a Conservative could have joined – but I couldn’t see why they would have wanted to. Why would anyone join a project they aren’t interested in the aims of? This is also why I only targeted Conservatives for invitation to the project. I also said that anyone who wanted to was welcome to set up a Userproject:Socialism and we could have a friendly competition as I was not out on a mission to denigrate Labour-related articles, merely to improve Conservative ones.
The grounds for the speedy deletion given were that it broke WP:NPOV, but as I said, repeatedly, WP:NPOV only refers to the main namespace. You can be as POV as you want outside of it, as long as that does not affect your articles. When I pointed this out, someone claimed it broke WP:USER, "If the community lets you know that they would rather you deleted some or other content from your user space, you should probably do so, at least for now - such content is only permitted with the consent of the community." However, the community did not want the content because... they thought it violated WP:NPOV. It was a very frustrating vicious circle. The admins concerned simply didn’t assume good faith, I don't think. I suspect this was also due to language problems: when an American admin sees the word "Conservative", alarm bells start ringing and they start seeing visions of the Moral Majority storming the wiki. In Britain it’s merely the name of a slightly right wing rather limp wristed political party which has been out of power for ten years.
a) How would you handle the matter if you were an admin looking at the matter rather then setting up the project?
I wouldn’t have deleted it. If I had been an admin at the time, I would have seen a potentially worrying and divisive project run by an idealistic user, in good standing and with an FA article under her belt, who was adamant she was not breaking any policies, which indeed, on further inspection, she technically wasn’t. WP:AGF. So I would have warned the user about keeping within policy, watchlisted it, kept a beady eye on it, and MfDed it the second I saw any attempts to votestack or insert POV.
b) What are your thoughts about your conduct during the discussion on this userproject?
For the first and only time in my Wikipedian career, I insulted someone. I shouldn’t have done that. WP:CIVIL applies to all people, in all situations, forever more, and it was certainly wrong of me to call someone a fool, regardless of how I was feeling. I can only offer in my defence that it was three months ago, I’d never done it before, and I’ve never, ever done it again. In general however, I think I acquitted myself OK. I explained my reasoning behind my project, quoted policy, and until my final slipup, I was civil throughout.
5. You have mentioned that you had a featured article with the Jake Gyllenhaal article - at one stage, you set up this page. Discussion about it can be seen here (scroll down to dispute) - (I feel the sub-title "Because, seriously, they might *not* be gay..." was indicative of a bias - you disagreed). You also said in dicussion: I have now set up a website to pull those pictures I was referring to out of the locked gallery at IHJ. It is available here.[3] I propose that, as these are photos, the provenence is largely irrelevant and we apply WP:IGNORE regarding WP:RS. Dev920 19:38, 18 June 2006 (UTC).
Quick note, I disagreed because “No, that was humourous dig at the fact that I can't find anywhere that says they are friends without adding gay stuff. :D Dev920 20:25, 18 June 2006 (UTC)”. I then subsequently added a disclaimer to the front page; “It has been brought to my attention that, in our increasingly sexualised society, people may see the captions I have added to the photos as pushing some sort of an agenda. The captions exist to demonstrate that Jake and Austin's body language indicates that they are good friends, not just random people who have been photographed a few times together. It was NOT my intention to have anyone read anything more into it than that; this website exists to demonstrate Jake and Austin's friendship, and if you happen to see more to it than that on this site, you are mistaken, and my apologies if I have not demonstrated my point more clearly.”
a) What do you think about editors setting up their own sites so they can then use them as sources? --Larry laptop 09:53, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I set up that website because I couldn’t find anywhere that mentioned Austin Nichols and Jake Gyllenhaal in the same sentence without assuming they were lovers (which, incidentally, it has been confirmed that they aren’t). I knew from the photos I saw on IHJ that they were friends, but it was impossible to find a source that just said that. So I created one. I felt that in regards to WP:RS, what I had done was something of a grey area, as the photos themselves were reliable, but hosted on a locked website. WP:OR even says “However, research that consists of collecting and organizing information from existing primary and/or secondary sources is, of course, strongly encouraged.” Fortunately, we found and added a newspaper article just saying they were friends (and then subsequently added a paragraph acknowledging the speculation, but that’s another discussion) but ultimately, I don’t think we would have added it. Is it acceptable to host reliable sources on an unreliable source? WP:V says “For that reason, self-published books, personal websites, and blogs are largely not acceptable as sources”, which implies that occasionally, they are. This question is also a major part of the Youtube debate. There’s a fine line there, but I think it is best to err on the side of exclusion, if only because it could undermine Wikipedia’s credibility. I think unless a very good case were made (such as the Youtube clip of Saddam’s execution), generally they should be taken down.


General comments

Discussion

Support

  1. Support as nominator. -- Samuel Wantman 08:54, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Yes! Yes! Yes! Edit-conflict-with-nominator support. Unreservedly, certainly trustworthy. She is the very model of a modern Wikipedian. Just to elaborate - fantastic FAs, calm, level-headed, good XfD participation, and the extraordinary quality of the Esperanza MfD nomination should tell you all you need to know; this candidate can really think as well. Concerns were expressed about when the MfD actually took place - just after Christmas - and it is perhaps a sign of Dev's absolute suitability for adminship that she had actually planned to wait until the New Year: the eventual timing was my fault. If ever an RfA candidate approached maximal excellence in every possible sense of the word, this is it. Moreschi Deletion! 08:55, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Support - Dev920 is an enthusiastic, active contributer who has a very clear understanding of what Wikipedia is and is not. She is active in most important areas of the project, and has changed Wikipedia for the better. Her actions regarding Esperanza were bold, and she kept her cool during the entire process. She has also completely revitalized the WikiProject LGBT studies, and her attention to the project is the principal reason for the exponential increase in members over the last few months. I have complete confidence that she would make an excellent admin. My only concern (with all admins, not just Dev) is that she not stop article creating and editing, due to being burdened with admin tasks. I notice often that admins seem to spend most of their time on bureaucratic functions, and forget the reason they joined Wikipedia in the first place. Jeffpw 09:02, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Support I don't think we've ever directly interacted, but I've managed to stumble across her great work all over Wikipedia. Besides, she made an excellent choice in the color of her userpage. —Mira 09:19, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Support but don't forget to keep making excellent contributions to WikiProject LGBT studies while you wield the mop...! The Rambling Man 11:15, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Support I trust this user with the mop. ← ANAS Talk? 13:07, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Support Great editor. I'd trust her with the mop. Gzkn 13:26, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Support per nom. Contributions look good.--Eva bd 14:28, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Support: Adminship isn't a big deal, and there's an urgent need for more admins, third lowest ratio of admins to editors on any wikipedia, apparently. --Kind Regards - Heligoland 14:37, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  10. Support per nom. yandman 15:07, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Support. AFter reading this candidate's statement in the Esperanza MfD, I have no doubts about their good judgment. RyanGerbil10(Упражнение В!) 15:19, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  12. Support, never seen anything other than good stuff from Dev. Proto::► 14:40, 19 January 2007 (UTC) (reinserted this support vote--it was removed during another user's oppose vote) Jeffpw 15:30, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  13. Strong support - kind, thoughtful and willing to stand up against problem users. Addhoc 15:39, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    Support A tireless contributor and very helpful to newcomers Hassan2 15:40, 19 January 2007 (UTC) something odd here - the user page does not match with the user contribution and the account was created this afternoon. --Larry laptop 15:45, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    After he tried ripping off my userpage, he ripped off Larry's userpage. I warned him against doing it again, he said "oh noes!", I blocked him. DS 16:07, 19 January 2007 (UTC) [reply]
  14. Support per Proto - whenever I see her, she's doing something useful and intelligent. Trustworthy and capable of making very well-reasoned arguments. Trebor 16:56, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  15. Support no problems here. Arjun 17:12, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  16. Support I have seen user maintain admirable COOL when less mature and/or responsible editors would have failed to. Mark83 18:17, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  17. Support. Michael 18:47, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  18. No concerns. Christopher Parham (talk) 19:24, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  19. Weak Support. Most of the diffs pointed out below don't concern me too much, and those that might be of some concern aren't enough to dissuade me from supporting the candidate. I trust the nominee will take those comments to heart when handed the tools and will make a fine admin. Agent 86 19:27, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  20. Support I'm happy with the answers to the questions and I,on balance (and thinking quite deeply about my frankly too high standards for what an admin should be), think that Dev920 will make an excellent admin. Just make sure you keep up your excellent editing work. --Larry laptop 20:29, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

  1. Oppose I can not condone the random insulting of people over one article.I regretfully oppose. I have checked out this users contributions to other peoples talk pages. Apparantly this user believes that some articles are exclusive clubs only to be edited by certain types of people. I feel that this attitude goes against the spirit of Wikipedia.To see those comments go to this page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:NkrasCylonhunter 14:46, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't really see that in the link you have provided - all that I can see is Dev explaining that a certain wikiproject is going to be interested in a certain type of project. --Larry laptop 14:51, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    This quote really disturbed me."Any article which involves LGBT to a reasonable extent is covered by us. That isn't having it both ways, that's doing our job." Dev92014:58, 19 January 2007 (UTC)— Preceding unsigned comment added by Cylonhunter (talk • contribs)
    I don't see anything disturbing in that interaction. A user was confused about the Wikiproject LGBT tagging an article, Dev and another user explained the rationale, and the user's concern was assuaged. Since communication is the key to Wikipedia, I think the exchange was perfectly normal and innocuous. And by the way, Cylonhunter, please do not remove other editor's votes of support, as you did with Proto's vote. Here is the diff. Jeffpw 15:08, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Itsmejudith&diff=prev&oldid=94576820 this bothers me as well. This editor is to prone to frustration and anger to be an admin. I am sorry for deleting votes I did not intend to do this. Cylonhunter
  1. Sadly and reluctantly, Oppose Comments like this are not helpful to resolving disputes. Hipocrite - «Talk» 15:05, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    The tone was a bit harsh, but then again the editor in question was pushing the limits of AGF, IMHO. yandman 15:17, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral

# Neutral I am neutral for the moment pending the answers to my questions (I should point out that I indicated to Dev that I would be asking those questions). I think Dev is a excellent editor and wikipedian - however some of her interactions with fellow editors makes me wonder if administration is the right role for her. I should also point out that more generally I concerned by recent events that RFA is not a particular rigorous process and really needs to be more selective about who it hands a broom out to (that's not a slight on Dev920 but the process, I plan to partipating in RFA a lot more, Dev is just the first person I plan to turn the rubber hose on) --Larry laptop 10:01, 19 January 2007 (UTC)--Larry laptop 10:01, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  1. Neutral for now. I have some concerns and need to take a closer look before I could support. Carcharoth 11:31, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Neutral leaning weak oppose - lots of good work done by editor (especially with the very well-constructed MFD nomination of Esperanza) ... but there are a few things that keep me from supporting. (1) The conservative project thing - it wouldn't bother me at all if you said, "I realize now that politically biased wikiprojects are wrong" or words to that effect - everyone makes mistakes, but you seem to be defending it in your comments above. (2) !voting on a contentious AFD with no reason given [1] (3) WP:V and WP:NPOV are fundamental policies, so I would certainly consider being unsourced a reason to delete if nobody is willing/able to source it [2] (4) In your two recent edits to Jake Gyllenhaal, you were probably correct, but your edit summaries seem to show a misapplication of WP:IAR and of WP:V. (5) Referring to another editor [3] as a weirdo - it was User:62.136.153.73's only edit so I'm not sure how that makes him/her a weirdo. Edits like these are obviously, 100%, the exception rather than the rule for someone whom I consider to be a valued editor. Consider this, if anything, just some suggestions on areas to improve. --BigDT 16:05, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    Regarding (3), here's her comment on the AfD: Being unsourced is not a valid reason to delete per WP:DELETE. And that is absolutely correct - being unsourced is not a reason to delete. Being incapable of being unsourced is different matter entirely. At most she was unclear (and I wouldn't agree with that characterization, personally). -- John Broughton | (♫♫) 16:56, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    Ok, let me clarify some of those points:
    (1) I don't accept that Userproject:Conservatives was wrong. It was probably a bit dumb, and I wouldn't do it now because it would be too much hassle and I've got a hell of a lot more to do :); but the idea itself was within policy, though not to be encouraged. I've already explained everything else above, so I'll stop now.
    (2) I wanted to vote on it but couldn't think of anything else to say that hadn't already been said, so I voted without an explanation. Obviously, as AfD is not a vote, it was fairly meaningless, but I just had a crisis of imagination. I haven't done it since.
    (3) John Broughton has got there before me because I've spent so long researching this reply, and he said what I was going to say. The deletion policy says only if an article is totally unverifiable can it be deleted entirely. SkierRMH said that it was a term that was widely used in book circles and there were plenty of references on it, so it apparently was verifiable, and I voted accordingly. I apologise if I was unclear.
    (4) Randomly removing a name but leaving the brackets is a bit weird, but you're right, I probably shouldn't have called him a weirdo. Thank you for calling me on it and I shall avoid doing so again.
    (5) This issue is one that I was going to take to to AN to get some other opinions on this, but I never got round to it. Basically, WP:V says the burden is on the editor to prove an event happened. At the time, Jake singing a show tune in drag had only happened twelve hours previously, and it hadn't hit the newspapers (though it now has: [4]). One of the things I love about Wikipedia is our ability to cover breaking news. I added the info, and Larry reverted, saying I needed a source, but the only thing I could find was a gossip columnist linking to the Youtube video. So I put that up. Obviously, it's a bad source, but you can't really lie with a video, so I felt that to apply WP:IAR here was acceptable, as I could not prove the sentence any other way and to link to the video itself would be a copyright infringement. But it's a bit of a grey area for me and I will certainly take the time to think more on how the policies fit together. Thank you for the criticism. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 17:24, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    Ok ... that's all reasonable, thank you for your reply. As I said, you are obviously a great editor and if anything, consider my comments just general suggestions. --BigDT 17:36, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Neutral. I have to admit, this edit seems to have me a little concerned. I went wading through her contribution log and wasn't able to find anything else that would incline me to opposition. --Brad Beattie (talk) 18:12, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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