User:Elonka/Advice

This is a draft page for Wikipedia:New admin school.

How can I help?

Now that you've got your shiny new mop, you may be wondering how you can best help with the project. This will depend on your personality style and interests. Some admins find a particular niche that they enjoy, and stick with that. Others like to bounce around to different areas of the project. Others check for where backlogs are forming, and then jump in to help until the backlog is reduced to manageable levels. The following are suggestions:

• Check Category:Administrative backlog
• Set up a personalized "to do" page, which contains the content of categories that you are interested in, or which routinely have backlogs. For example, you could add a page like this to a subpage in your userspace, and then add other categories of interest: /Admin watchlist
• Scan WP:AN and WP:ANI.
  • The threads at the bottom of the page will be the most recent ones that may not have gotten administrator attention yet. If you see something obvious that needs to be done, you can try handling it.
  • If you'd like to start slower, you could offer a comment on what you recommend should be done, and then see if other admins agree with you. For example, it couldn't hurt to say, "I'm still a fairly new administrator, but in this case I'd recommend doing (course of action). What do others think?" If no one replies or otherwise handles the situation in a reasonable amount of time, then proceed.
  • To start even slower, identify the articles and editors involved in that particular thread, and add the relevant talkpages and user talkpages to your watchlist. Then you can observe how other more experienced admins handle that particular situation
    • Caveat: There are over a thousand administrators on the project, some of whom have very different styles. For any one thread on ANI, it might be handled completely differently by different admins. So keep this in mind when watching, that you may not be seeing the "right" way of handling things, you're just seeing one particular way that it's being done.
  • If you see a thread on ANI that seems to be "done", go ahead and tag it with the {{resolved}} template.
• Add WP:AIV to your watchlist. It's usually kept fairly clear, but if it starts getting backed up, the word "backlog" will appear in the edit summary, as an alert that more help may be needed.
  • When blocking an anonymous IP, scan the prior blocks on that account. If there is ongoing vandalism, with no other productive edits coming from the account, don't hesitate to increase the block length from the prior block, up to as long as a year.
    • If there's not already an ISP template at the top of the IP's talkpage, you may choose to place one (this is entirely optional). For instructions on which template to use, see Template talk:ISP#Documentation. Choosing the right template can be a bit of an artform, so if you're not clear on which one to use, don't hesitate to post a message on that page and ask.
  • When blocking a named account, if 100% of the account's contributions are vandalism, the account can be blocked indefinitely with a "VOA" block: "Vandalism-Only-Account"
• WP:AN/3RR is good to watch, as is a new (November 2008) bot-maintained page, User:3RRBot/bot reported disruption and 3RR violations
• CAT:CSD is usually backlogged.
  • Tip: When reviewing a speedy-deletion candidate, check the history of the page, and scan the contributions of the creator. If they made one "bad" page, there may be others there as well. Alternatively, if they have a history of many good contributions, it's probably worth taking a second look at the speedy candidate. It may have been tagged incorrectly (or too quickly).
  • Many speedy candidates will be obvious. If they are not obvious, you can either:
    • Skip them and go on to something obvious
    • Add the page to your watchlist, and go on to something else. Then when another admin handles it later, you'll be able to see what they did
    • Remove the speedy tag, as "Declined". When doing this, it's a good idea to add something to your edit summary either about why you declined, or directing people to prod or AfD.
    • Research/expand the stub yourself
    • Sometimes a speedy candidate will be left unhandled for a long period of time. This is usually because multiple admins have glanced at it, but didn't see an obvious way how to handle it. In these ambiguous situations, you may wish to "decline as ambiguous" per WP:AGF and WP:BITE, to give the benefit of the doubt in these situations.
• Category:NPOV disputes can use help. See advice at Wikipedia:New admin school/Dealing with disputes#Practice