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User:Jonny-mt/Coaching

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The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Thank you so much for agreeing to take me on; I really appreciate it. That being said, let's get this party started, shall we? --jonny-mt 02:23, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Oh, a quick note about edit summaries. I generally only skimp on summaries when I'm editing things in my own user space, particularly in my sandbox. This month saw a bunch of edits to that and User:jonny-mt/Attacktest as part of a discussion on Template talk:Attack. Hopefully my mainspace/Wikipedia namespace edit summary usage is a little more...robust, but I'll be paying extra attention from here on out. --jonny-mt 02:33, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
  1. Start your training by participating on these message boards: articles for deletion and requests for admission. Those are the ones that will train you best for what admins do, and give you "exposure" to the voters of the academy users who discuss matters at WP:RfA. Also, take a look at the username board from time to time. I have all three bookmarked by hitting the "watch" button. More to come.... Bearian (talk) 18:01, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
    I think I'll start by tackling your lessons one at a time, if that's all right :) My level of participation in XfD discussions tends to fluctuate a bit--I may check the logs one day, comment on a bunch of discussions, and then watch those discussions through to completion before I start commenting on more. Since MfD and AfD are my two favorite deletion hangouts, I'll set a goal of commenting on at least two discussions in each per day for the next week in an attempt to get in the habit. Incidentally, I recently added WP:AFDO to my watchlist in the hopes of helping with big backlogs by performing non-admin closes. There was a big backlog a couple of weeks ago, and so that provided a number of opportunities for me to do so. Is there any chance you could take a look at my closes and give me some feedback? (Armistead L. Long, RGD Ontario, Moi Caprice, Duane Peters)
    As for WP:UAA, I actually plan on making that one of the first areas I would participate in as an admin. I currently have more reports there than to WP:AIV, although I think that simply has more to do with the fact that I run across so many spammers during newpage patrol whose names match (not surprisingly) the name of the company they're advertising for. I've added it to my watchlist, though, so hopefully that will expose me to a broader range of WP:UN violations.
    Finally, I do participate a bit in WP:RFA, although that participation tends to be limited to the cases where I've either run across the user personally or where the RfA has just started and doesn't seem to be going well. Surprisingly enough, I think you and I are on opposite sides of one of the more recent ones I've commented on (Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Wisdom89 2), but I'll comment on that more later when I've had a chance to really go over the materials you linked below. It's well past my bedtime now, and I think those links are best with a clear head (or a fresh cup of coffee...but I've got a meeting in the morning so only one of those is a viable option right now)! --jonny-mt 16:32, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
    Good so far. Look also at this essay about editing while too tired. Bearian (talk) 20:46, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
    I've actually read that one before, but I find it becomes more and more relevant each time I do. When I first started out, I had a hard time understanding how people could get so worked up about Wikipedia, but now that I'm fairly involved with the project I recognize that this is something that deserves to be taken seriously, although it's certainly nothing to lose one's civility over. Given that Wikipedia is a "slow cook" project (to an extent), I've always been surprised at how quickly contentious conversations can heat up; that being said, I understand more and more how one can lose sight of the forest for the trees here, and from reading through admins' talk pages and watching WP:ANI, I know that's something I'll have to be very careful about.
    That and editing under the influence. But a strong password basically takes care of that :) --jonny-mt 15:04, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
  2. Next, read what some people actually feel now about adminship at User:Dlohcierekim/standards and at my standards page. Bearian (talk) 18:05, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
    While my participation in RfA is limited at best, I've read through enough nominations (both those that succeeded and those that crashed and burned) to realize that it is a moving target. My personal standards may be nowhere near as well developed as yours and Dlohcierekim's (and those you both link to), but I think they all speak to the same thing--adminship is not supposed to be a big deal, but giving the wrong person the tools can make it a big deal down the road. I think the standards you pointed out are fair in that they are adaptive and focused not on evaluating someone's worth as an editor but as a potential caretaker of the project. For my part, I consider the effective application of policies and guidelines to be the second-most important characteristic in an admin candidate after the ability to be calm and rational in discussions. To that end, I've opposed one candidate with incredible mainspace contributions and another who never seemed to leave ANI because they couldn't display effective policy knowledge to my satisfaction. In such cases, my concern is not necessarily that they would go rogue so much as it is that they would be prone to misusing the tools through a simple lack of knowledge.
    But I digress :) The point was to introduce me to other peoples' standards, and introduce me you have! For the record, though, there's a reason my "This page has been vandalized n times" userbox is hidden.... --jonny-mt 15:16, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
    This is a great start. By the way, the fact that we disagree 50 % of the time is par for the course. Bearian (talk) 20:44, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
    I was actually a little worried about that, particularly when I realized that you supported Scott5114's RfA above. I suppose my current harshness on candidates will probably mellow out with time and experience, particularly as I experience the phenomenon of a paltry 1,480 admins trying to take care of over 6 million users first-hand. I wonder if the RfA process would be different with that little statistic stuck at the top of every discussion. --jonny-mt 15:04, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

3. AfD Closings Take a shot at closing an AFD. To close an AFD at WP:AFD:

  1. Hit the "edit this page" button
  2. add {{subst:at}} to the top of the AFD discussion above all other lines including the name line
  3. followed by the result (Keep, Delete, or No consensus) -- that result word or phrase should be in bold
  4. followed by a brief explanation
  5. and add a note that this is a non-admin closure.
  6. Remove the category line.
  7. Finally you add {{subst:ab}} to the bottom of the discussion.

(Thanks to NawlinWiki, who was my coach.) Bearian (talk) 22:00, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, I gave it a shot, but per WP:DPR#NAC I stuck to the non-controversial ones. In addition to the ones above, I just closed the following two discussions (as keeps):
Per an old discussion on my talk page, whenever I close an XfD now I try and be as verbose as possible, citing policy where applicable. Sadly, I couldn't find anything good for the second AfD above, as WP:COMPANY doesn't really cover malls.
I'll keep working through the backlog at WP:AFDO where possible and posting my closes here for you review, if that's all right. Once I get a little farther in, I'll take a shot at mock closing some delete/merge/redirect AfDs by posting my call here before the actual discussion closes.
Oh, and I have to say I love the fact that NawlinWiki was your admin coach, if only because it means that you're passing on something learned from one Louisianian to another Louisianian :P --jonny-mt 07:16, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
Got a couple more in; these two were actually related:
Sadly, WP:AFDO no longer lists a "big backlog", so the pickings might be a little slim until another one builds up. A few hours oughta do it :D --jonny-mt 07:42, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
Wow, great job so far! By the way, I was involved in a controversy last week, when I blocked another editor by mistake. The lesson to take out of that is to be extremely careful when blocking, especially when the block could be viewed incorrectly as censorship. Bearian (talk) 16:33, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
I've gotten more abuse for blocking an IP in error. Please make sure this is what you want. :-) Bearian (talk) 21:08, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
Well, no one ever said mopping is a glamorous job :)
I actually saw the first ANI thread, and I just read through the IP block thread on your page. If watching ANI has taught me anything, it's that administrators are prone to the same mistakes and gaffes as the rest of us, but proper handling of those cases (as in yours) can defuse a lot of wikidrama. I have no illusions about being an administrator--you get dumped on for the one thing you do wrong but never hear a peep about the 99 things you do right--but as far as I'm concerned, if the project ultimately benefits, then it's worth it.
On a tangentially-related note, I've been taking a trip to the darker side of Wikipedia and getting a good bit of experience in with conflict resolution this past week or so, first at User talk:Yosemitesam25 over his POV edits to Hawaiian sovereignty movement (which I ultimately requested protection for), then at User talk:Boomgaylove (noticed when he re-added the AfD tag to HillRaisers), then at User talk:ILike2BeAnonymous (I added a warning about edit warring after reading up on the first user's personal attacks at the Potrero Hills article...which I requested protection for), and finally at User talk:CarolSpears (where my assumption of good faith--an assumption I would make again without hesitation--backfired after I asked Durova for some insight on a question). So I figure that if I'm still keen on being an administrator after a week of that, I can handle whatever comes my way.
By the way, now that WP:AFDO is reporting a big backlog again, I'll hopefully get around to some more closes (and comments) tonight. Stay out of trouble in the meantime :) --jonny-mt 05:05, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I have a question. In going through the AfD backlogs (incidentally, I only have the one close for today), I've noticed a number of items that simply haven't been discussed. I go ahead and relist those discussions, and all is right with the world. However, today I noticed a number of AfDs that had been relisted despite what I would consider to be fairly robust discussions--going through the log for February 14th, I found not only this example (which is not actually too bad) but also this discussion (which you commented on), this discussion, and this discussion, all of which seem to have had adequate input before being relisted.
So I was wondering, then, if you could offer any guidance on when a discussion should be relisted and when it should be closed as no consensus? Is there a general rule of thumb that most people adhere to, or is this something that tends to vary by admin? --jonny-mt 16:29, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
So, I wondering myself, as there appears to be no guidelines. It is ad hoc, a judgment call. That's why we have admins, and not bots, closing debates. I asked for a re-listing only a couple of cases so far. I am a "mergetarian" by inclination - let's see where we can stick this instead of deleting this crap. I also like to mop up and close debates (never mind that my apartment is a pigsty). Sometimes you have to walk away from a dead horse and close the debate. Bearian (talk) 16:54, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Well that makes a good bit of sense. I like the essay, too--I think there'd be a lot less wikidrama if people could learn to simply walk away.
In related matters, I've got a good group of AfD closes today. User:TexasAndroid apparently went through and did a number of procedural nominations on transwikied content, so those were pretty easy pickings.
I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of it. One of the more interesting things I found is that, as the closer, you have to be both neutral and engaged at the same time--that is, you can't have a stake in the discussion and must take care to defer to the arguments presented rather than form your own opinion, but you also have to be prepared to discount invalid arguments and give proper weight to the valid ones (e.g. "it's a blatant BLP violation with no redeemable content" trumps "he's a notable individual per WP:BIO"). Although I think I'll start small, I'm rather looking forward to closing some controversial discussions down the line. --jonny-mt 13:46, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
Another batch of closes for today--I guess the joy of working on backlogs is finding out that they just won't go down, eh?
The last one may have been pushing it a little bit, but I think it should be all right. Essentially, there were a number of users calling for redirection based on a lack of sources, but during the discussion period someone found sources and started adding them to the article. Since the redirect arguments were no longer based on policy, I discounted them and examined the rest of the arguments, which were universally for keeping the article (one was more of an WP:OTHERSTUFF argument, but even after discounting that there were multiple keep opinions). I know non-admins, as a rule, are only supposed to close non-controversial XfDs, so I may have pushed that line a little bit with this close. Still, I'm confident in the close itself and made certain to outline my reasons in the closing summary--I think it would stand up to deletion review. --jonny-mt 08:34, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Just two closes for today:
And I'm off to bed...soon as I help work the kinks out of a certain template. --jonny-mt 16:16, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Let's see, after a month of training, you may be good to go. Do you have rollback rights? Bearian (talk) 21:35, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
    • Well all right, then! I actually just got rollback about a week or so ago, but so far it's been working pretty well. Truth be told, I was initially a little resistant to using it, but I figured it might be a good idea to dip my toe into the metaphorical ocean of server-based tools in order to get a better feel for them. It'd be nice if there was better Twinkle integration in order to make adding warnings a bit easier, but I think I've gotten the hang of it. So does this mean it's time to brave the gauntlet? --jonny-mt 02:07, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Sadly, the backlog at WP:AFDO has been cleared now, so I've been spending my time cleaning up from Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets/Boomgaylove, writing a couple of articles, and getting back to my roots by doing some more newpage patrol. Can you think of anything else I should be doing? --jonny-mt 10:29, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

If you feel ready, I'll prepare a nom for you at WP:RFA. Bearian (talk) 17:37, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
I think I'm about as ready as I'm going to be! I have to admit I made a bit of an error in judgement yesterday on a deletion nomination that I suspect will earn me some oppose votes, but hopefully the way I handled it combined with my other deletion discussion contributions will help temper that a bit. Frankly, I kind of hope someone asks me for an example of a time I screwed something up so I'll have a chance to explain myself.
If it helps in writing the nomination, the first things I plan to tackle as an admin will be CAT:CSD, WP:UAA, XfD discussions, and a bit of image-related work, along the lines of what User:Melesse does with WP:NFC. And before we even start the process, I just want to thank you for all the help you've provided. No matter what the outcome, you've been instrumental in making me into a better Wikipedian, and I really appreciate it :) --jonny-mt 02:41, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Well, it's been about a week since my error above, and hopefully I've made enough good edits in the interval to show that it was a simple misstep. Schedule-wise, I think I have enough free time this week that I would be available to answer any new questions that could come up in my RfA, so if you think I'm ready then please let me know! --jonny-mt 04:24, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.
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