User talk:Firedrake

Janelle Pierzina

I'm not a good person to ask about vfd, since I'm not an admin, or an expert; so please check vfd pages about this. But, I do know a vfd normally lasts for five days. If it survives the vote, the tag is removed, and generally that decision is respected as a precident. Sometimes, unfortunately, an article will later get renominated, also sometimes people will try to re-direct the page elsewhere. So, supporters of a disputed article have to stay observant.

But, you wish to know when it's "safe" to add to a page. Well, any edits to any page, could potentially be undone. That's just a risk of wikipedia. If you have some good content to add, I urge you to go ahead and add to the page. This will help justify it's existence. Saving your work (like in notepad) might be good, if you're worried about loosing stuff. In my opinion, you shouldn't let fear of deletion keep you from contributing.

p.s. Even if the "vote is lost", it will probably be "re-directed", not deleted in this particular case. Hence, all previous contributions will be preserved in edit history.

--rob 21:46, 4 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Firedrake, I've posted a detailed guide to my thought process regarding this AfD over at Talk:Janelle Pierzina. Fernando Rizo T/C 01:00, 9 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Firedrake wrote: **As a new user, let me just thank you for letting me know just how useless you feel my opinions are here. Not much incentive to do articles when one admin can decide it's not important enough and put it up and another will push through that decision. Just makes new users leave and entrenches the old school. What a crock.--Firedrake 02:09, 9 September 2005 (UTC) at Talk:Janelle Pierzina[reply]

Firedrake, there are two main reasons that new users' votes at AfD are generally discounted:

It is extremely difficult to tell a new user participating in a AfD from a sockpuppet, and
Newer users may not have a good grasp of the AfD process.

This does not mean that you should not participate in debates; your argumentation could well sway the opinions of many other users. But the fact remains that you have less than twenty edits to your name.

This is not something that you should take personally. Wikipedia allows anonymous strangers and new users such as yourself to do almost anything at all here, but some activities are a bit more guarded than others. Hang around and get a few more edits under your belt. I'm sorry if you think this is cronyism, I assure you that it isn't. Clearly our system can't be all that disasterous, as Wikipedia continues to attract new users, many of whom stick around. I myself only arrived here in February. Just this past week, a user who had only been here for one month missed becoming an admin by a handful of votes. Fernando Rizo T/C 02:19, 9 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Re-listing of Janelle Pierzina at AfD

Firedrake, I'm dropping you a line here with two purposes in mind:

Firstly, I've re-listed the article at AfD in the hopes of establishing a clearer consensus. You can find the new AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Janelle Pierzina 2. I won't be participating in any way now that the nomination has been made, in order to avoid any appearence of impropriety. I hope that you'll agree that this is a fair thing to do, in light of the controversy that my original decision generated.

Secondly, I've come to offer you some neighborly advice, not as an administrator but simply as a fellow Wikipedian. You very nearly accused Zoe and myself of misconduct on my talk page, and have placed an invitation to Zoe on your user page that could very easily be construed as a personal attack. You should consider being more careful about the way you make accusations, and you should absolutely remove that vulgar remark from your user page. You would make it much easier for other editors to assume good faith on your part if you did both of those things.

I'm sorry that this episode has been a source of frustration to you; I assure you that is has been a source of frustration for me as well. :) I hope that our future encounters are of a more pleasant nature. I'll see you around, Fernando Rizo T/C 10:55, 10 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]