Misplaced Pages

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Misplaced Pages 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: The main areas I'd like to jump right into are CSD and AIV. After that I'd gradually widen the scope of my contributions (probably hitting UAA next) as I get more experience in areas I've used less often. My ultimate goal is to be an admin that is competent and knowledgeable in most areas on Misplaced Pages so I can be "on call" to deal with problems and backlogs as needed.

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

A: I'm proud of the span of my edits, which generally fall into two categories; content protection and content creation. On the content protection side, I've been Twinkling, new page and recent edit patrolling, wikignoming, and reporting vandals and sockpuppets. On the content creation side, I've been creating requested articles (123), adding disambiguation pages, making bold edits, fixing redirects, editing images (123), and taking photos for articles. While lately I've been getting involved in a few projects such as WikiProject Northern Ireland, I see myself as editing for Misplaced Pages as a whole rather than any part specifically.

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 can't think of a serious conflict I've had with an established editor. I'm fairly low-controversy because my edits tend to arise from either vandalism, obvious article problems, missing information/citations, or requests. This means that my work tends to fall over a wide range of subjects that I'm fairly detached from emotionally. Thus, rather than go into depth on the subtle points of an article's subject, I tend to fix basic article problems and then move on.

As a result, most of my conflicts with users arise when newer editors are upset because an article they created has been marked for deletion. They often feel singled out or insulted if their topic has been marked not notable. In these instances, I aim to AGF and explain Misplaced Pages's policies for notability, NPOV, what WP is not, etc. Often, these early editors are far from vandals, but simply unaware that articles need to meet certain criteria. Plenty of them go on to be valuable editors, so we have every reason to err on the side of not biting.

General comments

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

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

Discussion

Support

1. Support because beating Neuro to an edit is fun. Seriously though: Good contributions, excellent answer to q.3 and I trust the nom (although probably not with my wallet :P). Ironholds (talk) 08:37, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
2. Support - As nom, and occasional Ironholds hater. — neuro 08:38, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
3. Support because beating Neuro is fun (edit-conflicting with him less so), and because she let me sleep in her apartment once. Oh yeah, and trustworthy and all that, too. — Werdna • talk 08:39, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
4. Suppport - clue and trust are there, no reason not to support. Matt (Talk) 09:06, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
5. Support Well qualified candidate, clean block log and a nice mix of defending the wiki and improving it. WereSpielChequers 10:06, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
6. Support Very good editor, knows what they're doing, works hard to put good stuff in, and flag rubbish stuff to be taken out. Good mix as far as I'm concerned. --Ged UK (talk) 11:20, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
7. Support > helpful and pleasant. ╟─TreasuryTag►contribs─╢ 11:40, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
8. yes - //roux   11:51, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Oppose Good user but I would not trust her with the mop at the moment. She wants to work in speedy deletion but her tagging is less than good. Let me elaborate:
   • Mistaken A1 for an article with clear context
   • A7 on an article that makes claims of notability (owner of multiple newspapers)
   • A3 one minute after creation (another one like that, here an A7)
   • A7 on article with clear claims of notability
   • Good faith attempt at a game report but no test page
   • A7 on an article about someone who has a notable school named in his honor (that should be enough claim of notability to fail A7)
   • Incorrect G11 (how can sth be advertising if the product is not sold anymore?)
   • A1 with clear context (Another one)

   And that is just within the last week (and I left out most of those where she realized her mistake). We have a shortage of admins at CSD, I know that, I cleared CAT:CSD the last days almost alone for several hours. But I cannot support someone to help with it if they make such basic mistakes so frequently. The candidate seems overeager to delete on sight and I fear she will continue with such mistakes when allowed to delete herself. At the moment I advise against this candidate, although it is a pity given the good contributions overall. But this is too grave to overlook. Regards SoWhy 10:35, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

   Comment - SoWhy - Thank you for your feedback. As Neurolysis mentioned, I do a ton of CSD'ing each day, and definitely I make some mistakes along the way. Whenever this happens, I try to as fast as possible fix the mistake, apologize to all involved, and explain what happened if a user is confused. And definitely, if a hangon tag is present, I will investigate the subject again to try and find the notability or content that the article in its first form could not convey.

   That said, while the CSD criteria are reasonably well defined, deciding if something meets the criteria and which one can be open to interpretation. Many of the diffs you provided are edge cases which I think can simply be interpreted differently, so I'd like to address them individually:

   • Mistaken A1 for an article with clear context I do believe this could qualify in sufficient lacking in context, as the only tie that this entry provides to the world is a name with no Misplaced Pages article.
   • A7 on an article that makes claims of notability (owner of multiple newspapers) This one is definitely an edge-case, and certainly it could be argued that owning newspapers is an indication of why the subject is important. For this reason, when the user made an edit to my talk page asking about the tag, I declined my own speedy and instead helped wikify and source the article. I also want to point out that the A7 tag is not exactly a mark of the subject being notable, but rather if there is any indication of why the subject is important. It's a slightly lower standard than notability, which is often more suited to an AfD or Prod.
   • A3 one minute after creation (another one like that, here an A7) The question here is time (this article was marked quickly) rather than the tag (the article indeed had no content). The reason I am willing to mark pages for speedy deletion very shortly after creation is because speedy is just that - a tag for deletion, not deletion itself. It alerts the article creator that something is wrong, and gives them the chance to correct it (via the hangon tag, another edit, using the talk page, using my talk page, etc). This is very different than deleting an article very quickly, which I feel that admins should not do (except in cases of vandalism, attack, nonsense, etc). My personal take is that if a page qualifies for speedy, it should be marked as such without need for much delay. Then the editor should be given time to contest it or to fix it, and if that fails then the article will be deleted. After all, an editor is warned when creating a page that "an article without references will likely be deleted quickly."
   • A7 on article with clear claims of notability I applied the tag here because while the claim itself would indicate notability, I searched for the name of the person and could find absolutely no evidence that they exist. I can see how you could argue that since the article provides a claim to notability and the problem is that the person in question appears not to meet that claim, a PROD or AfD explaining this would have been more appropriate.
   • Good faith attempt at a game report but no test page I agree with my tagging here, but I definitely think this is an edge case that could be interpreted a few ways. I applied the test speedy tag because the content appeared to be some sort of copy/paste from a blog or other article without any indication the author was trying to format the page like an article.
   • A7 on an article about someone who has a notable school named in his honor (that should be enough claim of notability to fail A7) This one is truly my mistake - I did not notice that the name of the school mentioned was the same as the subject of the article.
   • Incorrect G11 (how can sth be advertising if the product is not sold anymore?) My opinion is that advertising is no more appropriate if the item in question is hard or impossible to purchase - it's more a concern of tone and style. The test of the G1 tag is whether an article "exclusively promotes some entity and that would need to be fundamentally rewritten to become encyclopedic" - not whether an attempt is necessarily being made to sell the reader the item. Incidentally, I personally feel that articles written as advertisements should be either deleted or the POV parts removed until they can be substantially rewritten. That's why, after this speedy tag was declined, I came back and removed some of the advertising language and helped to wikify it.
   • A1 with clear context I think the context here is questionable - I read the link that was provided before I applied the speedy tag and could not verify the source to be notable or true in any way. (Another one) I must admit I did not understand the context here and thought the page might be nonsense. That's why I removed my own CSD tag when the editor provided enough information (the subject pharmacology) for me to identify it.

   In summary, the process of patrolling new pages is unfortunately never cut/dry black/white, and the ones above I feel are for the most part edge cases which could be interpreted and marked different ways. I suppose what I'd like to point out are two items. First, in many of the above cases where a speedy deletion tag is declined, you'll see I go back to that article and try to wikify/tag it to meet Misplaced Pages standards. My motivation is not purely deleting bad content on Misplaced Pages, but making sure the content here is good - so if an article about a notable subject is written as an advertisement, I'm happy to fix the article and have it stay rather than delete it. Secondly, I want to point out that, as I mentioned, I feel there's an important difference between marking pages for deletion and actually deleting them. Honestly, I think people should mark pages for deletion more liberally than they would actually delete them, and if I become an admin this will be the tack I take. As an admin, rather than quickly deleting many pages as fast as I mark them for deletion today, I would give the editor time to fix whatever problem was called out in the speedy tagging and err on the side of improving an article to Misplaced Pages standards rather than deleting it. I see marking a page for speedy as the first line of defense to flag a problem, but actually deleting a page is the final say and I think all effort must be given to take each case individually and make a decision fairly. FlyingToaster 11:39, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

2. Oppose per SoWhy. X MarX the Spot (talk) 11:29, 20 February 2009 (UTC)