User:Magog the Ogre/Admin coaching/Lesson 1

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia 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: I plan to work on CAT:CSD, WP:AIV, image related speedy deletion and discussion. I plan to work on some of the mundane or difficult work like WP:SPI and WP:SCV.

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

A: Definitely my uploads for the city footprints for for banks: [1]. A picture speaks a thousand words; seeing where a bank does its operations is among the most important pieces of information in an article, and not a lot of other people have the programming wherewithal to create images like that. They often exist but are about never free enough for Wikipedia.

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: See #5 below. I hate edit warring, so I try to stay away from those disputes. If someone pushes to edit against me, and is obviously in the wrong, it can be handled by calling community attention to the page (e.g., someone is pushing the point of view that Germany was forced to invade Poland in WWII: I would take the issue to a military history page or a central/western Europe page). If someone pushes to edit against me, and it's less obvious, then WP:RFC may be the proper venue as well.

Questions from FASTILY

1. How comfortable are you with working with media files and image policy on Wikipedia? (i.e. WP:NFC, WP:NFCC, WP:IUP, ect.) [Rate on a scale of one to ten - one being "uncomfortable" and ten being "master"]

A: 9. I will come out with a huge amount of chutzpah. Look at all the images I've uploaded. But far more importantly, look at the work I've done on images, whether recategorizing or tagging as move to commons, etc. But just as importantly, I spend a lot of time just observing. I am familiar with the cc-by (legal) vs. cc-by-nc (illegal here) vs. outright copyright vs. derivative images vs. some images being legal in this country but not abroad (e.g., images created before 1923 outside the US, but where the author died less than 70 years ago). I even once saw a deletion debate on commons about deleting the Mosa Lisa image, because France has different laws concerning what's considered a derivative.

2. How familiar are you with WP:CSD in general?

A: 9 or 10. Again, chutzpah, but I can prove it. Most CSD deletions fall under a7 (non-notable music, person, club, group); another good large amount come from G11 or G12 (copyright, spam, respectively). But just as important is what doesn't fall under speedy deletion policy. That includes non-obvious hoaxes, non-neutrality violations, poorly written junk (that's at least legible), etc.

3. How familiar are you with Wikipedia's blocking policy in general? [one to ten]

A: 0. Blocks should be punitive, and short-term cool off blocks are good. Also, I encourage administrators to block people they are in a dispute with, and any administrator can just undo another's block willy-nilly if s/he feels so disposed. In fact, if one administrator gets mad at another, it's entirely appropriate to block that person. Also, if you ignore everything I just said, you're probably getting close to the proper policy on blocking.

4. Do you do much anti-vandalism work?

A: I've used huggle a decent amount; well over half my edits are surely antivandalism. I've also used Lupin's Javascript tool.

5. (Be honest) Have you ever engaged in any sort of incivility or harassment of other users?

A: If I have, I've forgotten. I was pretty hotly mad when someone deleted an article I created on Spanish Wikipedia, and the deletion discussion had some of the worst non-policy based arguments I possibly could have thought of. Not to mention someone else just recreated the article a few weeks later and that time it stood. Grr. But in all serious, yes, I can sometimes blow a bit of a fuse IRL, I admit that, but I think I've edited pretty civilly if you look at my history. I can't think of any time off the top of my head.

6. Have you written/contributed majorly to any articles? If so, which article(s)?

A: See my user page: that's the ones I've created. I got a lot of heat in my RFA for not sourcing them as biographies, though there was no negative content. I've also put a lot of time into a program I wrote that scrapes data and creates maps for many banks in the US. See this

7. What do you know about Wikipedia's page protection policies?

A: It boils down to: semi-protection: only for excessive vandalism (usually multiple per day), and designed not to be permanent. Full-protection: for disputes, to get everyone to stop and discuss. There are exceptions to the rule, e.g., semiprotection might be permanent on some articles like George W. Bush or Jewish according to Jimbo himself, or full-protection should a host of autoconfirmed accounts start to vandalize the same article.

8. Have you ever participated in any WP:XFD debates? If so, how frequently?

A: I can think of maybe one or two. For the most part, I stay away from it as useless process-wonkery and arguing about arguing that contributes nothing to the encyclopedia. Once in a while, e.g., if we decide to get rid of an administrator content-policy violation board, this might come in handy. But no, I haven't. That doesn't mean I'm not familiar with them, or that I don't read them, it's that I think contributing is usually silly.

9. What is your area of expertise on Wikipedia? (e.g. Help Desk, Image policy, article CSDs, article writing, ect etc (pet peeve, this typo is, of mine, Magog the Ogre (talk) 01:42, 7 June 2010 (UTC)). What do you do to contribute there?

A: Image policy; I am also quite familiar with CSD and the requirements to write an article. I haven't worked Help Desk much, but I'm familiar with coding and policy I could do it.

10. What do you hope to accomplish through Admin Coaching? Do you have any specific goals you want to achieve through coaching? Do you have any specific areas you would like to work on/improve on?

A: To learn enough about policies and know what I have to know in order to become an administrator. It's like any coaching or school; it prepares you for what you eventually want. And yes, I want to become an administrator eventually; the fact I already applied once should show that, and I don't think I'm showing an unhealthy amount of ambition.

11. Is there anything else you'd like me to know?

A:

1. I'm a very intelligent individual, I have a computer science degree, and I love policy related things (e.g., I pay attention to politics), so the combination of the two led me to Wikipedia administratorship.
2. I've paid quite a bit of attention, and a lot of times I'll just watch things go on without contributing. No need - the less one speaks, sometimes, the better.
3. BLP seems to be <addendum>usually</addendum> the only time it's ok to invoke WP:IAR without any repercussions.
4. Amanda Bynes is my dream woman. Have you seen her recently, she just gets hotter every year. I didn't think it would be possible, and then those Maxim magazine spreads... OK now I'm getting creepy I'll stop now.

Nice answers to question 10. I've looked over your answers, and I think I have a general idea of what we will need to focus/spend more time on. Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey. Proceed to Lesson 2 please. -FASTILY ^(TALK) 01:41, 11 June 2010 (UTC)