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Welcome!

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Hello, Spacecraft Man, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

You may also want to take the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit The Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Tokyogirl79 (。◕‿◕。) 06:59, 22 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Becoming an admin

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Hi! I know that you were asking SpacemanSpiff about this, but I thought I'd give my two cents here as well.

My basic advice for you is to learn as much about Wikipedia as possible. The thing about 2-3 months and 1000 edits is that this is considered to be the minimum amount of experience someone would need before they should even begin to think about requesting admin status. The reality is that this alone will not be enough to become an admin, as the people taking part in the RfA will be looking at the quality of your edits, the amount of experience you have in multiple areas, and your interactions with other editors. It's actually fairly rare for someone to pass RfA with less than a year's experience and the RfA process can be fairly rough. I personally wouldn't recommend it within your first year of editing, since it can take a fairly long time to really get the hang of the ins and outs of Wikipedia - and the site's rules and guidelines (both said and unsaid) can frequently be confusing. The reason why RfA is so hard to pass and people expect so much out of an admin is that the position itself can be pretty stressful. As an admin, if you make a mistake people are more likely to give you less leeway than they would a non-admin, because you're expected to know more/better. Plus you will inevitably have to deal with arguments or other tense situations between editors. It's not required that an admin get involved with situations between editors, but as someone who generally tries to avoid drama on here I can say that at some point you will get drawn into something at some point.

I'm not trying to deter you, just kind of give you a head's up of what you're getting in for. My best recommendation is to just take it slow and learn at your own pace. Don't rush through things in order to become an admin, because there are a lot of things that you can really learn best as a regular editor. I would heavily recommend looking at WP:ADVENTURE, one of the basic training programs on Wikipedia for a general overview (since you're new), and I'd also suggest using the WP:TEAHOUSE on a regular basis with any questions, no matter how small. From there you can get started on improving articles and learning about the guidelines for notability and sourcing. Once you're ready you can dip a toe into article creation. I recommend looking at improving articles before starting to create them, as pooling together sources to justify an article creation can be difficult, especially when you're just starting to learn about sourcing and notability. Once you're ready, try taking part in the articles for deletion process. This is something I wouldn't recommend getting into right away, as you'll need to know a bit about guidelines and the like. (You could probably get started on this about the same time you feel ready to start make articles.) You might also want to look into joining a WikiProject devoted to a particular subject, like medicine, anime, or books, as that's a good way to learn policies and also help improve Wikipedia.

Other than that, there are other areas to participate in, but none that I'd recommend straight off the bat since those can have a steep and sometimes unpleasant learning curve, like WP:ANI - and going in there without a good amount of knowledge about Wikipedia is not recommended.

I know that you were asking about being an admin, but part of being an admin is knowing about the policies and about general editing on Wikipedia. The stuff that you do that is admin only (article deletions, for example) will require a good knowledge about the stuff you learned as a general editor. Tokyogirl79 (。◕‿◕。) 06:58, 22 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]