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thesis

Discuss

Thanks for trying to come up with a compromise. I like the fact that it shifts attention away from "unsourced" BLPs (many of which are at least partially sourced). I'm actually more worried about some of our heavily sourced but inaccurate BLPs, (no current examples, but I've fixed quite a few in my time). I'm not convinced that semi-protection is the right answer and am concerned that it won't stop sneaky vandalism from those clued up enough to create an account and get it autoconfirmed; whilst it would lose us the protection of vandalfighting IPs. I think a more work

The thesis seems to have got some things right, but missed some things we could have tipped the author off about. Only registered accounts that have edited more than once are included, so all the IP edits are ignored. I couldn't see if they were including deleted contributions in the study, if not this would filter out a lot of the supposed zero edit accounts. Bots are filtered out and he's recognised that some accounts run bots and filtered some out - but he may not have realised that an account can have both bot and non bot edits. His unwritten assumptions also include a 1to1 ratio between accounts and editors - so if anyone wants to improve on this they'd just need an extra module that trawled for the various templates that disclose multiple accounts. I think the report over emphasises the importance of both admins and FAs, and misses some meaningful information "although we cannot know on which date a certain article was promoted to the FA state". Measuring the reputation of authors by what proportion of their edits are to FAs is an interesting approach, and if we were to adopt it as a measure for RFA would lead to more copy editors and reviewers who correct and support rather than critique at FAC and more wannabee admins putting FAs on their watchlists so they can rollback vandalism on FAs.

application

I've been here a while, (though recently been through wp:CHU). I first considered going for admin in September 2007 because I wanted to edit a protected page, but after realising what a big deal it was I thought I'd hold off a year before applying and see if I still wanted to do it. Since then I've reverted a fair bit of vandalism, using almost every variant that Arnon Chaffin has to offer. I think that the only vandals I've reported who haven't subsequently been blocked are the ones who were being blocked whilst I was reporting them.

Done the questions and read most of the policies.

Disambiguated enough Queens to found a dynasty or fill a stadium, protected those interested in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front from a link they might be offended by, and tweaked enough Atlases to keep the Sky up.

Got through my difficult early period without actually getting blocked for edit warring, (both my current and former home IP addresses seem to have behaved themselves as well).

Added an image or two, including one which has been nabbed by the Britannica.

I think I understand why Gnaa, Nigeria doesn't yet merit a mention on GNAA though it may well do so yet as it probably exists, and I know why the trolls of the same name don't merit a mention.

I've made some hopefully useful edits, including to some quite controversial pages. My watchlist currently includes a comic, a Scientist, a Rock Star, an island and a couple of rude words that I'm not going to link to from here.

My involvement in deleting stuff has been minor but usually sound, and has been growing since I've started patrolling New Pages.

I've been a Rollbacker for several moons, and I hope you'll agree that I've used that tool responsibly.

Oh and I've made one or two contributions to this great Encyclopaedia.

To pre-empt a few of the usual questions:

I appreciate that some Wikipedians regard the current desysopping process as imperfect, but instead of offering some non-standard recall process for myself, I'd suggest that those who are uncomfortable with the system review the whole desysoping process.
I'm olde enough to have run computer programs with punch cards, but believe I'm still as responsible as I was as a teenager, so please don't hold my age against me.
The only situation that I can think of where it might be appropriate to Ignore all rules and use cool down blocks would be the purely hypothetical one where both edit warrers were clearly inebriated and needed protecting from themselves.
Yes this is a self nomination. Not sure whether that's a sign of being more power hungry than those who go through other routes, but if anyone has analysed what happens to self noms ally profiled rogue admins and found a pattern of them being disproportionately self noms then I'll withdraw.
Should consensus override verifiability? Hmmmm if the consensus is "Please please no more examples of Moai in popular culture" then yes that overrides a verified source that some Aquarium has full size fake Moai in its shark tank. Equally if someone found a source that called Sean Connery British rather than Scottish then I'd stick with consensus (or at least look for another source as I did in this incident), but normally yes verification trumps consensus.

Lastly I neither own nor would be likely to fit into a spidey suit, and promise not to press Wikipedia's self destruct button if you entrust me with the means so to do.

So:

Initially there are three areas where I can see myself using the tools:

Non-contentious edits to protected pages.
Deleting

and whilst that isn't the only thing I'd do as an admin one thing I would like to do is to be able to make such uncontroversial edits to protected pages.

temp

I suspect that some aspects of the Wikipedia:RfA Review would now be out of date anyway. But as you say this is a different angle. A while ago I trawled through unsuccessful RFAs looking for possible RFA candidates. Whether they were bitter or not, quite a few unsuccessful RFA candidates stopped editing after their RFA failed. I did find both my 65% fail last Autumn, and my success this spring quite memorable; and the first run a little bit stressful. But there were some very nice comments during my first RFA that kept me here, and thats one reason why I'm concerned to keep RFA civil - especially when people are likely to fail. As for retreating to secluded areas, yes I took the dwama boards off my watchlist and my talkpage went very quiet. I remember it feeling quite odd when the RFA spotlight moved on and I was yesterday's curiousity (I've checked my talkpage history for last October and it was a couple of days after my RFA failed before I got another message,. Ϣere SpielChequers 22:21, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

As for trying to change RfA, yes I am trying to change things, but I don't consider that means "the uncomfortable corollary that the Wikipedia model may not be working". I'm trying to reform RFA through the wikipedia process - making a case as to why I think this process is headed in the wrong direction in the hope that people will try and workout a solution, the Wikipedia model will only have failed . So far things have gone better than I expected, I think we've found and fixed the problem that may well have caused the intensification of the drought last November. caused the was has gone wrong and come up with solutions. We've already idenified and fixed the probable cause of the

Whilst I agree that we need an effective recall process for admins; I'm not convinced either by the argument that if our number of admins is dwindling we need to be more cautious in the absence of such we need RFA to be I don't know how widespread those perceptions are, but I am aware that there are editors who are uncomfortable with the current arrangements for de-adminning. If there were many editors out there who consider admins in general to be unfair then I would expect more attention at RFA as to whether a candidate had exhibited fairness in their actions.

This new test could, if it collected a large enough sample, give us a percentage of articles deleted incorrectly; and of articles deleted where there is some dispute as to whether they should have been deleted. This could quantify the percentage of speedy deleted articles that should not have been deleted, which has been estimated above as 2% of new articles. More importantly IMHO it would seek to measure the percentage of valid articles that get deleted - I measure the efficiency of my spam filter in terms of how much of the mail I want gets trapped by it. We should measure the speedy deletion process in terms of the chance of an article that should not be deleted being deleted, and then how much higher that chance is if you are a new editor submitting your first article as opposed to a more established editor or an admnin or autoreviewer. There is a flood of dreck at newpage patrol, and we need to filter out the attacks, vandalism and other legitimate deletions before we calculate the chance of a newbies article being deleted.

It can be more than fifty years. My driving license expires on my seventieth birthday, and after that its up to my GP. I was a teenager when I passed my test so it was initially a licence for more than fifty years - which I appreciate is quite a longterm thing by Internet standards. I think the British driving licence is an extreme model, partly because the only way they know you are using it is to count the speeding fines. I do think that medium term we could do with an autoretire on disused admin accounts, but it needs to be after a gap so long that it becomes a useful precaution to make.

New Page patrol is very effective at removing attack pages, blatant vandalism and clearly unimportant people. By the time an article is a week old you will scarcely ever see "**** is our totally awesome High school prom queen" type articles. But that aspect of new page patrol had been working well for a longtime before stickyprods came in. totally

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stat

http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pages/index.php?name=pt1+pt2&namespace=0&redirects=noredirects

6a. You have little recent activity in AN/I, none in dispute resolution and none in deletion discussions, areas that RfA candidates are often expected to participate. Can you explain why you have not participated in these areas?

A. I took AN/I off my watchlist after my first RFA failed, I put it back a few days ago when I decided to run again. If this RFA succeeds then I will participate there again as I think what I did in threads like this was quite useful, if it fails I probably won't. A month ago when I'd reached a three month interval from my last RFA I started consulting some of my opposers from last time as to what I might need to work on if I was ever to run again, and the response I got was mostly quite positive, if one my former oppsers had said "ask me again after you've participated in 30 deletion discussions" then I'd probably have done so, but none of them did. On the couple of occasions that I've looked at AFD I think I've wound up fixing basic errors in the articles rather than debating their fate. I suspect if I'd gone down the admin coaching route I would have been advised to work in those areas, but at present that's not where my interests lie.

7. You support Flagged Revisions. Can you explain why you feel it is necessary from a policy standpoint?

A. I support it from a practical standpoint, when there's a good IP edit on say Beaver (recently semi protected) I think it would be a much better use of everyone's time if the first watchlister to look at the edit flagged it as good, rather than over a couple of hours have all of us who watchlist that article check that edit (though on a cautious note I do wonder how the system could cope with the 25 edits per minute that some high profile articles can get). As for from a policy standpoint then the trite answer is that if after the trial we have consensus to make it policy, then it is policy. However I am concerned that there is a tradeoff, and that this technology could undermine our third pillar "anyone can edit" replacing it with "anyone can edit, but not necessarily in realtime", in order to comply with our second, fourth and especially first pillar "All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy". However we live in an imperfect world and sometimes have to make choices, if the trial is successful then I believe that flagged revisions would make Wikipedia a better Encyclopaedia.

Thanks for your answer and for the invitation, however I would prefer to keep this discussion on Wikipedia. I assume from your answer that your project isn't a retrospective test, but may I suggest that you reconsider and make it such? as don't intend to that would actively harm biographies of living people

In my experience if the opposers find serious problems in a candidate's contributions then that RFA will fail, the fact that we've recently had three . However one of the areas that concerns me about RFA at present is that it seems to be turning from a review of the candidate's contributions to an open book exam. I'm not opposed to asking any questions, though there have been a few recently which have left me wondering why

Thankspam

Hi , very very belated thanks for your support in my RFA, which passed by an embarrassingly wide margin, there's a full glitzy Oscar style version of my acceptance speech here. One of the advantages of being so slow in working my way through the participant list is that I've now got enough mop experience to cunningly combine a thankyou with a request for feedback. So far I've mainly been getting involved in CSD which has really boosted my experience in article rescue, but if you look at my deleted contributions there is some detritus from articles I've unsuccessfully attempted to rescue.

== RFA == Dear , much thanks for your support in my RFA, . Since you might not be the only one who didn't spot what my name means I've included in the full Oscar version of my Thankspam which is [[Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/WereSpielChequers 2#Thanks|here]] if you want to see the unpersonalised version:-) ~~~~

Hi ChildofMidnight, I've reread your replies to my comments on both your talk page and wt:RFA and I didn't take anything as rude or sarcastic. I'm well aware that my specialism in spell checking means that if I make a typo myself I'm fair game for a bit of joshing. As for spell checking being a dangerous business, well I only search in article space when I'm typo hunting, and I can do hundreds of edits there without any feedback at all. I recently patrolled solider and changed 90% of the 148 occurrences on wikipedia to soldier without anyone commenting; I've deleted over a thousand articles in the last couple of months and declined less than a hundred deletions but those deletions I've declined generate far more discussion - mostly positive, though I have had people ask me what my sources were. If there was a debate as to whether fixing typos in talkspace should be acceptable I'd be for that change, but I respect the current consensus. Ϣere SpielChequers 09:15, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Article contributions are a de facto requirement at RFA, I suspect I'm the only person to pass RFA this year who didn't include any article writing in my best contributions. What is not and never has been a requirement is audited contributions such as FAs and GAs. There are several reasons for this, one is that the FA process checks the article not the nominator. In theory an FA candidate article could have started with a bunch of spam in it, and provided one of the other editors removes that it is no bar to FA. At RFA we audit the contributions of the candidate, a successful candidate needs to have made useful contributions like this to the encyclopaedia. I'm an occasional reviewer at FAC and I would regard it as a misinterpretation of my review to interpret support for an FA as an audit of the nominator of that FA for adminship. This is partly because FAC reviewing is done very differently to marking a candidates coursework, at FAC if you spot an error you fix or at least query it so the nominator can fix it, that is a good way to get articles to featured status, but not a good way to assess the work of one individual .Some FA candidates get quite a bit of work during the review process, others sail through to bring Linking RFA and FAC would I fear be very damaging for both., it woulAs well as the risk of .GAs are not required to become an admin, and it would in my view be potentially damaging to the FA process if they were.

I've started more than my fair share of these stats based threads, so I'd like to answer your comment these self-pitying threads are doing more harm than good. How to Lie with Statistics is quite relevant. Firstly I'm already an admin, so I dispute that finding proof that A We have a problem at RFA and B what that problem is, is self pity. Secondly I don't agree that discussing and analyzing a problem is doing more harm than good, even if the only change we have achieved so far is to convince some of the sceptics that we have a problem. A few months ago the prevailing meme here was that there was no evidence that RFA was broken, now anyone still holding that view has a lot of evidence to explain away. I hope that in the next few months either the RFA isn't broken crowd will find a convincing explanation for these statistics, or the consensus here will shift to one that recognises we have a problem and is looking for ways to fix it. As for How to Lie with Statistics, I've read that book, and as far as I know I have not used any of its techniques, if you think