Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/RoySmith

The following discussion is preserved as an archive of a successful request for adminship. Please do not modify it.

[edit] RoySmith

Final (27/6/0) ended 16:37 October 9, 2005 (UTC) (UTC)

RoySmith (talk • contribs) – I've been editing for almost a year with 1600 edits [1]. I've been quite active on Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation, and spend a lot of time reverting vandalism to pages I watch. It's for this latter task that I seek adminship; to make it easier to revert pages using the fancy admin revert tool. I see that some people seem to be hung up on proper use of edit summaries. I use them most of the time, often don't bother on talk pages, occasionally forget, and once in a while produce bizarrely incorrect ones when Safari surprises me with an auto-fill on the text box that I didn't expect. Such is life. RoySmith 16:37, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here:

Support

1. Only just, FireFox 17:06, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
2. Support Ryan Norton ^{T | @ | C} 21:23, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
3. Support. Looks good. Linuxbeak | Talk | Desk 22:40, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
4. Support. Always uses edit summaries, almost daily edits, although participation to AfD has been low lately. Deserves the tools. feydey 23:45, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
5. Support been here for a long time and wasn't involved in anything bad.  Grue  05:29, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
6. Support. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 05:48, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
7. Merovingian (t) (c) 06:42, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
8. Support. This edit count inflation is getting out of control. 1600 edits is "way too low of an edit count for an admin"? It wasn't too long ago that 1000 was the magic number, then it seemed to rise to 1500. Is it at 2000 now? Not everyone has the time to make 10+ edits a day. Carbonite | Talk 19:30, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

   comment since your directly quoting me... 1000 has never been my standard, hell I know SOCKPUPPETS with more than 1000 edits. The fact of the matter is 1600 total edits is not enough to spot tendancies of a person. Hell we've seen users with many more than 1600 edits flaunt the rules (e.g. everyking, ed poor, rickk just to name a couple) at this point I dont think there is enough history to see if said person has the temperment for admin powers. My standard is not just editcountitis, but involves a measure of time as well. I personally prefer AT LEAST 2500 edits, but more importantly at LEAST 1 full year of editing. I think that this is typically adequate to gauge someones tendancies and agressiveness. However those with low yearly edit counts are also infrequent enough contributors as to not give enough material to base a decision upon. thats my $0.02 worth anyway  ALKIVAR™ 03:14, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

   A study done over this past summer showed that admin nominees with more than 1000 edits but less than 2000 edits were successful nominations 48% of the time. 2001 edits to 3000 the figure was 83%, a 35% increase. Indeed, the bar does seem to be 2000 at which voters seem to think a nominee is suddenly imbued with the qualities that would make a good admin. --Durin 20:24, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

   Thanks, Durin! Very informative, if a bit disturbing. Maybe edit count standards are somehow linked to fuel prices. Not sure how else to explain 1600 edits being considered a rather small number. Carbonite | Talk 21:14, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

9. SupportTintin 21:52, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
10. Support. El_C 23:41, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
11. Support--Exir Kamalabadi^Esperanza 03:51, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
12. Support And those with editcountitis can eat my sock. Bratsche^{talk | Esperanza} 04:15, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
13. Support, damn the editcountitis. Ral315 W_S 17:04, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
14. Support. I'd rather have a thousand good occasional admins than a single busy poor admin. Unfocused 19:14, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
15. →Journalist >>talk<< 22:15, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
16. Support. A fine editor with plenty of edits to prove it. Also, I strongly support the position of others about editcountitis, it may not be fatal but sure can make some for some distorted appraisals. Virtually all of the opposition has to do with edit count and nothing to do with his quality of contribution (except for one who didn't like his comment about edit counts below!). - --hydnjo talk 17:56, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
17. Support. I had fewer edits and a lower rate of edits per day when I became an admin, and find that opposition based on edit count alone to be unreasonable where an editor with 1600 edits is concerned. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 23:04, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
18. Support The editcountitis below is getting ridiculous. Borisblue 01:16, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
19. Support CambridgeBayWeather 01:35, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
20. Support Good response below --Rogerd 02:40, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
21. Support. I'm not worried about the edit count. Like Roy, I believe the correct measure is the total value of his contributions, not the sheer number of individual edits. I was more worried about his self-proclaimed deletionism, but I couldn't find a single case where I disagreed with him on his AfD vote (and I did look!). I am not a deletionist myself, but I do trust this man with the "Delete" button. Owen× ☎ 22:58, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
22. Support - Has shown his mettle in admin-type functions. Doesn't seem to suffer from editcountitis! Sunray 06:48, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
23. Support. RoySmith hasn't done anything silly, as far as I can see, and has shown interest in the maintenance side. I'm slightly disappointed with the amount of material he added to the encyclopaedia (at least in the block of edits that I checked), but we need different kinds of editors and also different kind of admins. On the statistics: he's been here for almost a year and took about 4 months for the last 1000 edits; nothing to alarm me. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:30, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
24. Andre (talk) 04:59, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
25. Support. Responsible contributor. --HappyCamper 15:11, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
26. Support level-headed interaction with other users. Edit count largely irrelevant and I empathise with Safari surprises me with an auto-fill on the text box! Dlyons493 Talk 17:02, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
27. Support as a fellow Mac-user. Nicholas 11:38, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Oppose been here too long to only have 1600 edits. Should be very active on wikipedia to be an admin. I can't support. Private Butcher 16:56, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

   He's been editing almost every other day since June, though. --Blackcap | talk 18:25, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

2. Oppose way too low of an edit count for an admin. Anyone spending "a lot of time reverting vandalism" as user states should have a much larger edit count.  ALKIVAR™ 07:27, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
3. Oppose. As the nominee said, 1600 edits/year. It's a rather small number. Deryck C. 16:37, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
4. Oppose for reasons stated above. PedanticallySpeaking 17:06, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
5. Oppose for the way he responded to Durin below. JobE6 Image:Peru flag large.png 20:05, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
6. --Boothy443 | comhrá 06:59, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Neutral

Comments

• A chart showing this user's edits along with a total number of edits line and average edits per day line is available here: Image:RoySmith-edits.png. I offer this not as a more refined version of editcountitis, but as just one tool to help evaluate an admin nominee with a somewhat low edit count on Wikipedia. --Durin 13:58, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
• Uses edit summaries 81% of the time, 86.6% of the time over the last 500 edits. Average edits per day is 5.3, 7.7 over the last 90 days. --Durin 13:58, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

• I don't know if it's appropriate (or even wise) for me to comment on my own case, but I'll be bold and do so anyway. I'm honestly a little surprised at how much weight is being given to how many edits I've made. The numbers are what the numbers are, and there seem to be plenty of good tools to slice and dice the stats and make pretty pictures out of them. Make what you will of the numbers, but I can't help wonder if this is the right way to judge a candidate. Does anybody care how many briefs Harriet Miers has written, or do they care what she wrote in them? Do people marvel at how many at-bats Hank Aaron had, or do they celebrate how many home runs he hit? If I had made 10 meaningless edits per day for the past year, my edit count would be up over 3000 by now; would that make me a better candidate? I would feel much more comfortable about the process if somebody were to say, "I watched Roy's actions during XXX and based on that I have my doubts about his judgement, character, wisdom, temperment, intelligence, whatever". At least that would be a reasonable objection. Likewise, I'd be much happier to read somebody say about me, "I really liked the way he handled XYZ", than, "Roy's got a awesome edit count". --RoySmith 21:41, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

• RoySmith, the creation of the charts and the statistics on your average edits and use of edit summaries is intended to get peopel to stop depending upon simple edit counts as a means of judging the worthiness of a nominee. I wholeheartedly agree that edit counts are a very, very poor way of trying to objectively measure a candidate. Indeed, objective measures are difficult at best. Having the chart and some figures on your use of edit summaries and your activity level gives us additional tools to evaluate you; it is not intended to be the only tool. Anyone doing so is making a very poor choice. Please see User:Durin/Admin nominee charts. Thank you, --Durin 22:11, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Questions for the candidate
A few generic questions to provide guidance for voters:

1. What sysop chores, if any, would you anticipate helping with? (Please read the page about administrators and the administrators' reading list.)

A. As stated above, I do a lot of vandalism fixing, and cleanup of dab pages.

2. Of your articles or contributions to Wikipedia, are there any about which you are particularly pleased, and why?

A. Created {{Disambig-cleanup}} and the associated Category:Disambiguation pages in need of cleanup. I'm proud of this for two reasons; first because I think it was a useful tool for the project, and second because in creating them, I had to learn a few bits of wiki-technology to get it to work right.

3. Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or do you feel other users have caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?

A. Absolutely. One of my earliest conflicts was with User:Supercool Dude (who I believe is the same person as User:24.44.23.111) regarding many edits he was making to City Island (New York) and a number of other related articles. They weren't quite vandalism, but the quality of writing (structure, diction, grammar, spelling, conformance to the MoS, etc) was quite low, and included many statements which were both difficult (if not impossible) to believe and not supported by references. He also had a possessive attitude about what he wrote, insisting that they were his articles. It was a challenge to both improve the articles and avoid getting embroiled in conflict, but I believe I was (for the most part) successful at both.

BTW, are the recent edits to Sextant by User:201.145.99.216 a covert test of my ability to deal with wiki-stress? If so, how am I doing? :-) --RoySmith 22:28, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

The above adminship discussion is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the talk page of either this nomination or the nominated user). No further edits should be made to this page.