Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Rfc1394

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Rfc1394

Vote here (1/9/3) ending 03:45 13 September 2005 (UTC) Rfc1394 (talk · contribs) - Your nomination/description of the user -- Paul Robinson 03:45, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here:
Well, since I nominated myself it's obvious I would refuse the nomination, of course. NOT.

For a photo of me, see Sepia tone. It was a shameless way (since it was a legitimate article) for me to put a picture of myself in the encyclopedia. I am "a Computer Programmer and Notary public in and for the Commonwealth of Virginia, at large." I have a lot of esoteric interests in many different subjects. I'm also 44 years old.

One of the articles I put up here caused the Virginia State Police to come looking for me. If you look at the article on Woodrow Wilson Bridge, two of the photographs there, the one showing the bridge under construction, and the one showing the sign for the drawbridge, are mine. When I was taking pictures out the window of my car, someone saw my arm extended to take pictures, thought it was some "high powered camera equipment", took down my license number and reported me to the State Police!

So some trooper, in plain clothes, came to see me to ask me some questions. So I pointed out to him that the "high powered camera" was me extending my arm so I could hold a digital camera to aim it out the window, what the person saw were flashes from my taking pictures at night (none of those got used here, they all came out cruddy), and I was doing it to post them here.

He pointed out that I hadn't done anything wrong, I wrote down the website here and mentioned why, e.g. where the article on the bridge mentions it's under construction, a photo of the bridge under construction would be perfect there, just as much as I put a photo of the sign "drawbridge one mile" next to the text where it mentions the bridge is one of the few interstate highways where there is a drawbridge.

It's been several weeks and I haven't been arrested yet, so I figure that they must have believed me. Paul Robinson 04:31, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

Rfc1394: Round 2 As per comments made here, I will attempt to answer them. I had no idea my putting in this application would generate so much hostility and anger or I might have reconsidered bothering. Perhaps I have made a mistake if I have generated as much animosity as I see from the comments here. (If I'm misreading your tone, I apologize.) I see a number of things that need to be done (from some of the todo lists and some of the things I have noticed) at an administrative level that nobody seems to be doing and I thought I could help, since I'm not in a position to donate money.

I had some thoughts on how to address the load balancing and service outage issues (edits are sometimes failing, sometimes indicated as failing but actually succeeding, and there appear to be scaling problems). I can make those suggestions but I think it would be premature to do so since I am, to some extent ignorant of what is happening here, and I think I should reduce my ignorance first, as I'll explain below.

Now, perhaps those are not addressed by applying to be an administrator, but I thought it might be better if I learned something about how Wikipedia works with respect to system maintenance before proposing changes to its operation. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and proposing things (even with good intentions) when I am potentially ignorant of what they do or whether they are useful might either get me labeled a fool, a kook, or incompetent. (I will probably get labelled those by some people no matter what I do!  :) For my uncompromising stand supporting the rights of individuals, someone once called me a fascist. I had to look up the word to discover it means the exact opposite of what I believe in.)

Otherwise I might have gone a different route and asked to find out how to submit code changes. But I do not want to do that until I know more about how things work. I believe I can't do that if I am simply just an ordinary user with no idea of the operation of things. (Well, I could, but re-read the previous paragraph if you don't understand why I think I can't, or at least, shouldn't). If anyone wants to hear my ideas, feel free to ask.

I want to try to do more, but not at causing dissention in the ranks. (If you're simply expressing disaproval of the application but are not otherwise in disagreement or upset, then again, please understand I have misunderstood your tone.)

By the way, since there seems to be so much dissatisfaction with the term "Administrator," why not change the name to something less, perhaps, frightening and possibly more relevant, like Supervisor. Then, all of the former administrators are now supervisors, and all of them together are, guess what, the Board of Supervisors of Wikipedia!

In fact, I like that term so much I think I'll start using the term Supervisor as I think Administrator is too stuffy, and IMHO Supervisor seems a better fit for what I am talking about doing here.

I also think, if you have questions of the type you are asking me, they should be included in the default template and perhaps added to the pages on administrators; it would have made it clearer to me what is expected of me, and possibly to others. Now maybe these questions are not policy and may be different for every candidate, but if it is one of the things needed to bring consensus, it should be included; it reduces the chance that someone who clearly has no chance of being approved would bother to apply, and getting their nose rubbed into it.

Let me try to answer some of the questions proposed.

Edit summaries I've done changes to articles where the material was plain wrong, in order to correct known errors, and to correct format problems.

  • In The Hospital the article stated that patients were dying strangely; I corrected it to indicate that it was doctors and staff who were having mysterious fatalities. (I've seen the movie, obviously.)
  • In an earlier set of articles on the Justices of the Supreme Court, I traced through the templates being used to discover why some of them produced different sized boxes than others, and discovered a missing size percentage. That took something like crawling through 10 indirections to find.
  • I had a minor issue with someone who disagreed with my creating a new template of something like "Supreme Court Justices 2005-present" instead of allowing them to rename the one "Supreme Court Justices 1994-present" to that. It turned out, in between the time I did that (because of the new appointment of Roberts) and now, Rehnquist died, which means the old template is no longer valid and has to be changed anyway.
    Problem is, there are two classes of articles using that template: articles dealing with issues up through 2005 and those continuing after 2005. All those articles have to be updated, and by leaving the old template in place, the ones that aren't changed remain accurate, and we do not break compatibility on old articles. This reduces the need for immediate maintenance and we can get around to them on any reasonable schedule.
    It turns out that my decision to create a new template instead of renaming the old one proved correct in this case. Whether it was simply a lucky coincidence or a good skill in deciding when to reuse an old one and when to start a new one is a decision I'll allow others to make
  • I've also created a number of templates for the purpose of making articles more consistent and allow them to be somewhat "cleaner", in that, instead of a lot of table wikicodes, it is a macro and a set of parameters that are fairly well obvious. I've been a programmer for decades, I understand the benefits of transclusion quite well, it's the main reason software is such an important part of our world.

Taking things seriously

I've been accused here of not taking things seriously. Since I have a background in legal matters (I've won over 1/2 of the cases I've been prosecuted over). So in that spirit, in this case I'll do the opposite from my usual stand and plead nolo contendre. Or rather, guilty as charged. I take very few things seriously; I'm often very irrelevant and funny. (Or at least I think I am; some people disagree with my sense of humor.) If the issues are not life and death, they don't need to be taken seriously.

Let's face it people, we should be here to have fun and learn things. If you're not having fun, what the hell are you doing here? None of us is getting paid anything, and I don't know about you, but the editing and correcting of articles here is real work, as much effort and trouble as any job that people paid me $20 an hour or more to do.

I do this stuff because it's fun, because I want to learn from the collective intelligence of other people who have taken the time and trouble to let me and hundreds of thousands of other people know these things. To quote William Conrad in the movie -30-, "it's the work of thousands of people, to discover things we wouldn't know about if they hadn't taken the time to go places and find out and tell us about them." And because I want to be part of making this place into, as I put it bluntly, "the best damn encyclopedia ever written." Full stop.

Just because I'm not treating this issue as if it were "as serious as a heart attack" doesn't mean I don't consider what I am applying for in the nature of a professional appointment. I've been a computer programmer for over 24 years and a Notary Public for over 24 months. If I screw up writing a program it merely means that I have to do it over but it is potentially going to cost people money if it goes into production and I wasn't diligent in catching it. If I screw up as a notary, it can cost people money and I could conceivably lose my license. I have fun as a notary, but you can bet your ass I do act professionally. And, sometimes, I take what I'm doing seriously because it is important to others. And that, I think, is the direction I have taken here.

So it's your choice, I thought I could offer my assistance in ways to improve things here. If I have failed to answer relevant questions, please ask them. If you feel I am inadequate to the task, then you should reject my application. The world will go on either way (I'm not "Good Little Anthony" from The Twilight Zone, I can't wish you into the cornfield if you disagree with me), and if you feel that way, what I might have been able to do is a loss for Wikipedia, which will not be known. You'll never miss what you did not have. But I feel, in part, that it is at least slightly unfair that I am, at least in part, held to account to a standard that is no where announced until after I step up to the microphone to announce my candidacy. What you're planning on doing

It's been pointed out that I haven't made clear what I would be doing. To put it bluntly, I have no idea. Let me make that explicitly clear. Until I actually start doing something I have no idea of what the task involves. I don't know what functions an administrator a Supervisor has other than the explanations on some of the pages. But let me put this on you: someone can use Wikipedia hundreds of times, but until they've actually gone out and edited pages they will have no idea of what is involved.

Anyone taking on any new task they've never done before is ignorant of what is involved. So am I. If I'm expected to know in advance what is involved the barrier to entry would be so high as to be unreachable, and I suspect none of you has been asked to meet that standard.

I can guess some of the things to which I might become involved.

  • Going through the user names to find ridiculous ones that have remained unused for over a year or more; these may be throw-away accounts, and the person should be sent a posting to ask if they really use the account, and if, say, after 30 or 60 days go by and they haven't responded, delete the account to free up unused resources and stop clutter.
  • Also accounts that have done nothing, no edits, have no user page, for two years or more, are candidates for deletion, things like that.
  • Go through pages that have been on Afd for a month (or whatever the time figure is) that have consensus to be removed.
  • Immediately remove - and notify the poster - anything we get a DMCA report of alleged copyright violation, as well as speedily restore the page if the poster gives us a counter-DMCA notice claiming non-infringement (lots of people are aware of the take down part but forget about the take back part which is part of the immunity provisions as well.)

I have gone though a number of articles and put category tags on them, but that doesn't require administrator Supervisor priveleges. But once I start to see what is involved in being an administrator a Supervisor I will better understand what things I will do on a regular basis and perhaps, at that time, I can propose things I think will help, like new or better special pages, or database tools to improve things. But as Robert A. Heinlein has said in Metheuselah's Children, "you can't know the taste until you bite it." Until I actually start working with some of the things that need doing, I have no idea what is involved, nor is there any capacity for me to, as I said earlier, is there any capacity for someone who has only used the encyclopedia to understand what is involved in editing pages.

I am willing to answer further questions in the hopes I can answer them and sway people to my side, since I lack the cash to offer adequate bribes nor do I possess enough background information to invoke blackmail. Nor would I; if I had enough information to blackmail people I'd extort money from them, then use that to pay bribes. Anything else would be a waste. Paul Robinson 17:25, 6 September 2005 (UTC) Votes Support

  1. Merovingian (t) (c) 06:19, September 6, 2005 (UTC)

Oppose

  1. For a minute I thought the Playboy model on Sepia tone was you. Obviously not - your image there has been removed. Anyway, as per Denelson83, but I will oppose until you rephrase this nomination properly. Andre (talk) 05:08, September 6, 2005 (UTC)
    As per your comments, I've reverted the photos back to mine until someone comes up with something better than using (as was pointed out to me) a photo from Playboy that could potentially be a copyright violation, and which we don't have a release for. Now maybe we don't need a relase but we don't need to make trouble by using commercial photos either. Paul Robinson 17:25, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  2. Oppose Interesting description. In fact, it was just last night that I asked myself, "Why don't more Playboy bunnies contribute to Wikipedia?" Acetic'Acid 05:11, September 6, 2005 (UTC)
    If someone has some other photos than mine to use that don't subject us to potential infringement issues I have no problem if they want to replace mine. But let's not get into trouble we can stay out of. Paul Robinson 17:25, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  3. Oppose The nomination is strange and the contributions don't seem specially significant. As for Playboy models, one Finnish Playboy model is a very prominent novel and screenplay writer, so why shouldn't Playboy models contribute to Wikipedia? — JIP | Talk 05:56, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
    Perhaps I should have looked at the article first to see if someone changed the photos. My bad, I guess. Paul Robinson 17:25, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  4. Oppose. Lack of edit summaries. You could have at least bothered to put an edit summary when nominating yourself. Oleg Alexandrov 11:52, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
    If this is an important issue, perhaps it should be included in the list of questions. I have added some summaries above. Paul Robinson 17:25, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  5. Oppose, for now. Answer to standard question #1 indicates that the candidate doesn't have a good idea of what he's applying for, and the content and general tone of the nomination indicates he's not taking this very seriously, which is rather puzzling. If this changes, I may reevaluate my vote. android79 14:06, September 6, 2005 (UTC)
    I take very few things seriously; if they're not life and death, I don't need to. See above about some of these questions. Paul Robinson 17:25, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
    Even more reasons to oppose your adminship. Being a Wikipedia editor is lots of fun, but there is also a lot of frustration sometimes, for some people anger, relationship problems, personal revenges etc (yes, things do happen). And an administrator has the power to delete virtually everything on Wikipedia, with some things irrevirsibly (such things did happen). Not speaking about you personally now, but a big fool with a power tool can be a public danger. Oleg Alexandrov 23:07, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  1. Oppose. User self-admittedly has 'no idea' what being an administrator entails, has only a few edits to the Wikipedia and Talk namespaces, and fails to follow the syntax for setting up RfAs. Also, your 'summary' of yourself is a bit excessively long, you could move most of that onto your user page. You should read up a bit more on policy and participate more in the community, and I'd happily support in a few months' time. - ulayiti (talk) (my RfA) 17:47, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  2. Until you give a general description of yourself, I shall abstain from this vote.  Denelson83  04:08, 6 September 2005 (UTC) Opposing this candidate for his non-standard application.  Denelson83  20:34, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  3. Oppose. This editor appears to mean well, but does not appear to understand what adminship involves. Friday (talk) 20:40, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  4. Oppose per Friday. He also seems to be too verbose (this is an RfA not a user subpage), and I'm always a little leery of people who need to debunk every one of their oppose/neutral votes. --Idont Havaname 20:47, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  5. Oppose, per everyone, especially Ulayiti. Wow, what a long profile :)

    Journalist C./ Holla @ me!

  6. Oppose Actions speak louder than words, and you have too much on this page. Bratschetalk | Esperanza 21:50, September 6, 2005 (UTC)

Neutral

  1. I must be missing something...but after looking at the images in Sepia tone I thought, oh well, never mind.--MONGO 05:31, September 6, 2005 (UTC)
  2. I won't oppose because of these grounds, but please make a serious nomination if you really are planning to become an admin. The current state of the nomination is "colorful", to say the least, but it doesn't say much about who you really are. At least it doesn't say what you would like others to think. Titoxd 06:24, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
    I do not have the capacity, nor would I want to tell others what to think. I can simply speak the truth and let them make up their own minds. Paul Robinson 17:25, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
    By the way, how come you're hot when your name is Paul? :P Titoxd 06:26, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
    My bad, I never thought someone would bother with new pictures. Paul Robinson 17:25, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  3. Neutral. I'd like to see a better explanation of exactly what janitorial work the user wishes to participate in. OH, and for all of you who are wondering, check the edit history (summarized as "more relevant image") for the original (correctly gendered) photo.--Scimitar parley 13:46, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

Comments

  • Closing in on 3500 edits (details here) since November 2003. Grutness...wha? 05:16, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
  • Um, all that text isn't necessary, we would prefer to read about your wiki-work. And why would the police come after you if you have a camera? User:Nichalp/sg 05:17, September 6, 2005 (UTC)
  • I have sometimes tended to be long. It is a habit I have in that I tend to write long, then come back and cut. I can always remove material which isn't relevant but it's harder to think of new things than to say them in the first place, or at least I see it that way.

As to the second point, after September 11, everybody and his brother reports anything out of the ordinary and the authorities are on the warpath because they're afraid of another attack, or worse, that someone thinks they knew of something and didn't act on it. The cop who spoke to me said he had visited three other places that day, and in general the items are all routine, but they have to check them out.

People are frightened; why do you think the U.S. Federal Government has made people disappear because of suspicion, and wants the Federal Courts to ignore what they are doing, deny people access to counsel and hold them incommunicado, and allow them to let this continue? They won't even say how many people they are holding and it's because of fear and weakness. Paul Robinson 17:25, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

  • I'm too new to have meaningful input on RfA, but 'This is an encyclopedia, not the Gaza Strip' is possibly the best sentence I've read today. That answer as a whole is steady, though the current description is.. unique. :) -- Soir (say hi) 05:25, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
    • I agree with Soir. --Bhadani 15:14, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
It was the best thing I could think of. There's a saying, "academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small." I could see the potential that Wikipedia could turn into something like that. If being serious is going to lead us in that direction, perhaps we need to take stuff like this a little less seriously.
Paul, administrators are simply regular editors empowered with a few extra abilities: page deletion/undeletion, image deletion, page protection/unprotection, and user blocking/unblocking are the important ones. They use these abilities according to policy. It's still not obvious to me that you are completely aware of the administrators' role on Wikipedia. Admins certainly don't have a hand in coding the site (well, some might, but they are also developers in addition to being admins). I don't know how one becomes a developer, but that's neither here nor there.
Anyway, most of us have expressed confusion at this self-nomination because we can't figure out what you want to do with these extra abilities, and whether you are informed enough to know what they are in the first place. A typical RfA – oh, say, mine, since it's ongoing – would give the nominee a chance to show why he feels that he is ready to be given the keys to the janitor's closet, as it were. You make a reference to deleting old usernames that aren't being used anymore, but as far as I know there's no policy governing that, nor is there any real need to do anything of the sort. Your nomination is a bit like showing up at a job interview and inquiring about the position's duties and qualifications as your first questions for your prospective employer.
I've been active in an area of Wikipedia pretty much since my start here as an editor: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, formerly known as VfD. Since article deletion is one of the administrator's main functions, experience at AfD is one of the ways that an editor can gain experience that might show he is ready for adminship. There are, of course, other ways, but I'm just using myself as an example.
My suggestions are: take a step back here. Look at other editors' RfAs. Read up on the administrator literature. Figure out what an admin does and why it's done, and whether you'd like to be one or not. android79 18:01, September 6, 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. Well, there's bound to be a lot of janitorial work that needs to be done that can't merely be done by ordinary users and I think I might be able to help.
2. Of your articles or contributions to Wikipedia, are there any about which you are particularly pleased, and why?
A. Can't really think of any off hand. I mean, I've done more than 2,500 edits and edited more than 2,000 pages over the more than 20 months that I've had an account here, so it's hard to say. Some pages I've felt I've done more to improve than others. What I am most proud of wasn't on Wikipedia, it was when I thought of putting a quick index on the front page of Wiktionary. I came to realize that a dictionary without a means to go to the index was sorely lacking in functionality. (Wikipedia has fairly good reference points on its front page to find things; this was something Wiktionary lacked.) Perhaps if I have to pick at least one article I've written on Wikipedia, it's the one on the book Down to a Sunless Sea although the big thing is, I don't know if anyone has ever read the article; if one writes a really good article but nobody reads it it was a waste.

Oh yes, if you want to hear what I sound like, go to the article Chess as I recorded the reading for that article. Paul Robinson 04:34, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

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. Walk away. This is an encyclopedia, not the Gaza Strip (and that is another example of another really stupid fight; I can't see the point of why so many people are fighting over a really crummy piece of probably worthless desert). It's not worth fighting turf battles. I've had disagreements with other users, usually I just ask them nicely and if that doesn't work I quit for a while on that issue and come back later, and often a consensus can be reached.

[edit] Pass 3

I have chosen to be bold and clear up the issue and thus reduce the excessive words that apparently are my downfall and my curse, the albatross hanging around my neck, stinking up my environment.

It is comments such as the above that have made me come to the conclusion that I made a stupid and reckless mistake in bothering to apply. I am placed in a "damned if you do /damned if you don't" Catch 22 situation; if I don't respond to comments I haven't satisfied the criteria and people will oppose me; if I try to respond to people's comments I am saying too much and people will oppose me.

If someone opposes me applying I presume it is in good faith because they wish to be sure someone is sincere in their application and would do good by this Wikipedia; you have now shown this to not be the case, that there never was any good faith. I can accept being turned down, what I cannot accept is being placed into a no win situation: heads I'm rejected for inadequacy, tails I'm rejected for responding too much.

You win; you can keep your little clique to yourself. It is clear and obvious that you neither want nor need my assistance. And you all have put paid to the claim by Jimbo Wales that adminship "should be nothing" important.

Since it's clear my application is being rejected there's no point in continuing this farce.