User:Shalom Yechiel/Other stuff/Second RFA

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I have edited Wikipedia consistently from January until now. During the past five months, I have involved myself with various cleanup and maintenance tasks in both articles and project-space. I have also written a few articles, which I have listed on my user page.

My previous request, two months ago, can be found at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/YechielMan. Two major concerns were raised then. First, I had created a Google bomb within Wikipedia to associate Richard Joel with an unsavory word. Second, given this history, I did not have experience to earn the trust of the community. I cannot undo the past, though others have undone it for me; and the spamming incident occurred within my first twelve logged-in edits ever. Since the first RFA, I have made multiple requests at WP:AIV and WP:RFPP, and I have patrolled user pages to weed out spam and WP:NOT#MYSPACE material. Of the last four thousand contribs at Special:Contributions/YechielMan, you might find one or two which could be considered vandalism.

I eagerly await your opinion.

1. I am familiar with all XFDs, but I will be most comfortable closing AFD, MFD, and RFD. I will also sort through the pile of candidates for speedy deletion. I am most interested in CSD G11, G12, A7, and R1, but I will eventually include images and other pages in my purview. Less frequently I may patrol the noticeboards, including WP:AIV, WP:AN3, and WP:UAA, and block or warn users as appropriate. To paraphrase the old joke: I'm from Wikipedia, and I'm here to help.

2. My best article, by far, is endgame tablebase. It has unsuccessfully stood for WP:GA and WP:FA, but it represents my best work and my most visible contribution to the encyclopedia. I've written about a dozen other original articles, such as Shaare Zedek Medical Center and List of chess periodicals. However, I spend most of my time on administrative tasks: evaluating AFDs, categorizing pages, patrolling new pages, correcting obvious spelling errors, and so forth. Ultimately, these smaller contributions, taken as a whole, may be more valuable.

3. I have been in minor conflicts with User:Kevin Murray and User:FrozenPurpleCube. In the latter case, I closed a complex AFD regarding chess openings as a speedy keep because the score was 12 to 1 in favor of not deleting it. FrozenPurpleCube, the nominator, undid my closure because the existence of merge votes precluded a speedy keep, and I was not an admin. I defended my reasoning but ultimately accepted that I had interpreted policy too liberally. I made a couple of other early AFD closures shortly afterward that were also challenged, but these did not cause much discussion or stress.

4. Regarding WP:IAR: It doesn't stand for "I Am Right." Rather, it enables me to bypass process and save time and effort to reach an obvious result. Thus, I support a liberal interpretation of the snowball clause, though (except as IAR may apply) it is not policy. For another example, I have seen some articles that are clearly speedy-delete material but cannot be associated with any CSD. I can WP:PROD them, or can sometimes stretch the boundaries of G1 (nonsense) or A7 (nonnotable). Sometimes I'll write my own explanation into the template, with an implicit reliance on IAR. Similarly, I have closed two AFDs (including Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hormensis) as "speedy redirect" even though there is no such concept. If it's obvious that a redirect is called for (as it was in those two cases), I'll boldly do it and cite IAR explicitly. The common thread among these examples is that a reasonable person should not find the end result controversial; in other words, IAR allows you to use common sense to replace process. YechielMan 00:20, 1 June 2007 (UTC)