Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Staecker

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[edit] Staecker

Voice your opinion (20/2/2); Scheduled to end 03:24, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Staecker (talk • contribs) - I first met Staecker after a night of working on C:CSD. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I noticed there were an extremely high ratio of CSD I1 images. The next day, Staecker contacted me and let me know that he was working on a bot to automatically identify and tag CSD I1 candidates. He asked me why I occasionally would delete the other duplicated instead of the one that Staeckerbot tagged. I explained it was because sometimes the licensing information wasn't identical or the uploader provided more details about the image on the untagged image. Staecker ended up adding some code to copy the licensing information to make sure both images had the same information. I feel that giving Staecker the tools would be greatly beneficial to him by allowing him to review why admins sometimes deleted the image that wasn't tagged which would allow him to further refine his bot.

Staecker has also contributed quite a bit to other image related tasks. He has nominated images for being {{PUIdisputed}} and has helped users clear up image copyright problems. I am confident in his knowledge of policy, especially image/CSD related. Reading through Staecker's contributions, I have found that he has kept his cool and makes good use of talk pages and edit summaries to explain any possible contentious edits. PS2pcGAMER (talk) 01:05, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here:

Thanks for the nom, PS2- I hadn't ever seriously considered my being an admin, but I gratefully accept the idea, if others are in favor. I have been editing for 2 years now- I care a lot about WP, and would love to assist in any way that the community deems appropriate.

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia in this capacity. Please take the time to answer a few generic questions to provide guidance for participants:

1. What sysop chores do you anticipate helping with?

A: My bot User:Staeckerbot is all about image speedy deletions. A bit of background- Over the past year or so, I used to occasionally page though the Special:Newimages gallery, looking for suspicious images (likely copyvios, duplicates, etc). I was always surprised that nobody else seemed to be patrolling that gallery. A couple of months ago I decided to write a bot to detect duplicate file uploads, and now this bot (still in trial) nominates about 75 duplicates per day.

The experience with the bot, and image deletions by hand for many months before, has shown me that we need help in clearing speedy deletions (at least as far as images go). Help first of all in the form of bodies willing to go through the hassle of making the deletions, and second of all in evolving our policies to make it more efficient. I'm sorry to say that I don't have any revolutionary ideas, but I recognize the need and will gladly help however I can.

I also have seen horrible problems with image licensing tagging- so many images are improperly tagged, and I've occasionally done what I can to fix them up, but as is I think more needs to be done from a policy/interface standpoint. That's just another half-baked idea in my mind at this point, but it's something I care about, and something that I would love to help repair.

I have a fair amount of expertise in the ins and outs of MediaWiki- I run several at the College where I work. This of course doesn't directly impact my editing at Wikipedia, but at least I already know what the "delete" tab looks like and I'm not going to be trigger-happy with it.

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

A: Certainly my most useful recent contribution to the project as a whole has been my bot, described above.

As far as my (manual) edits are concerned, I've done my best to create new articles wherever I see the need, some fairly interesting, some certainly useful, some on the edge of notability (feel free to AFD that last one, if it's not worth keeping- the pic is priceless, at least). I'm also a PhD mathematician, and have contributed a fair amount of material in my research area (Nielsen theory and related topics). My edits to WP often follow my life interests as they come up. I've been contributing quite a bit on the films of Werner Herzog lately.

Honestly speaking, my most useful edits over my two years here might have been anti-vandalism. It gives me some sort of cheap thrill to revert silly vandalism (the sillier the better). I go for a month or so reverting fairly high-traffic vandalism pages, until I get fed up and take my business elsewhere. I spent some time keeping the "haters" off of 50 Cent, some time at Jar Jar Binks (the similarities are subtle but many), etc. Most recently I've been watching Kazakh and Nursultan Nazarbayev, which get about one Borat-related vandal each day. My personal favorite page to watch for vandalism: Liar. Why such an obscure page gets vandals, I don't know, but it always gives me a smile to see that one pop up on my watchlist. My nominator has suggested that I should take the time to notify vandals more often when I revert them, and this is, I think, a good suggestion.

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

A: I have had a few run ins- Conflicts with misguided new users have included: A lengthy debate at Talk:Almaty about nomenclature. Receiving the brunt of a disgruntled user over an image at Talk:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (more comments at my talk). Being accused of faith-based censorship (see section at my talk.) These are cases in which I felt that I was clearly in the right, and I've tried to respond to unreasonable or misguided attitudes with grace and patience.

One thing that bugs me is pre-emptive semiprotects, which I've encountered twice. See discussions here and here. You be the judge if I handled it appropriately.

Of course I don't always feel that I'm clearly right. I had a long-winded debate at Talk:Florence Foster Jenkins about NPOV, and to this day I'm not really sure who was right (I eventually "lost" by giving up- by the way I'd appreciate any commentary on that debate, not to revive it but to clarify my impressions of what NPOV is supposed to mean in a case like that).

I also had a (in my opinion) ugly experience at Intelligent design, which is now at Talk:Intelligent_design/Archive29. I made what I thought was a fairly innoccuous suggestion, and ended up with a fairly hostile reaction. My lesson learned from that episode- don't try to jump in, even in a very little way, to mega-controversies without doing a lot of research ahead of time (which I didn't).

I hope that anybody who's interested can read over the above incidents and decide for themselves if I acted appropriately. I think that having a clear head and civil tone is absolutely essential. I don't experience stress very publicly in these situations- I do get a little excited in my own mind, but always try to put my emotions aside when contributing. I am always willing to admit when I'm wrong (I hope), and certainly would never use adminship as a trump in disputes in which I was personally involved.

General comments

• See Staecker's edit summary usage with mathbot's tool. For the edit count, see the talk page.
• I'd be happy to elaborate on any of the above (or anything else), and look forward to good discussion regardless of the votes. I hope to be as transparent as possible- if you are aware of significant information about me that I'm leaving out, please let me know and I'll try to address it. I also know that I can be a bit longwinded- let me know if I should just shut up about something.
• Someone pointed me to WP:CANVASS regarding my edit here. I've seen so many people pimping their RfAs and other causes that I thought it was fairly accepted. But now that I've seen the guideline page (it's fairly new, right?) I reverted the above diff. Sorry if anybody thought it was uncool- Staecker 13:21, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

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Please keep criticism constructive and polite.

Discussion

Support

1. Support as nominator. --PS2pcGAMER (talk) 01:11, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
2. Support Seen them around and interacted briefly regarding the bot, very civil. Also familiarity with the tools is always helpful. - cohesion 05:37, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
3. Support I share the nominator's confidence. YechielMan 06:04, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
4. Support Attitude and experience are all there with the bot-work an additional plus. I imagine that the projectspace and user Talk edits will increase dramatically after the admin tools allow you to patrol the new pages/recent changes pages, etc. (aeropagitica) 09:38, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
5. Support per good answers and sufficient overall experience. Addhoc 10:44, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
6. Support - A sensible user who I feel would not abuse admin abilities and who has answered the questions well. Also, seems to have plenty of experience, especially with bots and images. Camaron1 | Chris 11:20, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
7. Support An excellent candidate, could use the tools when, definitely be trusted. Good luck - Tellyaddict 11:21, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
8. Support seems trustworthy and experienced. Why not? —Anas ^talk? 12:57, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
9. Terence 13:34, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
10. Support You have made contribs in many different areas, you're experienced, and civil. I like that you admit experiences where you learned something important--shows maturity. Nice clear answers to questions. Edit count not a problem for me. κaτaʟaveno^T_C 14:04, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
11. Support A good candidate for adminship. Captain panda 14:50, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
12. Support - no reasons to oppose. Walton ^{Vivat Regina!} 14:56, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
13. Support Good contribs, active, no reason to oppose. Ganfon 15:47, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
14. Support I hate editcountis. --Doc^g 15:58, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
15. Support —KNcyu38 (talk • contribs) 20:11, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
16. Support Looks like good reasons for Adminship to me Homestarmy 01:27, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
17. Support. Neutrality^talk 03:53, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
18. Support. I don't see anything to be concerned about - it appears that the editor handles sticky situations well. Obviously needs to tools to just clear the offending images instead of just nominating them. --Mus Musculus 04:15, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
19. Support good experience and no concerns if he handles admin tools. Wooyi^{Talk, Editor review} 04:52, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
20. Support. RyanGerbil10(Упражнение В!) 05:45, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
21. Support. Clearing backlogs is something we can always use an extra keyboard for. --Hemlock Martinis 06:27, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Weak Oppose I really like your demeanor, and we certainly need help with image backlogs. Still, I feel a bit more project-space experience is needed to give you the feel for handling the mop. Xoloz 15:48, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
2. Oppose per Xoloz. While I don't have issue with his edit count as a whole he has few project space contributions and only 12 in the discussion sections, all in WikiProjects. I like more involvment in the "inner workings" before giving out a backstage pass. With some time in the project space, esp with policy discussion I would see no reason not to support in the future. NeoFreak 01:17, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Neutral

1. Neutral. Your contributions and statements give a very good impression, but your total edit count of 2660 is a bit low, really. I'd be happy to support you some time later. Sandstein 13:56, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
2. Neutral leaning support Like Sandstein says. Looks pretty good, yet a wee bit more experience would be nice. Pascal.Tesson 16:55, 8 April 2007 (UTC)