Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Viridae

Viridae

Voice your opinion! (1/0/0) Ending 12:13, 2006-08-08 (UTC)

Viridae (talk · contribs) is an MCB student that hails from Australia (his name means "virus family"). I believe Viridae will make an excellent Wikipedia administrator.

Viridae is a dedicated RC patroller - he warns vandals, follows up on AIAV, brings complex cases to AN/I, tags articles for deletion.

Activity: >3000 edits in 3 months.
Interaction: Communicates intelligently and civilly; helps others at WP:HD, WP:VP.
Conflicts: A few minor disagreements; Viridae reacted with composure and resolved the situations peacefully. Avoids unnecessary confrontation.
Experience: Participates in WP namespace: WP:AN, WP:AFD, WP:HD, WP:VP, WP:AIAV, WP:RFA, WP:CP.
User page: Clean, non-polemic.
Edit summaries: 100%.

Viridae is unlikely to abuse administrator tools and would benefit from having them. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-08-01 08:51Z

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here: I Accept. Viridae ^Talk 12:15, 1 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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 voters:

1. What sysop chores, if any, would you anticipate helping with? Please check out Category:Wikipedia backlog, and read the page about administrators and the administrators' reading list.

A: As an admin I would help close discussions in WP:AFD, WP:CFD and WP:RFD but at the same time, not limiting myself to closing disscussions - also continuing to be involved. I will not close any discussion in which I had been involved unless the concensus is clear. I would also reguarly check on CAT:CSD to make sure speedy deletions are exactly that. I would have WP:AIV on my watchlist, nothing is to be gained from a backlog building up there. I would also have the various Administrator noticeboards (such as WP:AN and WP:ANI for instance) on my watchlist in a similar way to how I currently have WP:HD and WP:VPA on my watchlist now. I find the administrator noticeboards very useful for dealing with complex situations needing administrator, and I wish to help others as others there have helped me. I can see myself involved in WP:RM too because that is frequently backlogged. Last but not least I would continue RC patrol and new pages patrol. This is all just a starting point , I hope to utilise my new mop, if I get it, wherever it may be needed within the project.

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

A: My largest and most time consuming edit was definately the addition of the Non-viral methods section to Gene Therapy. This was also the article that prompted me to sign up to Wikipedia and start editing. I am (as mentioned by Quarl) a third year molecular and cell biology student, so noticing that non-viral methods was severely lacking from that article prompted me to leave a note on the talk page asking someone to expand that section. When noone did, I did it myself. It took several hours of research, looking through review papers on pubmed and my own lecture notes to write but I think it has been a worthwhile contribution and I hope those who read it find it useful and interesting. My involvement in writing the encyclopedia will probobly continue to revolve around my studies - as I learn fascinating things, I come and look at the relevant wikipedia articles (if they exist) and if I notice that they lacking in some department, I will research and add to them as needed. That said, the research and translation of material from scientific jargon into quality articles takes a lot of time and brain power and the latter is not something I have a whole heap spare of these days so for the most part my involvement in the encyclopedia is with minor edits and vandalfighting. But I will continue to slowly add as I see fit.

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: I have been in some minor editing disputes at times, some of which have temporarily raised my blood pressure but nothing serious. I find the best way to deal with disputes is to approach them calmly and thoughfully. Calling names, and getting very angry is useless. The first violates Wikipedia policy and achieves nothing and the second shortens your life span and also achieves nothing. I suppose the best example of how I handle a dispute would be this dispute with the recently blocked* editor Ste4k. As you can see, I tried to remain calm and literate and present my argument as I saw it. The dispute was not resolved, but as you can see it was concluded when we agreed to disagree on the matter. I also recently got frustrated with the amount of ridiculous information in the Mini Mammoth article and ended up removing large chunks of hoax material, in the process leaving an edit summary of "removing crap" (which I immediately regretted). My deletions led to a minor dispute with another editor with him implying I was a vandal and my pointing out to him that the inclusion of hoax material in an article was vandalism, not its removal. This dispute finished when I decided that I did not want to be involved in a dispute over something so trivial, especially when the AfD was progressing rapidly to a deletion concencus.

*(Ste4k was recently the subject of a RfC in part because of behaviour similar to that which she displayed while arguing with me. This resulted in her getting permanently blocked.)

Comments

Disclosure time. In a recent RfA some people took exception to tools such as vandalproof being used to rollback non-vandalism edits. I admit that I too have done this occasionally. If, while on RC patrol, I come across an edit (made very obvious by the diff) that depreciates the article and I cannot see any way that its inclusion could benefit the article. I ussually (though not always because its quicker) do a custom rollback citing why the edit was reverted. (However this leads to ammusing edit summaries like this.) Viridae ^Talk 12:15, 1 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Support

Support, as nominator. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-08-01 08:51Z

Oppose

Neutral