Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 17:14, 27 October 2008

Alan De Smet

Voice your opinion (talk page) (3/12/2); Scheduled to end 06:08, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Alan De Smet (talk · contribs) - Alan De Smet has been around for a while and has made a lot of edits. He would make a great admin. February 15, 2009 (talk) 04:27, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here:

I accept this nomination. — Alan De Smet | Talk 06:06, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Anyone considering my nomination should know: the time I have to spend working on Misplaced Pages is already overwhelmed with work to be done. I have a backlog of work to be done. As a result, I don't foresee spending much time doing tasks requiring access to the administrator tools. But maybe just a little bit of time, maybe my directly doing painfully obvious deletions or protections, will help just a little bit and be worth elevating. If it's not worth the overhead of having another administrator who will contribute so little, so be it.

Furthermore, I am an inclusionist at heart, tempered by an understanding that most deletionists are simply trying to hold Misplaced Pages to high standards so that it can be great and not just another heap of unfiltered garbage on the internet. But it twists my heart to delete sincere contributions, and tortures me to see things deleted on technicalities. I mention this because it will come up in answers below.

— Alan De Smet | Talk 06:06, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Misplaced Pages as an administrator. It is recommended that you answer these optional questions to provide guidance for participants:

1. What administrative work do you intend to take part in?

A: Very little. Quick deletions of painfully obvious new copyright violations or other obvious Prod/CSD work. I will err extremely on the side of not using these tools; both out of general caution with powerful tools and because of my inclusionist tendencies. I do appreciate that my inclusionist tendencies will tend to bias me toward restoring things, and as such I intend to be extremely careful in using those tools as well.

2. What are your best contributions to Misplaced Pages, and why?

A: T. John Ward was originally authored by me, and I believe the lion's share of the content remains authored by me. While perhaps not the most eloquent prose, it's extremely carefully cited and I believe conveys the key points about this man. Naturally I'm proud of it.

It's tiresome work, but I work to add citations to articles wherever I can; sometimes fully fleshed out, but sometimes just a quick link to a web page, which is better than no citation at all. ( ) I strive to flesh out or better format citations whenever possible, be they my own added earlier in haste, or others. ( ). No individual edit is much, but I'm proud of the collective result.

I also do what I can to add suitable images to articles and to improve the images present. Full upload log]. I've uploaded a number of photos of my own creation of people who have articles, (ex: 1 2 3), a few other relevant photos of article subjects (ex: 1 2). I've created a few original illustrations (ex: 1 2 3), and converted a few others (ex: 1) 2). I've taken some graphs and created them using gnuplot, which gives okay, if unexceptional, SVG output but more importantly is really easy for other people to update with new information. (ex) None of my image work is brilliant, but I believe I'm filling holes and making things better for it and I'm proud it.

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'm involved enough with Misplaced Pages that conflicts are inevitable. I try to bite my tongue and wait if necessary before replying. Of course, disagreements go to Talk pages, not into edit wars. I strive to use logic and defer to the policies and guidelines. While perhaps not flattering to me this pretty well documents the most recent serious stress causing incident. I know there have been one or two other incidents that caused me similar levels of stress, but they escape me at the moment. The more strict editors and robots (User:BetacommandBot being one obvious one) are also an ongoing source of stress. I respect the need to keep Misplaced Pages to the highest verifiable standards, but I am inclusionist in my heart. I strive to not let my preferences taint my actions, but I'll admit that many of the fair use claims I've added for images are perhaps unnecessarily wise-ass.

(Late addition) I should note that on occasion I go and write angry things about all sorts of things. Of course I'm going to rant about Misplaced Pages. 1, . Both rants are more than a bit out of date, and don't entirely match my current views. But they are out there. — Alan De Smet | Talk 06:16, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Optional question from Ameliorate!

4. You state in your answer to question 1 that "my inclusionist tendencies will tend to bias me toward restoring things". In what circumstances would you restore ("undelete") an article?

A:

Optional question from ϢereSpielChequers

5. You have some strong views on certain wiki policies, are there any current policies which you would be uncomfortable enforcing if you had the mop, and if so what would you do about it?

A:

General comments

• See Alan De Smet's edit summary usage with mathbot's tool. For the edit count, see the talk page.

• Links for Alan De Smet: Alan De Smet (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)

Please keep discussion constructive and civil. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review Special:Contributions/Alan De Smet before commenting.

Discussion

Support

1. Support clean block log, moderately good amount of contributions, Why the hell not? one good use of the tools benefits the project. Also per my RfA criteria Foxy Loxy 06:39, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
2. Moral support I mean I unblocked the nominator. --Tikiwont (talk) 11:14, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
3. Support I think you would make a fine administrator. I do not see any objections not to support you at this point. I wish you the best of luck and hope you get to be a administrator! J.B. (talk) 12:27, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Oppose per the block notice on the nominator's talkpage and Things that make me weep for Misplaced Pages on the candidate's userpage; anyone who thinks that articles are deleted because they " meet some petty deletion-biased bureauocrat's intepretation of the guidelines" either does not understand our policies or the concept of consensus. ~ User:Ameliorate! 06:35, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
2. Oppose per userpage. Anyone who posts that and then says in their statement that they " that most deletionists are simply trying to hold Misplaced Pages to high standards so that it can be great and not just another heap of unfiltered garbage on the internet" is at best an idiot for assuming people wouldn't check their userpage and at worst a very poor liar trying to weasle their way past RfA. The nom hardly inspires confidence either. Ironholds (talk) 07:02, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

   As far as I see the candidate linked himself to his 'rants' on his suerpage before the first vote, so I'd take issue both with the substance and tone of your comments. --Tikiwont (talk) 11:22, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

   For the record, I had begun to look into their contributions etc. before they posted the links, when I stumbled across their userpage and nominator's talkpage I made the decision to oppose and section-edited to oppose, so I only seen that they had linked to their 'rants' after I !voted. There is a possibility that Ironholds is in the same boat. ~ User:Ameliorate! 11:30, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

   Well, I hoped my wording takes account of the possibility that others didn't see that, so the AGF link wasn't necessary. It hardly ever is. My issue here is that the position itself is potential concern enough, nor would I see the existing differences in wording between RfA and user page, both of which are public self-representations, as reason to call someone an idiot or liar, whether or not the candidate points out himself that he uses elsewhere stronger wordings than in this official candidacy. --Tikiwont (talk) 12:48, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

3. Oppose – per Ameliorate and Ironholds. If that is the candidate's perception of the AfD process, then I have little to no confidence in his or her knowledge of how consensus works. Furthermore, the candidate has hardly any project space edits (49 total), basically no experience in admin-related areas, and the answer to Q1 doesn't give me any reassurance in terms of how the candidate will utilize the tools. — sephiroth bcr 07:47, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
4. Oppose. Was going to vote "Support", but the user page issues brought up above are disturbing. No thanks, not at this time. Lankiveil 08:04, 27 October 2008 (UTC).
5. Oppose - not exactly a glowing nomination - and by a nominator who was recently blocked. If I've read this correctly, the candidate says he doesn't need the tools, doesn't plan to use them much, and doesn't particularly care whether or not he receives them. In that case, why waste everyone's time with this process at all? — CactusWriter | 08:12, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
6. Strong oppose - My basic criteria for support !voting on an RfA is simply that I can trust the editor, and that I cannot. Candidate seems confused over their stance on deletionism, and they have little to no experience in admin areas. You were also nominated by a user with, lets say... a not particularly clean track record. I apologise, but there is no way that I can support. To reiterate what Ameliorate! said, candidate also appears not to understand core policies, or the notion of consensus. If this oppose streak continues, I'd suggest WP:SNOW withdrawal, but that's either up to the candidate or a 'crat to decide. — neuro 10:02, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
7. The vast majority of the stuff deleted from Misplaced Pages is correctly deleted; because of that, the exceptions stand out, leading people to assume that we have a problem with trigger-happy admins. Anyone with sufficient experience of Misplaced Pages deletions to become an administrator will have learned that we don't particularly. On that basis, I oppose Alan's nomination. ➨ ❝ЯEDVERS❞ a sweet and tender hooligan 12:54, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
8. Oppose: I don't see any reason to give the candidate admin tools. He says that he's going to work very little anyway, and that little too with only deleting. He also says that he will err a lot if not having the tools, but I don't see how, considering he's an inclusionist. An inclusionist would want to keep the articles if possible, so it's not like he will go about placing CSD tags on every other page (which means minimal errors, right?). Then if he becomes an admin, I don't see how this situation is going to change. And anyway, if the candidate is not confident of his judgment now, it's not like we can give him a sort of a "test run" to see how he does and if this will change. Maybe I'm being stupid here, and if so, I'd appreciate it if somebody could point me in the right direction. Chamal 13:24, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

   I fear you've misread what he said - "I will err on the side of not using " says to me that if he's given admin tools, if he's unsure at any point over whether he should use them or not, he will avoid using them. It was nothing to do with "err" in the sense of making mistakes, it was a variation on the phrase "to err on the side of caution". ~ mazca 13:49, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

   Oh, right. I was thinking that it was something like he was promising to be more careful if he gets the tools. So then, he might just as well be more cautious now. Thanks for clearing that out, Mazca. But there's still the problem that he's not going to use the tools much. I think he could be of more use if he did the tagging of pages as a normal user, without becoming an admin for that single purpose. Chamal 14:04, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

9. Oppose I'll have to oppose this because of the questionable nom and the lack of experience and need for the tools. I have to echo the sentiment that you should spend some more time in AfD, for a couple reasons. First you'd see how the process generally gets thing right, and second, so we have another valuable content building editor who understands what goes into writing to help decide on certain cases that may otherwise be overlooked. --Banime (talk) 14:10, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
10. Oppose As per the cogent comments raised by everyone who got here ahead of me (I really need to get into these discussions earlier). Ecoleetage (talk) 14:24, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
11. Oppose Very odd nom + Frank in the neutral section overwhelm me. —Ed 17 for President _{Vote for Ed} 15:16, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
12. Oppose I fail to see why this user should get administrative tools when their answer to Q1 clearly states that they wouldn't use them very often. Ollie Fury _{Get ready for October 31} 15:41, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
13. Oppose. So basically, we have here a candidate who only has the time to perform two tasks, and whose religious convictions prevent him from performing one of the two. Splendid. The candidate's perspective on the deletion process is best described as "completely out to lunch". The dump I took this morning was, I assure you, a sincere contribution. Unfortunately, it was still crap. Badger Drink (talk) 17:14, 27 October 2008 (UTC)