Please not that the following is my attempt to see if I would meet my own standards for what a good Admin should be. It is not intended to be a straw poll or to change anyone else's opinion. I do not intend to nominate my self for an RfA, ever.

Alanbly edit

Voice your opinion (talk page) This is a Mock RfA and is not scheduled to end

Alanbly (talk · contribs) - This is my attempt to draft answers to the RfA questions so that if and when I am to weather that process I will be not only ready but sure of myself. Adam McCormick (talk) 20:34, 1 March 2008 (UTC)


Questions for the candidate edit

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

1. What admin work do you intend to take part in?
A: Not anything big at first; Like any tool, adminship is not to be taken lightly. As such I would not actively use admin tools until I was experienced both with the tools and with taking the social flak administrators must endure. When I was comfortable with using the tools I would begin with WP:PER and maintaining many fully protected templates I work on. I would like to help users out with working around page and template protection as I have always found locating an admin who knows template/parser function syntax to be quite difficult. I think it's important that all pages be looked over and that the most valuable tool for admins is access to the unwatched pages list (however trivialized it has been). I would attend admin school until I thoroughly understood how all the tools worked and what the repercussions of using them were. Once I've gained enough experience with the life of an admin (and after a nice long tenure at admin school) I might try to help clear a few backlogs in the XfD realm. Other than that,
2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?
A: The vast majority of what I do here on wikipedia is Article Assessment and I feel that most of my best work has come of this. I have been the main contributor to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools article assessment template and several other templates, including some condensing of the profusion of Userboxen, and working over at WP:RT. I am also very proud of my work with my bot. I think the most valuable contributions I have made, however, have been in helping new editors improve their articles through communication and assessment. I feel that communication and consensus are the stock and trade of this encyclopedia and as such we should all be ready willing and able to discuss and justify our edits and our editing philosophies to each other.
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: Most of the editing conflicts I have been in are very short; whenever I find myself making or reverting the same edit more than once I try to call for discussion before making any more changes. I try to discuss all disputed edits and to follow up on other editors' comments whenever necessary. I try to work toward consensus and would much rather discuss a problem than try to force through a disputed solution. My experience has been that a lack of communication causes more trouble and stress than a lack of action. Early on, I had a couple of issues while doing RCPatrol but not many since then.

General comments edit

RfAs for this user:

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

    Discussion edit

    Support edit
    Oppose edit
    Neutral edit