Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Ironholds 2

Note to readers: This is an experimental RfA based on the discussion on the RfA talk page. People will be given four days starting from Tuesday 7 October to ask questions and generally review the candidate. On Saturday 11 October, the discussion and questioning section will be closed and the voting section will open up. This is, despite the experimental nature, a serious RfA; I'd appreciate if people avoided "I don't like the layout, Oppose" comments.

Ironholds

Voice your opinion (talk page) (0/0/0); Scheduled to end 17:52, 15 October 2008

Ironholds (talk · contribs)

I have an extraordinary respect for Ironholds. He has brought a peerless degree of intelligence, sincerity and dedication to this project. As an editor, he has worked tirelessly to expand the depth and scope of Wikipedia’s contents, both through the creation of original content and in his insightful observations within the AfD process. He also does a find job identifying articles deserving of Speedy Deletion and, where applicable, reporting users who violate Wikipedia policies. In his communications with his fellow editors, Ironholds displays maturity and good spirit, which helps to solidify the positive aspects of our community. By offering his candidacy in this variation of the RfA vehicle (which most of us agree is not working), he continues to show his passion for improving Wikipedia’s operations. By nominating Ironholds for adminship, I believe Wikipedia will be well served by this wonderful individual. Ecoleetage (talk) 18:54, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here:I accept. Thanks to Ecoleetage for his kind words :).Ironholds 18:57, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Questions for the candidate

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 administrative work do you intend to take part in?

A: Speedy Deletion candidates are something I'd like to focus on; several times while patrolling New Pages i've had to wait around for 25-30 minutes due to the lack of an admin, hitting F5 on my watchlist every few seconds to make sure people dont remove the speedy tags on their pages. Did You Know is my second and not-so-commonly-picked area to focus on; I've written quite a few and there's been occasions where the DYK's haven't been switched over for several hours.

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

A: I tend to focus on obscure area's people haven't heard off, having encountered the common problem that area's I'm an expert on have already written about by someone far more knowledgeable than myself, so I can't claim any FA's or GA's. The 21 DYK's (and another three confirmed and awaiting posting) are something I'm quite proud of, although I know (within reason) that having a DYK on an article is not a measure of the article's quality. I did once try for a Featured List (List of Stewards of the Manor of Northstead) which didn't go through but i'm still proud of; see before and after. The before is actually a bit deceptive; Most of those bluelinks were red when I started, but I created a load of articles (I think about 100, mainly stubs, about 10 decent big'uns) to bluelink it all up.

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: No major conflicts that I can really think of. There was an argument over the clash between Wikipedia:Radio Wikipedia and Wikipedia:WikiUpdate which ended with uninvolved users generally telling everyone to shut the hell up. I was partially involved in that, and since then i've tried to serve as the voice of reason rather than the voice of "quick! more pitchforks!", such as at User:SoWhy's RfA, moving the discussion from the RfA before it could become the main focus of attention and trying to calm people down.

Optional Question from Davewild

4. Do you think you have addressed the concerns raised in your previous RFA's? If yes, could you explain how? Thanks. Davewild (talk) 18:07, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

A:I believe I've addressed them, yes. The issues in the first two RfA's were no-brainers; even I (as I am now) wouldn't have me; I had barely 3000 edits of recategorising and general wiki-gnoming, a wildly fluctuating edit count between months and wouldn't have even known what the abbreviations CSD, XfD or ANI even meant. The third one was more interesting; some of the opposes came from me having a cynical and slightly offensive atheism-related userbox on my page (similar to that of SoWhy's RfA) while most were to do with real editing concerns. Chief among them were a complete lack of article work, bite-y tone, lack of WP:ANI contributions and some really inappropriate MfDing of userpages that verged (barely) on policy violations. I took some time off constant CSD and Recent Changes patrol, which definitely helped the stress levels and thereby the biteyness; since then I've tried to be more polite to new users (especially considering that, after a year and a half of edits, I knew barely more than they did). I've also been doing a lot of article work and have developed a real love of filling in redlinks and expanding articles; i've had 23 DYK's so far, all but 2 for new articles. I've also worked on trying to get the List of Stewards of the Manor of Northstead (see diffs in Q.2) up to Featured status; it didn't pass due to silly grammar and style issues, but I'm going to try again once I've finished my current "things to do" (which stands at about 20 bio's, getting a legal court to GA status and 5 lists of redlinks). ANI contributions are something I've been more involved in, and that and the inappropriate MfDing and so on have been helped by me trying to abide by the spirit rather than the text; the rule should be that if you have to twist and think to work out how something should be deleted, it shouldn't. Another (rather embarassing) complaint at my RfA was that I failed to capitalise my i's; this I've corrected and now make a conscious effort to do so. Ironholds 18:21, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Optional Question from Wisdom89

5. What do you consider to be your biggest weakness on Wikipedia? Once identified, do you feel it will/can hamper your ability to work as an administrator?

A: I'm not the best person with the english language, by which I mean that I'll never churn out an entire FA or perfectly-phrased soliloquy. I don't feel this should harm my work as an administrator; I can fix my phrasing by simply working through the sentence in my head a few times (although this can be a long process when dealing with 40KB of text, hence my FA example). Ironholds 18:23, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

General comments

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

RfAs for this user:

• Requests for adminship/O Keyes
• Requests for adminship/O Keyes 2
• Requests for adminship/Ironholds
• Requests for adminship/Ironholds 2
• Requests for adminship/Ironholds 3
• Requests for adminship/Ironholds 4
• Requests for adminship/Ironholds 5

• Links for O keyes: O keyes (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)
• Links for Ironholds: Ironholds (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)

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Discussion

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