User:BDD/Mentorship/Leucosticte

Scope
Let's start with the end in mind. Would you rather the mentorship last for a set period of time, conclude upon the meeting of certain goals, or a combination of the two? --BDD

Goals
Give me at least three, no more than ten, goals you'd like to achieve through the mentorship. They can be quantifiable goals (i.e. "Create three articles that survive or don't come up for AfD") or not (i.e. "Become a more courteous editor"). We'll work on defining these goals as appropriate. --BDD
 * 1) Survive as a Wikipedia editor through the immediate situation. Make some sort of agreement with the community by which I can continue to edit in some form or fashion, and adhere to that agreement.
 * 2) Go six months without getting blocked, receiving deserved block warnings, or having additional restrictions imposed by ArbCom, community consensus at ANI, etc. due to any behavior occurring from today onward. In general, make progress toward a situation in which my conduct is considered to be in accordance with community expectations (as measured by rough consensus in any decisions related to me).
 * 3) Reduce number of complaints (especially valid complaints) for my edits not being in accordance with policy/guidelines or the spirit of policy/guidelines.

What I may do is post new articles to userspace for a few days before taking them to mainspace. That way, I can mull over them for awhile, ponder their chances of survival, and hopefully arrive at a sufficiently beefy first revision. Sometimes I've been a bit hasty and posted a substub that should either have been beefed up or, if it couldn't be beefed up, not posted. Probably I need to tone down my redirect creation too. New articles are kinda my specialty, by the way, although I created a few featured articles before the requirements got to be so high. Some of the same objections that apply to creating new articles can also apply to adding content to existing articles, the only difference being that there's no xfD for content added to existing articles. E.g. people can complain about BLP issues, PRIMARY issues, UNDUE issues, notability issues, etc. A lot of those policies some people have raised valid concerns about as being of questionable merit and difficult to apply objectively, but I've kinda learned to just let it go and let people have what they want for the most part, even when I think they're stretching the policy a bit. I've breathed enough fire over the years and now the knights have caught up to me, so I have to chill out.

I'm starting to realize that a lot of what goes into success is appearances. If you quack like a duck, then people will assume you're a duck and you might get shot. So, I have to learn to better avoid making ducklike emanations. An example would be the closet racist substub that people assumed was intended in bad faith as an attack article.
 * You make a good point about the difference between creating a new article and expanding a stub. Since they do have many similarities, I think this could be a good place to start. I'm going to do the mentorship equivalent of a professor assigning his own textbook: take a look at self-deportation, which I recently created. It's a bit more than a stub now, so you may want to look at the original version too. Notice that I basically gave every statement there a reference. Compare it to first version of closet racist. There are plenty of superficial differences, but one went to AFD and the other to DYK. Why do you think that is? --BDD
 * I would cite several factors:
 * Your first revision was a lot beefier. It's much longer; there are eight references rather than one; the references are fully formatted, so people can tell what they are without having to click on barelinks; there is more than one example of self-deportation cited, so it looks less like a coatrack; etc. Whenever there's only one example cited, it makes people wonder whether, for example, the article is really only intended to cover closet racism accusations against Mr. X, which might not need its own article. Also, when people see an article that it's evident not much work has been put into, they tend to not devote much work to figuring out its viability. I think part of the reasoning is that if the user put a lot of time into writing an article, then he can only write a certain number of articles like that per day, rather than churning out a whole bunch. Therefore, the deleters can afford to invest more time in the review of each such article, or even leave them alone, without falling too far behind and letting the encyclopedia get overwhelmed with a whole bunch of nonviable articles. Also, it's more work to explain why an article with eight reliable sources should be deleted than why an article with only one questionable source should be deleted, and is more likely to end in a failure to delete; therefore, some deleters might not want to fool with it.
 * The sources are better in the case of self-deportation because there are prominent public officials talking about it, rather than the Drudge Report. (I looked for sources to expand the closet racism stub, didn't find any particularly good ones, and had to convert it to a redirect. I think it is a plausible term that people might look up, so it should have at least that redirect.)
 * The subject of self-deportation is inherently less controversial than closet racism. Self-deportation is by definition a proceeding that people initiate on their own. Closet racism is by definition something that the person in question denies having but that others accuse him of. Therefore there are a lot more BLP issues with closet racism than with self-deportation. Granted, self-deportation has more of a negative connotation than mere emigration, because it implies that the person left to avoid legal troubles here, but that too is easier to prove, or at least infer with a high likelihood of being correct, than accusations of closet racism. Some editors might find the BLP issues so worrying that they would prefer that the article simply not exist, so as to avoid all the potential problems. I am not sure whether it would be possible to write a decent article about closet racism without examples, though.
 * I would say that I didn't really attack Ron Paul per se. I just said he had been accused. Newspapers are all the time saying so-and-so was indicted for such-and-such, or that he allegedly did such-and-such. No judgment is made as to whether he's guilty or not. Actually, where I may have messed up was in saying that he's been accused of being a "closet" racist, because if he actually wrote the articles he's accused of writing, then he wouldn't really be a closet racist. Closet racists don't publish racist articles any more than a closeted gay openly proclaims his homosexuality. Leucosticte (talk) 18:37, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I definitely agree with you on your first two points. If only one source is discussing a topic, it's probably not fit for a Wikipedia article yet—especially if that source is the Drudge Report (that's a bit POV of me, but Drudge has a pretty well established reputation for sensationalism). Closet racism as you described it certainly exists, but it doesn't seem to be in common usage. It gets fewer Google hits than self-deportation, which is a bit of a neologism. In fact, self-deportation would be on shaky ground for a standalone article if it hadn't been espoused by a figure as major as Mitt Romney. I actually listed the topic at Requested articles, noting that I wasn't sure it was fit for an article, before I decided to proceed myself a bit later. I understand how great it can feel to create an article, but again, you may want to be cautious about that for a while. --BDD

Related pages

 * User:Leucosticte/Deletion debates
 * User talk:BDD
 * User talk:Leucosticte