User:Balloonman/draft1

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

There are a couple of reasons why I am interested in becoming an Admin. My wife, an admin, is tired of handling the issues that I bring to her attention. She's been asking me for months to become an admin, but I've been telling her no. So, why am I interested now?

There are a couple of reasons. First, I have fallen in love with DYK and would love to become more involved there---especially the admin activities. Second, I enjoy AFD's. I tend to contribute on AFD's a few times a month. But I don't only want the Admin tools for AFD, I want to get involved with DRV. I looked at DRV a few weeks ago, and thought "This might be something that I would be interested in doing." Unfortunately, many DRV's are on deleted articles. In order to voice one's opinion there, being able to review a deleted article would be beneficial. Third, while I am not a vandal fighter, I have over a 150 pages on my watchlist. When somebody vandalizes one of those pages, I will generally look the editors other edits to see what else they've edited. This may mean that I may revert up to 10-30 pages of vandalism/spam for a given editor. Having the tools for vandal fighting would be nice (but of lesser concern.)

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

I have been the primary editor of an FA, but I don't think that's my best contribution to Wikipedia. I've taken more pride in being an advocate for NPOV and smaller edits lately than I do the FA. Part of the reason is because I am not convinced that the article that became an FA should have passed. I thought it was going to fail its FAC. Also, when I was working on the FA, it was pretty much me and a few other people. I wasn't part of the larger wiki community. I like the smaller things more because I'm more involved with the larger community and feel like I now know enough now to be helpful. I completely redid the WP:POKER page, have contributed to discussions on GA/R rules/procedures, instituted some discussion on DYK rules, and helped some less experienced editors out. These contributions are more meaningful to me that the GA/FA articles I've written... because they are community activities. (You probably won't see me doing much new pages patrol or recent vandalism patrol because they are activities individual perform on their own.) This also means that the 5,000+ edits of mine are real edits, not one's performed by bots.

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?

The Ugly: When I first started on Wikipedia, I created a category and discovered a similarly titled category (one was plural the other wasn't). When I went to the Category page, there was a CFD with a push to have the creator of said category blocked. Thinking the threatened block applied to me, as I had just created the same category, I panicked and contacted everybody I knew for help. Thus, I violated WP:CANVASS. The category survived, but I regretted how the CFD evolved. IMHO, the merits of the CAT are strong enough that it didn't need the artificial help; and my soliciting help actually hurt the CFD's chances and made me look bad. Definitely a growing point in my wikification. Since then I have been in several discussions where a number of editors have contacted me to praise me for my demeanor and calmness in discussing the issue---despite some ad hominem attacks. Two of the awards that I have received were for maintaining my cool when others were tryin to make it personal.

For example, I recently nominated an article for deletion that I had mixed feelings about. I still have mixed feelings about it, so I took it to AFD to get the opinions of others. The author of said page responded very poorly to my nomination and had a few choice words for me. Most notably, "I don't care what you think you anti-semitic troll. Pro-Iran and Anti-Bloomberg." Because of the way I handled this persons attacks, another user wrote, "If you go for admin I will give you my support based on your civility in the face of open hostility alone."  Within a week of posting the troll comment above, that same editor gave me a "Barnstar of Peace" with a note, "I have to give you this Barnstar Balloonman for putting up with my incivility a few days ago. I appreciate your help and someday you're going to be a great admin because you are even headed and don't lose your cool."  I also had an interesting discussion with an editor on the Holocaust denial GA/R. Again, I suspect that if you talked to that editor early on, he might have had some choice comments for me. But now, I suspect that if he were to comment on the RFA, he'd support it.