User:Hersfold/Adopt/Tyler

Adoption page - talk page []

Hello, Tyler! Welcome to your adoption/mentorship page! This page, and its talk page, will be a centralized discussion point for the two of us in relation to anything to do with your mentorship; this way, we won't risk cluttering up our talk pages quite so much, and everything will be in one place instead of spread all over. Getting here isn't hard - you can keep a copy of the link I gave you around, or there's a link to the Adoption Center at the top of my userpage. Searching for "Hersfold/Adopt" will also get this page among the first few hits.

You'll also notice I've put up a status box for you at the right here - you don't have to use this if you don't want to, however it could be useful if the two of us need to get together for a quick chat or something. This template does require a bit of setup to work the way it is intended, but it's nothing too involved.

So that I can get to know you a bit better, as well as some time to figure out where we're going to start, I've listed a short questionnaire below. All questions are completely optional, but remember answering them could be a great help for me in getting things ready. Also, I know I asked some of these in our IRC conversation last night, but please take the time to answer them again, as it's somewhat difficult for me to get to my logs. Thanks!

Should you ever need to contact me about something relating to the mentorship, feel free to post to this page or its talk page. I'm watching these pages and will be notified as soon as something comes up. If it's urgent or unrelated to the program, then you are of course more than welcome to drop a note on my main talk page at User talk:Hersfold. Then I'll get that god-awful ugly new messages bar and come running. Anyway, to your questions...


 * 1) What do you feel your best Wikipedia skills are so far?
 * I feel my best Wikipedia skills so far, are identifying and removing vandalism from various pages, mainly the Mainspace.
 * 1) What are your best contributions so far, and why?
 * Contribution wise(Not reverting), I'd have to say Flora_Jessop on the English Wikipedia, as I'm really involved in the Anti-Polygamy advocacy.
 * 1) What areas do you feel you need the most improvement in?
 * I feel that I need the most help in identifying appropriate tags to place on articles needed patrol. Also, I need to be able to make better use of WikiMarkup, and be able to be a part of WP:RfA, WP:AfD, etc.
 * 1) Say you were going to work on getting an article to FA status (any article, I don't even care if it exists or not). What would the article be about, or what general topic would it be a part of?
 * The article would be about Polygamy, and the history, who started it, and how it has negatively impacted the children and community.
 * 1) Have you ever found yourself in a conflict with another editor? If so, on what article, and what was the dispute about?
 * I don't believe I've ever found myself in a "conflict", though I have left a message on editors talk pages, telling them my opinion on a revert they made.
 * 1) Have you ever been subject to any form of sanction or editing restriction? I can tell you've never been blocked, but other sanctions are a bit more difficult to track down.
 * Yes, about 3 months ago, I clicked on a link, to the article "As I came of age", and replaced the article with "I came", which was part of some sort of "raid". I was part of a WP:ANI, and my Account creator privileges were revoked, and rollback temporarily removed, but was soon given back.
 * 1) What time zone do you live in? I am in US Eastern, UTC -4 or -5 hours depending on the time of year. Right now it's -5.
 * I am in the timezone "US ARIZONA", And we do not use DST, So sometimes we are DST, Sometimes we are MST, Currently it is UTC -7.
 * The following questions are strongly recommended.
 * 1) What do you expect to get out of this mentorship? Is there some goal you'd like to set for yourself, that you would plan to complete by the end of the program?
 * I expect to be able to make choices based on what I know, without constantly having to go to other editors like you for advice, I'd like to be able to be an expert, or close to one.
 * 1) As your mentor, what do you expect from me? Is there anything in particular you'd like to see me do?
 * I'd like to expect you to teach me the basics of Wikipedia, and working up to advanced, specifically, RfA, and AfD instructions, and a CSD Tagging tutorial.
 * 1) Take a look at the lessons I already have set up. Which of these do you feel you don't need to take? Which of these do you feel you really need? Ignore the required/optional markers; since this isn't a normal adoption program, the normal expectations are waived.
 * I think I really don't need Vandalism 151, but the rest, I feel I could be benefitted by.
 * 1) When thinking about how to run this, I came up with an idea to run this as a sort of "obstacle course", where I would give you various tasks to complete each week, with the intention of giving you experience in various situations. If necessary, I may get some other users to assist with this. Would you be open to such a program, or would you prefer something different? Either way, what suggestions do you have?
 * Actually, I've been thinking of that same program, that would be great, I'd love the idea of that.
 * 1) Would you be averse to using the Adopter and Adoptee userboxes?
 * I wouldn't mind using those userboxes :)

Thanks! I hope to hear back from you soon. Of course, if you have any questions for me, do feel free to ask them! This program is for your benefit, and I want to make sure it's run in a way that gets the best done for you. :-) Hers fold  (t/a/c) 16:25, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Cleanup patrol
In order to clearly and efficiently provide as much information as possible, Wikipedia has several editing guidelines to ensure that articles are kept neat and easy-to-read. The Manual of Style groups these guidelines into a sort of user's guide to editing Wikipedia. It outlines how to properly structure articles, and how to take care of the little nuances of English grammar in certain situations (where and how to use punctuation, whether to use American, Australian, British, Canadian, or some other dialect of English, etc.). Other policies and guidelines refer to how that information is to be presented. The Five Pillars of Wikipedia state that all information should be presented neutrally, and as such the Neutral Point of View, or NPOV policy is one of the most important within the project. Most pages on Wikipedia adhere to these policies and guidelines. For those that don't, we have cleanup.

WP:CLEANUP is a very large project with (currently) the third largest, and possibly oldest, backlog in the project, beaten out in size only by articles lacking sources and articles with unsourced statements. Pages get added to the cleanup category when an editor adds a cleanup template to the page. These templates point out to editors and casual readers that there is a problem with the page, and as such can't be relied upon to be completely accurate or even legible. Editors are constantly needed to work on these pages to resolve immediate problems to help improve things. This can be as simple as doing some basic copyediting for grammar or spelling, or re-wording sentences to remove bias, or in extreme cases completely re-writing entire articles.

While tedious, such cleanup patrols are essential to keeping Wikipedia running smoothly. The Manual of Style and WP:CLEANUP both give details on how to do all that.