User:MBisanz/Active deleters

Background
I took a list of the nine most-active human deleters from the prior month and asked them the following questions. Below are their poorly anonymized responses.

Inquiry
Hi, your name was mentioned at Wikipedia_talk:RFA, so I decided to stop by and see if you might be willing to answer a couple questions?

1. What motivates you to do a lot of deletions? Is it your primary manner of participation on Wikipedia or a smaller part of your overall work?

2. What sorts of things or interactions make your deletion work less pleasant? What sorts of changes or occurrences would make you less likely to perform the number of deletions you presently perform?

3. Do you have any suggestions on how the deletion process or conduct policies surrounding deletions could be improved to encourage greater admin participation?

Feel free to respond here or at WT:RFA, if you decide to respond. Thanks.  MBisanz  talk 15:55, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Response One
It's kind of funny, when I became an admin I said I wanted to do anti-vandal work mainly, but since then I've stuck with deletion work more than anything else. I think it was the relatively steady stream of fairly easy work that drew me there, whereas anti-vandal work is sometimes badly needed, and sometimes several admins tripping over themselves to clear out every AIV report.

Response Two

 * 1) Deletions are just some quiet little corner where I can do some work and help out with relatively little conflict.  I only do CSDs and housekeeping deletions.  I don't do AfD, PROD, or image related deletions.  Deletions are not the only admin related work I do.  I still block vandals and apply page protections from RC work.  I used to watch AIV, but I've gone away from that lately (don't know why), but still still occasionally handle things there.  Awhile back, ThatPeskyCommoner made a .  I see myself as one of those pothole filling, litter picking up, bandit chasing, road clearing admins. Maybe I need to get myself a florescent vest...
 * 2) The only unpleasantness that I run into is the people who really don't understand why I deleted their article or attack me for it.  The vandals cause me more unpleasantness than editors whose articles I deleted.  But like I said, deletion is relatively conflict free. As for what would make me delete fewer things, only two things come to mind: more bureaucracy (like say if the CSD criteria got changed or some extra layer of instructions) or more admins doing the same work.
 * 3) Depends upon which deletion process you mean.  If you mean my specific areas of interest, then there would be nothing process or policy related that would help.  You just have to have a certain interest in doing sometimes dull, tedious work.  However, with the trend of RfA !voters looking for editors involved in almost every aspect of admin-related work, it seems to me that the likelihood of somebody interested in doing "grunt work" (for lack of a better term) is relatively low.  I know that if I were to run an RfA today being the editor I was back when I passed my RfA, I would not have been confirmed with a big "Not enough content work".  That just isn't what I like to do.  I'd rather be filling potholes than paving new roads.


 * Hopefully that answers your questions. If not, feel free to ask more.  I've read the WT:RFA thread, but I'm not likely to add anything there.  Eventually all of those kinds of threads seem to end up the same result.

Response Three
The amount of deletions I do varies from month to month, as I tend to switch primary tasks quite often to help keep my interest level high. Deletions require a different mindset from writing or re-writing articles. It's a totally different kind of work requiring a different part of the brain. So when I am tired from writing, deletions are a good place to go. Mostly I work in file deletions. It's fun to work with images, especially the user-submitted photos. I started out working on non-controversial simple ones like F8s and F5s, and would leave and watch-list any I wasn't sure about, and then make a note of whether or not I agreed with how the closing admin handled the file. Over time I have become more and more familiar with our rules on freedom of panorama and fair use guidelines and copyright law, to the point where I started closing discussions at WP:PUF. Right now I am working on a case that involves copyright law, fair use, and Nazi Germany; I'm the perfect person for the job. Serendipitous. Since I have acquired a skill-set that allows me to do large numbers of deletions with few errors and few complaints from other users, it's more or less beholden on me to use those skills to help get the work done as best as possible. Another task I do sometimes is checking bot moves to the Commons; to do this task the checker has to be an admin on the sending wiki, so that they can look inside the deleted file and make sure everything arrived safely. There's presently over 61,000 transclusions of the {BotMoveToCommons} template, from all wikis. I have no idea how many of these are from our wiki. It's a simple task that's fun and easy to do, but only admins can do it, so I do it. I think we have two kinds of admins: those who view it as a promotion, a way to level-up, a hat to collect. Then there's people who once they become an admin they realise that they are now one of the grownups in charge, and they are obliged to try to help in whatever ways best suit their temperament and skills (whether that be vandalism work, closing contentious discussions, or more gnomish stuff). So I think the best way to encourage admins to help out with deletions or any of the other admin tasks is to try to locate and elect the people who fit into the second category. How that would be done I'm not sure, as I am not very politically motivated.

Response Four

 * 1a) I think very mechanically; I'm a computer programmer. As such, I prefer to do things en masse (think GIGO). NowCommons fits perfectly into that mold; I take a very brief look at the image description page by use of a tool I've written, and mark it for deletion. With my tool, I can probably do things 10x as fast as anyone else, and with better accuracy too. Probably 99% of my deletions are done with some sort of automatic tool.


 * 1b) File namespace deletions, particularly NowCommons, is the primary work I do here. I also occasion other areas, but this work is my primary.


 * 2a) I've written my tool to take away most of the tedium in deletions, so that problem has been fixed, at least for me (FYI I made the tool public at ~magog/commons_images.htm). I also proposed a change in the waiting time of WP:PUF from 14 to 7 days, which took away some of the tedium in that process. One thing I'm not fond of is haphazard way in which disputed fair use images are processed for deletion. Some of the time, people use {{subst:dfu}}, but some of the time they just use WP:FFD instead. Worse, the outcome heavily depends on who closes the discussion, so there is a lot of somewhat contradictory precedence.


 * 2b) There was a proposal a while back which said something like "for NowCommons images, they will not be eligible for deletion until seven days after tagging, and unless the uploader has been informed." The idea was panned, and rightfully so, IMO. That would be a disaster.


 * 3) It takes a particularly type of person to want to work with media in the first place - that person must be extremely familiar with copyright law, must have a close attention to detail, and must be willing to endure some tedium. That already disqualifies probably 90-95% of admins. Just look at my RfA coaching on media files before I was ready to take on deletion: User:Magog the Ogre/Admin coaching/Lesson 3.


 * A suggestion: perhaps a how-to page should be created for all things media deletion related, or one just for NowCommons. I'd even be happy to start such a page.

Response Five

 * 1. I suppose it has become a habit at this point. Three years of doing the same thing over and over, it just becomes a part of you, in a sense. It has become my primary manner of participation on Wikipedia, and it has been that way for quite some time; I don't have much time for much else, though I do try to create an article every now and then.
 * 2. The biggest issue for me would be the response I sometimes receive from others users about my deletions. I understand their frustration when pages/files are deleted, but taking out their frustration on me and getting snappy isn't going to move things any faster. This is especially prevalent with images, as I'm one of the few administrators who strictly enforces WP:NFCC, while most of the community does not. I also get flack for not notifying the author of a page of an impending deletion, even though that isn't my job nor is a notification by the nominator required by policy. I actually disabled the email option quite some time ago, as I received most of the insults there.
 * The only thing that comes to mind where I would perform less deletions is inactivity on my part. I can't really think of any other reason.
 * 3. I don't really much of a problem with the current system as it is. I think what may drive other administrators away from deletion work, and at the scale I do, is the type response one receives from so many deletions. Whether it be "restore my page/image!" or "hey, there's nothing wrong with your deletions—they're all within policy—but you're doing too many, so slow down". The latter did contribute to my first case of burnout, as one can see from the dates I received that comment and when I burned out, and I think that's why most avoid the deletion rate that the few of us other administrators dare to take on.

Response Six
Being asked to comment here, I must say that deletion IS a main part of my work here. It's a step on from what I was doing before I got nominated - tagging. I wasn't an NPP - I monitored edits by new users which picked up quite a bit that the standard patrollers didn't. My very first edit was removing rubbish from an article, so you could say I've gone on as I began... Having said that, I do get a chance to save some things, like Bobble-head doll syndrome and True's Yard (can't remember exact titles). I do some translation, and have started a new article (one sentence so far...) I've said similar things to this before, but this is how I look at it: A school is about teaching, and that means teachers are important. But... What if they had to clean the place, remove the rubbish, feed the kids at lunchtime, and do all the office work? How far would the star surgeon get without nurses, auxiliary nurses, technicians, porters, cleaners, and whoever disposes of the excised bits? Many Christians ignore Jesus's remark about 'in my father's house are many mansions' (they think theirs is the only one...). So do a lot of the regular participants at RfA. Some require content creation. Some require DYKs and GAs. I wouldn't know a by the definition and labelling GA if I fell over it. I may have seen a DYK somewhere. I do know spam, concealed spam, hoaxes, attacks, vandal articles, and non-entities with egos. If everyone was permanently healthy, what need of doctors? If all articles were perfect from the start, and no-one vandalised, who'd need patrollers and admins? I and several others (including those concentrating on vandalism) work mainly in the dirty areas. But dirt can grow crops as well as weeds, which is why I use individually targeted messages a lot. Where I think someone's not getting the point, or could in fact do a better job now - or a couple of years later when things are better known. There are some people who would do a good job as admins, but I wouldn't at present encourage any to try. We'd be likely to lose them through the downright unnecessary rudeness that RfA has become notorious for. (Just like the House of Commons...)

Continuing after a save (and some sour strawberries)... The loss of new editors. Some are well lost. The 'I'm only trying to get our company's history where people can read it' brigade, and their associates in politics, rap, and so on. Odd ones can come through - one whose name I can't remember started as a spammer and went on to be quite good. It's the good faith ones I worry about. I think one reason is that they only sign in when editing the article. You can see this when the contested deletion is IP made. They're not going to see the reasons on their talk page because they won't get the yellow banner. They see the article's gone, and they go. That's enough for now.