User:SaxTeacher/Admin coaching

My request for admin coaching

Articles created/edited

 * Here is my list of articles I created
 * And my list of articles I made significant contributions to

Background
I am 39 years old and hold a bachelor's degree. I have an insatiable curiosity, and the web has fueled this curiosity for the last ten years. But I had not realized its full potential until I found Wikipedia in November 1995. I created my first article on my first day as a user, and have been a regular user and contributor since then.

I first heard of adminship in August 2006. I checked my edit count, and thinking it was over 1000, created an RfA on 31 August. However it turns out that I misread the page displaying my edit count; the actual count was much too low for adminship. I realized this based on the first few comments but did not bother rescinding the RfA, which can be seen here (Requests for adminship/SaxTeacher). A suggestion by one of the voters was to sign up for admin coaching, which I immediately did.

I currently have 105 pages on my watchlist and most day-to-day work on Wikipedia involves general upkeep, small improvements, and rvv on those pages.

I read several of the Administrators' reading list documents to learn more about adminship. I have not finished all of them, but intend to as I get closer to adminship.

If I had to identify one weakness, it would be that I don't have a good understanding of what powers admins have, and what procedures they go through before they exercise those powers.

My areas of knowledge

 * Aviation, flying, piloting, small airplanes, seaplanes, gliders, hot air balloons, blimps, airships
 * Bicycling, bicycle touring
 * Do it yourself; make it yourself; home repair
 * English grammar, editing, proofreading
 * Music (clarinet, saxophone, classical music, jazz music, jazz improvisation, teaching music)
 * Outdoorsmanship, camping, hiking, backpacking, lightweight backpacking
 * Photography, black & white film developing and printing, darkroom techniques
 * Public speaking, Toastmasters International
 * Sailing, sailboat racing
 * Skiing
 * Travel, by car/commercial airline/private airplane/sailboat; international travel
 * Volunteer organizations (Civil Air Patrol, Coast Guard Auxiliary, Boy Scouts)

Other activities
I wrote a book in 1993 which I authored, edited, and typeset myself.

I serve as a volunteer expert at www.allexperts.com in the areas of aviation, clarinet, saxophone, photography, and sailing.

I maintain a web site and several non-profit domains.

I find Wikipedia so useful that I created a wiki for use by members of Civil Air Patrol and even obtained a domain name for it. Unfortunately, that wiki has attracted only a few users, so it has not become the definitive source of information that I had hoped - but I plan to promote it at some point in the future, hopefully achieving a critical mass of users and getting the resultant snowball effect whereby more members will refer to it and subsequently add to it.

Fang Aili introduction
I've been editing since August 05, I believe. Became an admin April 06. I've done a little of everything. This page shows some of my main contributions, and I've done a lot with admin tools (deletions, blocks, protection). I haven't written anything FA, though I helped get Michelle Kwan to GA status. I tend to think of myself as a seed-planter in regards to articles. I'll write a decent stub or start-class article, and other people will build on it. I've coached two others, Firsfron and BradBeattie. Both are admins now. I think it's neat that you're into music; I studied piano for about 20 years, and play with other instruments occasionally. --Fang Aili talk 17:43, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Next steps
So what are the steps in general? Here is my edit count from Michael Billington's Edit Counter:

Edit count for SaxTeacher on en.wikipedia: Total edits: 1159 Mainspace: 818 Talk: 59 User: 159 User talk: 56 Project: 35 Project talk: 1 Image: 1 Template: 8 Category: 20 Category talk: 1 Portal: 1

I guess I need 1500 or 2000 several thousand additional edits before RfA. Perhaps I should direct my editing efforts to certain areas; one of the suggestions I recall from my failed RfA was that I needed more edit counts in certain "spaces." Unfortunately I don't know what 'spaces' are; I guess they are categories / types of pages. I wonder if there is a

Here are comments from some of the "oppose" votes. (My comments in italics)
 * less than 50 Wikipedia space edits
 * less than 50 User Talk edits
 * less than 500 Article space edits
 * Aside from being able to edit and improve articles, admins and prospective admins should also be contributing to the Wiki space and talking to users, whether it be giving advice about editing or researching or warning vandals.
 * not enough talk edits
 * Seems to not be participating in discussions a lot (What sort of discussions? where are they taking place? on article talk pages? user talk pages?)
 * Your answers to the standard questions aren't compelling either: your answer to Q1 doesn't mention any tasks that require the admin tools, for example. (I need to gain a better understanding of what the admin tools are. A pointer or two would be very helpful.)
 * Please get some experience in areas away from the main space such as AfDs, so we can get a better sense of you and you can get a better sense of the kinds of debates an admin has to get involved in. (how does one get experience in AfDs?)

Note to self: need to read WP:RFA/ST —SaxTeacher (talk)  20:11, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Spaces
"Spaces" refers to the different areas of content on Wikipedia. "Article space" or "mainspace" is where the articles are. "User space" is stuff like this page, beginning with "User:" or "User talk:". "Wikipedia space" are things like Searching, or anything that starts with "Wikipedia:". WikiProjects fall into that space, being called "Wikipedia:WikiProject Whatever". Portal, Template, and Image are a few others. When people say that you need more edits to certain spaces, they are basically saying that you need a broader experience. If you were active at WP:AIV, WP:AFD, or WP:RFA for instance, you would have more edits to Wikipedia space. --Fang Aili talk 20:48, 24 January 2007 (UTC)


 * See Namespace. --Fang Aili talk 16:14, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Check in
Hello. How goes? Do you think you have a better handle on "spaces" now? --Fang Aili talk 19:09, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm using AWB steadily; so far I've corrected "saxaphone" to "saxophone" in all of Wikipedia, and now typo-fixing on articles in the "Musical instruments" category. I have some questions:


 * 1) Let's say I want to tag an article as a stub. I could just put but I have a feeling there is some sort of category-specific stub type... "Musical instrument stub", or "American-composer-stub", or "Canadian classical musician bio stub" or something like that. How do I find out whether there is a special stub category (if that's even the correct word) that applies to an article I am writing or editing?
 * There's a big list here, but I don't use it. Sometimes I'll just use stub and someone comes by pretty quickly to add a more specific tag. Or I'll check related articles and see if they have the stub tag I'm looking for. I do the same thing with categories-- sometimes just uncat, but sometimes I can guess or discover the correct cat(s) pretty easily. I've found that there are a number of people who quickly update generic stubs and uncats, so I don't feel like I'm doing the job halfway. Those people can find the correct specific tags/cats much faster than I can, usually. --Fang Aili talk 15:41, 8 February 2007 (UTC)


 * 1) When I finish typo-checking the "Musical instruments" category, what's a good way to fill the list in AWB with some more articles to fix? Should I just pick a category? Or is there some way to get it to look at "new articles" or "recent changes" or "articles that need typo fixing" ?
 * What sort of typos are you fixing? I imagine you could just pick a category at random and start fixing things. If you want to monitor recent changes or new pages specifically, there's AWB or the new page patrol program. Or another alternative is to check Category:Cleanup from February 2007 if you want to clean up recently-tagged articles. Or check the categories related to the various tags at Template messages/Cleanup. --Fang Aili talk 15:41, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks, —SaxTeacher (talk)  15:06, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

AWB and edit summaries
I only saw this one diff, but you want to be careful about your edit summaries when using AWB (and indeed, at all times). Surely such a great addition of content does not match the "Typo fixing using AWB" edit summary. :) So, just a head's up. --Fang Aili talk 15:43, 8 February 2007 (UTC)