User:Smokizzy/Coaching

Welcome ! I'm glad you decided to become a coach.

Your first assignment is to use those tools I told you about (User contributions, and Interiot's edit counter) to analyze each student's contributions and point out to them on their coaching pages their strengths and weaknesses, and also the areas in which they should get some admin-related experience. To help you identify areas of performance, see Wikipedia's help menu and directories (the dirs are accessible from the menu at the top of the Community portal). To pass RfA, it is nearly essential to have plenty of experience copy editing encyclopedia articles, developing good articles and/or featured articles, closing deletion debates, fighting vandalism, participation on one or more of the request departments, and dispute resolution mediation. Helping to clear backlogs in departments which have them is especially admired, and you can help steer students in that direction (and do some yourself if you have time). The two most important characteristics for being a great admin are trustworthiness and composure - so be on the lookout for incidents and how each student handled themselves in disputes. You should come down especially hard on edit warring, not assuming good faith, and uncivil behavior. That is, stress that these are things that admins are expected NOT to do.

Of course, since you are preparing for adminship yourself, you should familiarize yourself with the reading materials listed on the various links presented on the VC's main page, especially Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. When you read the policies and guidelines, be sure to copyedit them as well (the grammar usually can be improved) which creates a record in your contributions of what policies you have exposed yourself to. Though to make content changes to them requires building a consensus on their respective talk pages. Reading and participating in the policy talk pages is very helpful to Wikipedia, because sometimes individuals try to change policies for the worse, and only vigilance can keep the rules sane (and fight instruction creep). So you should reserve some of your wiki-time for policy (and guidelines) work. (Which reminds me, I'm overdue for some policy patrolling myself).

Be sure each student completes the general assignments listed on the VC's main coaching page, and have them inform you of their progress on their coaching page. By the way, you should do the same. :-)

Last but not least, encourage students to communicate with each other (on their various coaching pages), because each has strengths they can share. Invite them to visit the coaches' coaching pages as well, including yours, and to critique our performance. Teach them how to learn from the example of others by studying user contributions. Aside from the co-coaches, a good place to look for users who set a good example is the List of Wikipedians by number of edits - it lists the most active Wikipedians, most of whom are admins.

I've co-coached 3 users to admin status so far, so see their coaching pages to see what they went through to become admins. Also study their RfAs (and other RfAs if you have time).

Well, the above should keep you occupied for awhile. :-)

If you have any questions at all, feel free to post them on this page, and I (and perhaps the other co-coaches as well) will be more than happy to answer them. (It is also useful to post a quicky note on a user's talk page to let them know they have a message waiting for them on another page - this practice takes advantage of Wikipedia's user talk page new message alert system.

Good luck, and have fun!

 Th e Tr ans hu man ist    00:21, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

==Comment== Unfortunatly, I won't be able to contribute untill the middle of next week. Smokizzy (talk) 14:27, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Hey
I've done pretty much everything here, and I don't want to sound like a snob, but there's really nothing I can add to the student's pages that's not already there. I'm ready for my next assignment! :) Smokizzy (talk) 16:42, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
 * We have some new students. Feel free to jump in and help.  Look over their contribs, and comment on their performance.  Study some failed RfAs to provide experience of what not to do.  And help push these guys in the right direction.  Teach them things.  :)
 * I'm thinking that Bart133 is ready for the mop. Look him over and let me know what you think.  The Transhumanist 22:32, 29 August 2007 (UTC)