User:TonyTheTiger/RFA2Essay-nominated

As we toil on wikipedia, we sometimes forget people on other computers are seeing what we do. I am grateful someone has an appreciation for my efforts and do accept the nomination. I failed in my first RFA in Dec at about 5500 edits (see here). Since then I have attempted to address my weaknesses by becoming active in WP space and WP:XFD.

I had been considering renominating myself after 3000 more (8500 total) edits. However, I stumbled upon Requests_for_adminship/Daniel.Bryant_2 and decided I had a lot to learn. This caused me to expand horizons to CAT:RFU. A request for help with Category:Unassessed biography articles, inspired me to help a little and to tagged all my article creations with WPBiography, WikiProjectBanners, & Infobox Biography.

Another qualm with my prior candidacy, is that I am of Afro-American heritage and of Latin-American descent, and that I made inquiries related to the ethnicity/wikipedia administrator intersection. My heritage remains, but as far as I know statistics to quell my curiosities remain unavailable. I have been put in contact with administrators of color, however.

I should also add that in the last month two individuals have queried me about my user name using UsernameConcern. My reasons for wanting this particular name are as follows.
 * See my bio that is a linked attachment to my signature. I am a prominent martial artist.  That is essentially my performing name or stage name.  If the commercial release of my video CD is successful, I hope to be notable enough to have my bio unuserfied within 6 months.
 * I have been known by the name Tony, have attended junior high school, senior high school and college at schools with Tiger mascots.
 * As a prominent martial artist, the Tiger is a sacred animal to me. It represents stealth, grace, power, and ferocity.
 * I have built up a lot of human capital with 12500 good edits under this name. Last month, I earned my first WP:FL and my first WP:FA under this name.  I have several WP:GAs under this name.   I have also earned several barnstars and smileys under this name.


 * 1. What sysop chores do you anticipate helping with? Please check out Category:Administrative backlog, and read the page about administrators and the administrators' reading list.

It is logical for me to pursue adminship to increase the efficiency with which I can assist. I have been involved in numerous types of WP:XFD, especially WP:AFD, WP:CFD. Becoming an admin will enable me to more efficiently improve the encyclopedia. I will become more involved in XFD and will be able close out discussions objectively. I mostly find stale vandalism. As such my involvement with AIV is infrequent, but as an admin I would efficiently contribute to these efforts. Once I have mastered my new tools I will be of great assistance and will get active in the unfortunate task of blocking users. Although I will surely begin by blocking very clear abusive vandals who ignore warnings, I hope to be able to steer users towards good faith contributions. Overall, I will use new tools as respectfully and pragmatically as possible while balancing efficiency with caution. Above all else, I intend to act with the welfare of the encyclopedia as a whole in mind at all times.

Since last month I received both a WP:FA and WP:FL (as further outlined below) I have an interest in WP:FC. As I state on the featured content talk pages, I have an interest in modifying featured content. I believe Featured Templates and possibly Featured Categories and Featured Galleries (the picture analogue to Featured Topics) should exist. Also, below I discuss my interest in preventing the deterioration of the WP:TFA feature now that wikipedia has grown to a point where the promotion rate far exceeds the number of days in a month. Raul has done a tremendous job as the Featured Article Director selecting such articles, but I believe wikipedia's growth will lead to problems. I hope to be involved in the featured content process and possibly redesign of the main page.


 * 2. Of your articles or contributions to Wikipedia, are there any with which you are particularly pleased, and why?

I am pleased with my resuscitation of WP:CHICOTW because of its successes and general contributions. In addition, undertaking this responsibility has forced me to become a better editor. The strategy of the CHICOTW has been to attempt to create WP:GAs from redlinks and stubs. However, because of all the GAs the CHICOTW was producing I had to start cleaning up my own articles so it would not seem like all my GAs were on the coattails of the CHICOTW. If you look at my userpage you will see the numerous WP:GAC that were thusly motivated. This week I parameterized the ChicagoWikiProject so that the group members can add quality and importance designations. Any glitches with the parameters are because I am not a great programmer. However, I am quite a pirate. I do my best to give Johnny Depp a run for his money.

I am also pleased with my own progress as an editor. I have pursued editorial excellence by contributing hundreds of edits to articles that I created and guided to WP:FA (3/26/07) (Campbell's Soup Cans) and  WP:FL (3/16/07) (List of recordings preserved in the United States National Recording Registry) status. I spent over 500 edits on the former (333 article, 19 article talk, 12 FAC1, 44 FAC2, 82 Images (13, 11, 11, 9, 8, 7, 4, 2, 1, 1) Removed images (7, 4, 4) image talk pages such as Wikipedia talk:Images-3 and Wikipedia talk:Fair use-3 as well as numerous user talk page exchanges) and 300 on the latter. I have become a much better editor over the last 4 months. I am also pleased with some of my lead roles in less edit-intensive Washington Square Park, Chicago &  Marquette Building (Chicago) contributions. I also await responses to the numerous GACs I have in the queue.

Also, I am pleased to have created an article that survives WP:CRUFT and in fact achieved WP:DYK for an athlete that I use to root for. I am a very strong University of Michigan Wolverines fan who has trekked to Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Final Four, National Invitation Tournament Finals and NCAA Men's Ice Hockey Championship games. I have had The Victors as my ringtone for years. As a student in the renamed Ross School of Business, I use to root along with friends and classmates for the Michigan teams. I was a regular at the Saturday morning Business School tailgates. One of the favorite players for all the guys I use to hang out with in the business school was (02-27-07) Rob Pelinka and I am pleased to have been able to post an article for him. It is very rare for a student in the business school to have an important role on one of the major Michigan sports programs. As business school students, we use to like to shout his name (like we were PA announcers) whenever he did anything (even got up to stand by the scorers table). Rooting for him rivaled witnessing Desmond Howard's Heisman season as a Michigan sports memory. It was fun to create his still stubby article.


 * 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?

I had a minor dustup attempting to clarify why I could not get a block on a repeat offender just because I caught him 3 hours after the occurrence. The text can be seen on my page at Archive 7 and at TigerShark's archive. He got blocked 3 days later. I returned to my normal editing and vandalism patrol of my watchlists. I mostly catch stale vandalism efforts. However, I finally assisted on my first block on March 30. My numerous talk page tags have probably helped many others succeed at getting vandals blocked at WP:AIV. Going forward, I will as time permits continue to fight vandalism, but I will be satisfied with user talk page notices unless I have a fresh catch.

Also, during my Campbell's Soup Cans WP:FAC debates fair use issues became contentious because modern art articles face stringent requirements on image inclusion. I especially had extensive debate with User:ShadowHalo. Of course, in the end I relented to a significant compromise on image inclusion to get my article promoted. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 16:15, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

I had a much more protracted conflict with a proposal for changing the WP:TFA/R procedure for the new era of tremendous surplus in TFA nominees. It is debatable whether proper protocol was used in handling my proposal. That aside, in March 2007 a record 83 FA new promotions occurred. The current TFA/R queue has grown to about 130. There is about a 400 article pool of non TFA FAs. Many of these articles have been FAs for 2, 3 or 4 years. At the time of the debate, I had not determined a very important aspect of the problem, which is the large number of old eligible articles by active wikipedians that have not been promoted as TFAs. It seems to me that there are many problems to be solved. 1.) The FA Director, Raul654, is overworked and the situation will worsen as the process continues to grow in scale. 2.) The average wait between FA promotion and a TFA/R decision is growing to a soon to be annoying length. 3.) The number of articles vying for TFA/R is growing in a way that is going to start leading to disappointment and frustration as it becomes clear that some articles will be passed over for inordinate if not infinite lengths of time. 4.) The combination of the above will eventually lead to hostility and possibly discouragement 5.) The high quality of articles chosen as TFAs somewhat masks the high quality of some of the omitted articles. I have an ounce of prevention for these anticipated problems. However, the debate has basically boiled down to a discussion over whether I am attempting to solve a problem that I can prove has become unmanageable.  My take on this is that I am proposing an ounce of prevention to a mounting problem, and I am being told that until I have proof that there is need for a pound of cure, I should be satisfied with the status quo.  The long and the short of how I have dealt with this conflict is that I put a lot of effort into it, discussed it civilly, accepted its failure, rewrote it, and are again discussed it politely with the others. Although User:SandyGeorgia has generally been opposed to my idea, she has helped me to fill out a summary of old TFA eligible FAs after the proposal died. I continue to improve the presentation and although it is probably not proper for me to take a third stab at the apple, I would support resuscitation of my proposal by interested parties.