Wikipedia:Editor review/Mkdw


 * The following discussion is an archived editor review for Mkdw. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the user's talk page or in a editor review).  No further edits should be made to this page.  

Mkdw
I have been on Wikipedia for a relatively short amount of time, but in that time I have grown as an editor and Wikipedian. I will admit in the beginning I had much to learn about Wikipedia, as do all beginners, but since then I have reorganized the WikiProject Vancouver, and contributed in a major way to the featured status of some content such as Vancouver, History of Solidarity, and the Portal:Vancouver. Mkdw talk 01:42, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

 Reviews 

Okay lets get this show on the road, as always I review from an administrative candidate standpoint. Cheers.




 * Edit Count: 3,700, hmm...very nice total, Most RFA candidates are expected to have about 3,000 and you obviously surpass that total. Quality too, which is very nice.
 * Mainspace: Outstanding, browsing your contribs I am enlightened to see how great they are. You have a couple of FA's under your belt which is excellent. I have nothing else to say, except that you may want to do even more Recent changes patrol...only if it interests you of course. Otherwise just keep doing what you are doing.
 * Wikipedia: A good number but I see little XFD participation, which can kill you in a future RFA, so consider jumping in every once and a while and share your knowledge of policy. Also consider participating in RFA's as this is a good place to participate also.
 * User talk: High, which is great, I prefer admins/editors to interact with other users. And don't be afraid to ask questions either ;)
 * Civility: You appear to be very civil, which is great. Always do your best to stay calm...even in the most stressful situations.
 * Kindness: You are kind, nothing need to be said here. :)
 * Edit summarys: Perfect, keep it up, you always fill them in which is great but they are also of high quality...meaning that they are easily understandable even by the newcomers.
 * Userpage: Nice and clean and shows of your excelent material contributions to wikipedia. Way to go! =)
 * Other: Email is on which is great, Also I notice that you have put a lot of work into portals, keep it up. I notice a featured portal also...this is awesome! I do have a little bit of a problem with your talk page. You have that "you have new message" joke on the top of your talk page. I would consider removing it as it "really" confuses newcomers and that is not what we want, and it really tires the experienced users who get a lot of messages. Other than that no problems.
 * You, I and wikipedia knows that you are an outstanding user, and your work here is highly appreciated. I enjoy your contributions, and so does the world. I Arjun  am willing to nominate you in month for administrator if you work on your weak areas. And I am doubt that an RFA would fail. Cheers!  Arjun  02:35, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Other: Email is on which is great, Also I notice that you have put a lot of work into portals, keep it up. I notice a featured portal also...this is awesome! I do have a little bit of a problem with your talk page. You have that "you have new message" joke on the top of your talk page. I would consider removing it as it "really" confuses newcomers and that is not what we want, and it really tires the experienced users who get a lot of messages. Other than that no problems.
 * You, I and wikipedia knows that you are an outstanding user, and your work here is highly appreciated. I enjoy your contributions, and so does the world. I Arjun  am willing to nominate you in month for administrator if you work on your weak areas. And I am doubt that an RFA would fail. Cheers!  Arjun  02:35, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
 * You, I and wikipedia knows that you are an outstanding user, and your work here is highly appreciated. I enjoy your contributions, and so does the world. I Arjun  am willing to nominate you in month for administrator if you work on your weak areas. And I am doubt that an RFA would fail. Cheers!  Arjun  02:35, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Review by WJBscribe (WJB talk)
 * Statistics- User since August 2006. 3471 edits. 790 mainspace (23%), 682 user talk (20%), 497 wikipedia (14%), 460 portal (13%).
 * Mathbot's tool: Edit summaries= 71% major, 23% minor.
 * Edit spread. Your edits are more spread than most because of heavy portal involvement. Nevertheless your mainspace edits are low. Effectively less than 1/4 of your edits is actually on the encyclopedia itself- I would aim to raise it to more like a third. You have a strong number of Wikipedia contributions, though again they represent a low proportion of total edits. It may need to be higher if you intend to submit yourself for RfA (maybe more like 20/25%).
 * Project space. Most of your contributions are to Project Vancouver and Feature Portal nominations. These are good and show solid engagement with fellow editors through a project. But if you want to show a knowledge of Wikidia policies you might want to get involved in XfDs (as I see you've started to). You might also want to check out the Help Desk and see if you can answer any questions there.
 * Afd so far. I know you've withdrawn this vote: but I don't think you were right at the time. For one thing I don't think it met the speedy deletion criteria at WP:CSD. The article said, "he founded an academy in Calcutta" which is an assertion of notability. Starting a fencing school is likely to make you notable especially given his race and the time period. If you do think an article at AfD meets the speedy criteria, it would be helpful to tag it as such as well. I also worry that you didn't research the subject before casting your vote. The top hit on google is "100 Great Black Britons", which might have given the hint the guy was notable. I'm sure those are just signs that your new to the process but be careful when expressing delete opinions- it someone's work that your suggesting be rejected. Your other AfD contributions seem fine- the Yumi Vu AfD was months ago so I don't think any comment on that is very relevant any more.
 * When I voted "speedy delete" the article was much different than the one that is currently up. Edit 101002060 where it does not mention that he founded an academy. Mkdw talk 07:23, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
 * It totally says he founded an academy. I guess this is a lession in reading things more closely. Mkdw talk 07:43, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Vancouver project. Your involvement here seems to have been very positive and combine with the high number of UserTalk contributions show that you are good at interacting with the community.
 * Portal. This page is great. You should be proud. I even love the colour scheme -which might be obvious giving the colours on my user and talk page :). Good portals complement mainspace articles well and enhance the Wikipedia interface- I guess their in a kind of limbo between mainspace and projectspace. It seems a strong candidate to become Featured, which will quite a feather in your cap. (I may well go and vote favourable myself)
 * Votestacking. I notice that you notified the members of your Wikiproject about the featured portal nomination. I would draw your attention to the shiny new policy enshrined at WP:CANVAS. Posting to a group of users likely to hold opinions that support yours is a little contraversial. I'm sure you meant it in good faith, but your fellow project contributors have a clear interest in their Portal becoming featured. The regular Feature Portal contributors are prob the right people to comment in that debate, rather than bringing in Vancouver supporters who've never voted for a portal before :). Its not a major criticism but in future have a think about how such posts might be interpreted and how much they'll enhance the debate your inviting people to participate in.
 * Mainspace. Your mainspace contributions look strong. I see that you contributed to the article Vancouver which is now featured, congratulations. Pehaps your mainspace % of edits could be higher (esp. given a reasonable proportion of edits are to rv vandalism) but the ones you have are of a high quality and I suspect the proportion will increase after the Vancouver Portal is featured and requires only routine updates. No probs here.
 * Hollywood North has been particularly improved by your contributions both in terms of content and referencing. There seems to be a content dispute brewing but you are dealing with it well. It is indeed too soon for formal mediation. If you are unable to resolve the issues on the talk page, might I suggest informal mediation through WP:MEDCAB? I would be available in such capacity if you wish- as a Brit I have no bias on the matter.
 * Coding. By the way the proper coding for a line break on Wiki is  not  . Bad code is recognised (and so has the same effect) but its easier if the coding is correct to start with.
 * Minor edits. Your seem to have very few minor edits (only 43 (5%) if Mathbot's tool is right) in the mainspace, which is astonishing given your total number of edits. Don't know why that is but it looks a bit weird and I've seen some interpret it as arrogance (i.e. "I think all my edits are important"). I recommend flagging more of your edits as minor in future. Spelling and grammar fixes, adding/removing internal links and vandalism reverting can all be marked as minor. It helps those looking through the history to know that the edit didn't substantively change the content of the article.
 * Edit summaries. You need to use these more. Edit summaries help explain why you make the edits you do. They are helpful when looking through page histories to spot vandalism. A wikipedia guideline specifies that these should be filled for every edit and several RfA voters will oppose those with less than 90% edit summary completion. I suggest you alter the my preferences section of your account. The last option in the editing tab is to prompt you if you leave the edit summary blank. That way you can make sure you always use them.
 * Sig. I like your sig- individual but not overcomplicated, with a useful separate link to your talk page.
 * Thank you. Mkdw talk 07:28, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Conclusion. No one can claim my reviews aren't thorough . You seem to be a great editor and your contributions to Vancouver related articles and the portal are of a high standard. You'll soon have a feature Portal and an FA to your name which are good accolades. Get more involved in policy discussion and AfDs to bulk up your Projectspace contribs and edit your prefs so that you always leave edit summaries. More minor edits. That being said though the suggestions for improvements are minor in light of your good work. Get in touch if anything above isn't clear. Best of luck with the featured portal nomination. If you're interested in adminship I would be pleased to support you once you've addressed the above :). WJBscribe (WJB talk) 04:00, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Fortunately, about a week and a half ago the Portal:Vancouver did become a featured portal! Mkdw talk 07:28, 17 January 2007 (UTC)


 * 1) Mkdw if a good editor. I think he has some good ideas. I think the Vancouver project has gotten off the ground since he joined. However, I have some concerns with him.

Your reorganization of WikiProject Vancouver gained no consensus. You need to discuss things like this first, as it's a huge change.
 * I'm a little bit confused about this complaint Selmo. The WikiProject had seen very little activity and after my reorganization other project members thanked me for my contributions such as User:Bobanny. You in fact awarded me a barnstar for those changes to the WikiProject. "You should also should be commended for reorganizing WikiProject Vancouver. Being one of the "senior" members, at first I was a bit uncomfortable, but now it makes a whole lot more sense. -- Selmo (talk) 06:46, 18 November 2006 (UTC)". The majority of the changes had to do with moving this to subsections has the main page for the WikiProject was '39kb too long' Mkdw talk 09:16, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Second, you seem to take a significant amount of the credit for getting the Vancouver article featured when it was mostly me and Bobanny. You've essentially nominated and fixed the objections. You cut and paste moves and destroy the history, when the "move" tab was fine enough. You've overwritten the prototype of the Vancouver portal with no consensus, and you yell at vandals in edit summaries. (WARNING)
 * I can change my edit summaries. I was not aware they were messages in themselves to the users. I was under the impression they were summaries to let others know what changes you made and that the content of the warning messages were the details. You did strike out, but said you take a 'significant credit when it was mostly me and Bobanny' which I feel is a bad faith comment. No one owns an article per WP:OWN. I have only been on Wikipedia for a couple months and while my edit count to the article cannot compare to yours and Bobanny's, I still feel my contributions were important and I am proud of them. I changed most of the citations to cite web and cite book. I asked for many of the other WikiProject Vancouver members to come together on the project, and together we all did a great job on it. On Feb 8 it was featured on the main page. Your comment, "You cut and paste moves and destroy the history, when the "move tab" was fine enough" I feel is another bad faith comment. I was still learning about Wikipedia and User:Luna Santain was kind enough to show me about WP:MOVE as you can see by her message to me: User_talk:Mkdw/Archive_4. I did not intend to cause inconvience and it was not malicious, I just simply didn't know. As for the Portal:Vancouver, you will see from its history that its only had three major contributors. Yourself, User:AQu01rius, and myself. Now none of us discussed every change we all did the portal, even you. We all worked together and achieved a featured portal together. The Nov 18 version, the version you completely created, does not look all that different than what it looks now. There is a WikiProjects section, introduction, news, topics, article, categories, related portal, etc. Many of the changes came through the Peer Review and FPC.

I have also noticed that User:Lilly Towers has voted in polls in your favor. From my understanding, you have a personal relationship with her. If you take a look at WP:MEAT, Wikipedia discourages this.
 * Lily Towers is a personal friend of mine and good contributor to Wikipedia. She or I have done nothing wrong and I am personally offended by this comment and will stick up for my friends. She has voted to her own opinion and all the polls she has participated in have been the same ones you, I, and a good portion of the WikiProject Vancouver members have. Many people vote in FAC and FPC reviews. How can I discourage her from how she wants to vote. That is up to her and her alone and its not up to you to say I should discourage her to vote how I voted. And frankly, WP:MEAT is sock puppet policy which has nothing to do with other users and how they vote. Mkdw talk 09:16, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

My major concern is your leadership additude. It seems at times that you are the "lead" editor of WikiProject Vancouver. You decide what you "Five point plan" is. You called yourself the "director" of the Vancouver article.
 * It seems I am the lead editor of the WikiProject Vancouver, and how it that? Explain please. Is it because I have a large number of edits and maintain the page by almost 20:1 edits of other people since Nov? My contributions make me exactly that; a contributor. If that's how you feel, everyone can take an equal interest in the work of keeping up the page, but since the project was relatively inactive per the collaboration of the month and new content on the page, I took it upon myself. I did not call myself the 'director' of the Vancouver article. I never did, and nor will you find that piece of text anywhere relating to the article: Vancouver. I did title myself the "Showcase Article Director" for the Portal:Vancouver. I did this because its a task that needs to be updated regularily. Once I took the position I did offer it to other people. I should also note that you yourself (Selmo), are the "Showcase Picture Director" and the "Showcase Biography Director" for the portal. So... if you're saying that's wrong, don't you find your situation to be contradicting your complaint? Mkdw talk 09:16, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Furthermore we all discussed the 'five point plan' on the WikiProject talk page. For a week we did see: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Vancouver/Archive/November_2006. The section names was "Future for the WikiProject Vancouver". You even participated in that discussion -- many times. Mkdw talk 09:25, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Once you get this straight, I'd support you as an admin. -- Selmo  (talk) 05:10, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Selmo, I feel that these comments are more of an attack on me that honest suggestions for improvement and almost seem to be a ultimatium or an "I wont support you unless you do" type of situation. Most of the mistakes you've pointed out were that, mistakes and I have learned from them since. The other things you are complaining about are things you've obviously changed your mind recently and it would be more helpful if you actually told me what specifically and why. Mkdw talk 09:16, 12 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Thoughts on Selmo's review by WjBscribe 
 * Mkdw has asked me for my thoughts about the above review:
 * Warnings to vandals. I agree that capitalised text should generally be avoided in edit summaries. However when giving level 3 or 4 warnings to vandals, I don't think the usual standards of civility are necessary- warnings should be given with appropriate force. That said, I doubt most vandals check edit summaries- they are more to help other editors. My suggestion would be to copy the template used into the edit summary, which makes it very clear to users/admins reviewing user behaviour what warnings were given and when e.g. Vancouver.
 * User:Lilly Towers. This seems a minor complaint. If it is well known that she and Mkdw are friends, then there is little risk of meatpuppetry. Users are entitled to express opinions that concur with their friends. If they add a convincing rationale for their view then it remains valid. I would suggest that it is only when relationships between users are concealed that they are problematic. This does not appear to be the case here.
 * Vancouver project complaints. I confess I find these hard to understand without inside knowledge of the operation of the project. I can only offer the following suggestions:
 * Taking a leadership role is a bad idea but being bold is encouraged. Making proposals for the direction of projects to be discussed by the members of that project seems to me a positive thing. Similarly implementing changes that later meet with concensus from the project appears to be an example of being bold. Sometimes this is necessary to avoid projects becoming bureacratic. Unless it leads to dissent and unhappiness in other members I would see it as a good thing.
 * Often it is needed to allocate the task of watching over procedural parts of projects to specific editors to ensure they are done. Updating elements of portals is an obvious example. I would advise against using the word Director for such tasks. It seems rather unwiki- we afterall have administrators, bureaucrats and stewards rather than terms that could be seen to denote leadership. Perhaps a simple rota of designated updaters or switching to the term coordinator or monitor for those completing these tasks would be preferable.
 * Without deeper understanding of the Vancouver Wikiproject that's all I can say really. To an uninvolved party these do appear to be personal issues of Selmo's rather than a wider problem with your participation on Wikipedia. How you respond to them is up to you, but knowing what an editor you interact with frequently thinks of your contributions should be useful. Perhaps you could invite a comment here from another member of the Wikiproject who may be able to offer more insight into the situation? WjBscribe 01:58, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Comment I've been around the Vancouver stuff for a while, and thought I'd add my perspective based on that (which is why this is a comment and not a review)

Both Selmo and Mkdw have put in a lot of work on the Vancouver Project stuff, and both their efforts have been consistently constructive and well-intended. There has been some personality clashes between the two, and I think that's reflected in Selmo's comments. From what I've seen, some of those criticisms have simply been part of Mkdw's learning curve, and he has made adjustments in response to feedback he's been given.

Taking leadership tends to be controversial on Wikipedia, and if there's any hint of a hierarchy developing amongst editors, it won't be well received in an egalitarian project such as this. Words like "director," "co-ordinator," "administrator" seem to imply a status, even when the reality usually just means taking on more responsibility and work. In Mkdw's case, you're clearly aiming for administratorship, and in that context, there's an extra onus on you to demonstrate neutrality and objectivity because adminship does mean you have access to extra powers that could be used to the disadvantage of ordinary editors. You need to not only be objective and neutral, but you need to convince others that you are, which is a big part of what this process is about. I think you'd make a good and fair administrator, and you've been receptive to criticism. At the same time, even though Selmo's comments come off as personal, it's up to you to look past that and find the grain of truth, or to show that you understand where he's coming from even if you utterly disagree, rather than going on the defensive. If you do make administrator, you'll be stepping on more people's toes with those duties and will be subjected to heaps of verbal abuse as well as criticism, and it won't always be easy to tell the difference.

Besides that, I'd say Mkdw has contributed technical savvy, and has been a team player, working collaboratively and with an eye towards consensus, and encouraging others to do the same. Whatever his leadership aspirations, he has equally been keen to participate in the grunt work of editing, like fixing footnotes and finding citations. I disagree that "leadership" is fundamentally different from being bold on Wikipedia, and instead believe it's crucial for moving things forward, and in this respect, Mkdw has been a positive force on Wikipedia. Bobanny 03:26, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

 Comments 


 * View this user's edit count using Interiot's 'Wannabe Kate' Tool.


 * 1) Of your contributions to Wikipedia, are there any about which you are particularly pleased, and why?
 * I am especially proud of my contributions to the WikiProject Vancouver. The project was fairly inactive and I was able to reorganize the project to its current version from Oct version. In that time the project became active again and the article Vancouver and the Portal:Vancouver both became featured due to the efforts of the WikiProject Members. My contributions on the Portal:Vancouver are equally important to me.
 * 1) Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or do you feel other users have caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?
 * I'm currently finding myself in a 'stressful' situation with the article Hollywood North. I decided to take on the article and expand it. Since my expansion the article has drawn attention to itself and others are starting to contribute. However, US-biased and Canadian-biased editors are undergoing an edit war over NPOV issues. I have tried to stay neutral and stick to facts I can cite from notable sources, but trying to change the non-NPOV content that is added has been the cause for upset by other users. I'm trying to explain the situation and talk over it in a well dignified manor. 
 * The following discussion is an archived editor review for Mkdw. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the user's talk page or in a editor review).  No further edits should be made to this page.  
 * The following discussion is an archived editor review for Mkdw. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the user's talk page or in a editor review).  No further edits should be made to this page.