Wikipedia:Editor review/Rcsprinter123

Rcsprinter123
Recently, I was blocked for having an edit war on Template:Meat, and not reviewing Good Article Nominations correctly. I decided to get mentoring by User:Worm That Turned. I have completed his course and have come in to see what everybody thinks of me now. See also here, here, here, here, here, and here.  Rcsprinter  (talk)  17:50, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

 Questions


 * 1) What are your primary contributions to Wikipedia? Are there any about which you are particularly pleased? Why?
 * My primary contributions to Wikipedia would probably be bus-related articles, and making lists of bus routes.
 * 1) Have you been in editing disputes 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? If you have never been in an editing dispute, explain how you would respond to one.
 * ''Yes, I've been in a few disputes. I deal with them by just following the 3RR rule and not letting things get to hairy.
 * ''Yes, I've been in a few disputes. I deal with them by just following the 3RR rule and not letting things get to hairy.

Thanks everyone for reviews!''

 Reviews  Hi Rcsprinter123, I saw you requested this review quite a while ago. I wasn't going to chip in because I know we've interacted before and you haven't always liked what I've had to say. This has been open for a while now though, and there are a couple of things I've noticed recently. First of all, you're making a lot of positive contributions to the project and you're obviously eager to help. I know there have been a few issues with the non-free content policy, and edit warring, but hopefully you've learned from that. I'm going to review a few of your edits and also give you some advice. I'm probably being a bit cheeky, and you don't have to heed it, but I know you're concerned about how other editors see you, so hopefully you'll see it as constructive, which is how I intend it.
 * Review from Belovedfreak

Cleanup tags

Adding maintenance tags can be a helpful thing to do. It informs other editors what needs to be done and places articles in cleanup categories for maintenance. However, there are a few things you can do to make it even more helpful. Automated tools
 * First, is there anything obvious you can do to help the article itself? Often you can make a few quick changes that improve the article in almost the same amount of time it takes to ask someone else to cean it up. For example, instead of adding "uncategorised", could you just think of some obvious categories to add yourself? Some cleanup tags stay on articles literally for years, making it look bad. Sometimes just spending an extra minute or two could improve the readers' experience.
 * Second, it's always best to use the most specific tags, and to focus on the most glaring issues. The generic Cleanup tag is not, in my opinion, very helpful. It's vague and doesn't say exactly what needs doing. You added that tag here, and it's not at all clear what you think needs cleaning up. Wikify, Uncategorized, Notability or RefimproveBLP would have been better. Best of all, you could have made the title bold, added a couple of wikilinks and a couple of categories yourself.
 * Some tags don't need explaining, eg. Unreferenced on an article with no refs whatsoever. Often though, its not obvious what a tag is there for, and it helps to explain either in an edit summary or on the talkpage. Yes, it takes another minute, but it's far, far more helpful to other editors. You might find editors removing your tags if it's not obvious why they are there.

I know there have been issues in the past, so I'm not going to say too much. I just want to emphasize that you really need to take responsibility for your edits, whether you are using automated tools or not. You are responsible for every edit you make. We all make mistakes, and using automated, or semi-automated tools dramatically increases the risk of making mistakes. It's easy to click the wrong twinkle button, or sometimes edit conflicts mean that a warning is sent to the wrong person, but you need to still be responsible. I know you don't want to be prevented from using these tools, and you've even spoken about wanting a bot in the past, so you need to be able to prove that you can be trusted. I would suggest: Spellings
 * Make sure there's consensus for a certain change you are going to make "en masse".
 * Always go back and check your own contributions list - you can see when you made the last edit to a page because it says "(top)" next to the edit in your contribs list. If you do a load of edits and notice that several of the articles have been changed after you were there - check to see if you've been reverted. That can help you catch problems even if someone doesn't come to your talkpage about it.
 * As you have warned people incorrectly in the past, it might be a good idea to check even more carefully your edits to user talkpages and check that you have not made a mistake.
 * If you make a mistake in an article, go back and correct it.
 * If you make a mistake warning someone (here comes my perhaps unwanted advice) - take responsibility and apologise. Here you warned someone for vandalism who had not vandalised. They came to your talkpage asking what was up, and you were quite dismissive and blamed Igloo. You made the edit. You made a mistake, no big deal, and it may not have been your fault, but you caused someone to be warned for vandalism when they hadn't been vandalised. Again, here you reverted someone who was new and apparently trying to add a reference to an article he had just created. You reverted and warned him. Someone brought it up on your talkpage, and as far as I can tell, you have ignored the issue. We desperately need more users that are going to make constructive additions to the project, we don't want scare them off with warnings because they haven't learned to format properly by their 4th edit.

I know you were doing a lot of spelling corrections a while back and I know that I had mentioned a few mistakes you'd made, like switching unnecessarily between different varieties of English (like this page move for example). Another point to bear in mind with spelling corrections is that you really shouldn't "correct" other people's talkpage comments. It's usually unnecessary, and will actually been seen by many people as a little rude. This is an example of unnecessary fixing of other people's typos where you actually changed more than just typos and messed up someone else's comment. Have you also thought that when you fix typos on someone's user talk page, you'll be alerting them that they have a new message? I would find that quite annoying.

Other than all of that, I've noticed that you've done some good vandal-fighting. Just try to be a bit more careful on your reverting & warning. I can't comment too much on your article contributions as most of you recent edits in that space have been adding rail symbols. Keep up the good work Rcsprinter123, you're getting better all the time, just please keep listening to the people who drop by your talkpage. They're (usually!) there to help you. :) -- Beloved Freak  17:43, 18 August 2011 (UTC)