Wikipedia:Editor review/The Blade of the Northern Lights

The Blade of the Northern Lights
All right, I've been here for now just over a year. I've got around 11,000+ edits, rollback, and reviewer. I work a lot in New Page Patrolling, which is a very low visibility area where outside editors only see the plane that crashes, so I figured some feedback would be nice. I know there are probably things I can improve upon, and I want to hear what other people think I still need work on. Any criticism of me is fine; I'm not bothered by directness or sternness, as I want to get the most accurate feedback possible. I apologize if my answers seem rather long, I want to make sure all the information is out there. The Blade of the Northern Lights ( 話して下さい ) 17:09, 9 March 2011 (UTC) Please note; I may make replies with this account; this is my alternate account. Since it has a completely different name, I thought I should mention it. Hall of Jade (talk) 19:04, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

 Questions


 * 1) What are your primary contributions to Wikipedia? Are there any about which you are particularly pleased? Why?
 * My activity here has, since June, primarily been New Page Patrolling.  I tag a lot of pages for speedy deletion; however, I always check to see if the article is being contested, and am always ready to explain my rationale.  Sometimes I will remove my own speedy tag if it's called to my attention that I missed something or if the author added something after I tagged it (see Au Bonheur des Dames (band) as a fairly recent example).  If the author asks for help, I always tell them what happened, and I will sometimes show them how to create a userspace draft (please note; unless otherwise directed, I respond on the other user's talkpage, especially with new users because the new messages bar is good at getting their attention). The enormously high percentage of user talkpage edits (it hovers around 47%) is because of this.  I make some mistakes here and there, but the great majority of my speedy tags (I'd say around 98%) are correct. In addition to tagging, if I find something that interests me I will stop and work on it; see Chihiro Iwasaki.  I've also been active around UAA; the note about WP:REALNAME in the header was my idea, and to date I've only had 6 reports that I can think of declined. However, I have also done some content work, mostly in the form of small additions here and there to articles.   By far my largest content work has been to the article on Zoya Phan; after I read her book, I spent several hours turning it from a short, well-referenced stub to a much larger, more informative, and even better-referenced article.  I'm planning on doing the same thing to the article about her father, Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan, as well.  I have only created one article so far, on Noh Poe, but I see little significant difference between adding content to existing pages and creating new pages; they both achieve the same end, as far as I'm concerned, because they both add new information.
 * 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.
 * A few, but nothing that's ever caused me too much stress. For several months, primarily at St. Bernard (dog) but also some at English Mastiff, I dealt with a rather insistent SPA attempting to insert a claim of a St. Bernard that was larger than the largest verified dog ever (see the English Mastiff page).  It was somewhat frustrating, as the sources were prima facie bollocks, but that was how I learned about RSN and the (IMO badly underused) content noticeboard.  I also got myself involved in what became the recently-closed Longevity arbitration case.  I could see that there were only a few people actively editing in that area, and that a new set of eyes was badly needed.  I managed to make it through that without any issues beyond taking a few personal attacks at a couple AfDs, which I can't say terribly bothered me.  The one incident that really did stress me out was on Earthcore where I and a few other people were reverting what appeared to be vandalism (section blanking); however, it turned out that we had completely misread the situation.  In fact, the editor was the tour's organizer, and he was removing dubiously-sourced information that made him look bad.  As soon as I realized what had happened, and that I had been giving him vandalism warnings, I was as apologetic as possible, and with a few other people we sorted out what was really going on.  But apart from the Earthcore fiasco, I can't say I get too stressed about content disputes; on the rare occasion I start to get a bit frustrated, I take a look at my computer's background picture of three Cambodian kids in a refugee camp and I realize that, really, it is only a website.  One that I very much care about, but not worth getting overly worked up at; I have real life for that.
 * A few, but nothing that's ever caused me too much stress. For several months, primarily at St. Bernard (dog) but also some at English Mastiff, I dealt with a rather insistent SPA attempting to insert a claim of a St. Bernard that was larger than the largest verified dog ever (see the English Mastiff page).  It was somewhat frustrating, as the sources were prima facie bollocks, but that was how I learned about RSN and the (IMO badly underused) content noticeboard.  I also got myself involved in what became the recently-closed Longevity arbitration case.  I could see that there were only a few people actively editing in that area, and that a new set of eyes was badly needed.  I managed to make it through that without any issues beyond taking a few personal attacks at a couple AfDs, which I can't say terribly bothered me.  The one incident that really did stress me out was on Earthcore where I and a few other people were reverting what appeared to be vandalism (section blanking); however, it turned out that we had completely misread the situation.  In fact, the editor was the tour's organizer, and he was removing dubiously-sourced information that made him look bad.  As soon as I realized what had happened, and that I had been giving him vandalism warnings, I was as apologetic as possible, and with a few other people we sorted out what was really going on.  But apart from the Earthcore fiasco, I can't say I get too stressed about content disputes; on the rare occasion I start to get a bit frustrated, I take a look at my computer's background picture of three Cambodian kids in a refugee camp and I realize that, really, it is only a website.  One that I very much care about, but not worth getting overly worked up at; I have real life for that.

 Reviews 
 * OK! I'm back now!
 * Antivandalism : I don't see a whole lot of this, but what I did see looked good!
 * Namespaces : You make a good number of contributions to the Wikipedia and Wikipedia talk namespaces, and these, especially the ones in project talk, show that you understand what makes the place tick. I also like that you do not waste time working on pretty userpages (in contrast to me, LOL).
 * Article contributions : You do more than probably anybody else to clean up the backlog of unpatrolled articles. Thank you! Additionally, your work on Zoya Phan was also well done, transforming it from this to this. I would strongly recommend fixing up the bare URL citations, and Wikipedia's policies on reliable sources should help you determine which of those sources are actually reliable.
 * Policy : Your speedy deletion tagging shows that you understand Wikipedia's policies on speedy deletion very well. However, there are a couple I would like to point out. This one, where you tag an album for A9 when its author clearly exists was inappropriate. You may wish to review WP:A9. This, this were not spam. This was not a reposting of deleted material. Additionally, this had context. Did you not know what OS stands for? This definitely has context.
 * Overall : You seem to have a good knowledge of speedy deletion criteria, though you still make a decent number of mistakes. (I am not including cases where somebody improved the article after you tagged.) However, this should have been deleted IMO. Your content contributions are not very high, and your CSD mistakes are enough that you will not pass RFA if that was your intent. Additionally, have you considered logging your speedies, so you can better see which ones actually got deleted? You can see the script in my vector.js file. As you mentioned in your answer to Q2, personal attacks do not bother you. That is a good trait to have, as I have found when doing RCP. "...on the rare occasion I start to get a bit frustrated, I take a look at my computer's background picture of three Cambodian kids in a refugee camp and I realize that, really, it is only a website...." - This is very true; our "troubles" here are nothing compared to theirs. Good luck with your work!
 * Reaper Eternal (talk) 14:12, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Nah, wasn't looking at RfA, just trying to see what people thought of my work. My CSD work, point by point.  The Grouplove album was because I tagged the group itself A7 before that; a mistake, for sure, as I missed an obvious notability claim, but not a misunderstanding of A9.  Mosque of 25 prophets was also an unambiguous mistake, I'd have used a cleanup tag on that if I could do it over again.  Natasha Wheat was also a mistake, and one that's caused me to check more carefully when I see new articles with the same title as an AfD (I've not tagged at least two pages since then). So was the World Governance Index; I'm not sure what I was thinking when I tagged it. The Leptos Estates one was arguably a mistake, but another editor readded the tag too, so it couldn't have been that bad- the user who removed it did say "enough non-promotional content now", so that was more borderline.  I'm not too good with computers; I now know what OS is, but I didn't at the time, so that's a mistake I won't make again.  But consider this, too; I've been patrolling around 200-350 pages a day (I logged 1,666 pages patrolled in February).  Patrolling that much will come with some bad tags no matter how careful you are; for most people, that many pages is spread out over several months.  For me, that's less than a month, so the number of mistakes per time frame will be higher than normal even if the overall percentage isn't.  As to my content; the bare urls are something I've been meaning to fix, but I still haven't quite figured it out.  It is on my to-do list.  I've checked through the sources at Zoya Phan; there's one dead one that was in Spanish anyways (which I don't know), but the others clear RS.  They're news stories from the BBC and some other major networks, and there's her autobiography.  Yes, I use her autobiography a lot to describe here early life, but the purpose of WP:SPS is to keep useless fringe bullshit out of articles; I figure if we use The Diaries of Anne Frank on her FA, Zoya's book (which was at least vetted by a publisher) is fine for our purposes.  The one blog was not added by me, and I'm trying to find another, more reliable source with the same information so I can remove it.  Thanks for your time!!!!  The Blade of the Northern Lights  ( 話して下さい ) 03:57, 11 March 2011 (UTC) And on the off-chance you or anyone else wants to know; the picture in question is here, in one of the galleries.  If you read my description of it, you should be able to find it.
 * OK, I reviewed some more of your CSD patrolling, and I found fewer mistakes. Good work! You requested my reply a couple weeks ago, but I felt it would be best to wait and see how things went on, and then review you based on new evidence. Reaper Eternal (talk) 19:43, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
 * And thanks again. The Blade of the Northern Lights ( 話して下さい ) 13:52, 4 April 2011 (UTC)