Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Jaxl


 * ''The following discussion is preserved as an archive of a successful request for adminship. Please do not modify it.

Jaxl
Final (37/0/1) ended 23:50 [30 September 2005] (UTC)

– Jaxl, in nearly 3 months of contributions, has amassed over 7600 edits - a good many of which stem from his constant dedication to RC patrol (and being damn good at it, if I may say so). He also demonstrates a good knowledge of and participation in AfD and RfA. Let us bless him with the holiest of holies, the mop. Nufy8 23:50, 23 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Candidate, please indicate acceptance of the nomination here: Thank you, Nufy. I accept. Jaxl | talk 00:24, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Support
 * 1) MODERATE HETEROSEXUAL SUPPORT! Oh meh gedz, I thought he was one!!1!!! Nufy8 23:54, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Support -- ( &#x263A; drini &#x266B; | &#x260E; ) 00:13, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 3) Support Of course :) Ryan Norton T 00:20, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 4) FURRY ALIEN SUPPORT no prob. Alf melmac 00:41, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 5) Strong sopport &mdash; Im gonna use the banal cliché here: Thought he was already one! :-)  Journalist C./ Holla @ me! 
 * 6) Support Great guy and he often edit conflicts me doing reverts on RC Patrol. -GregAsche (talk) 02:08, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 7) GOTHIC TYPE O NEGATIVE SUPPORT I've seen this guy when i have been watching wikipedia for last few months. He seems good. Type O Spud 02:54, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 8) CRAZY WET OCTOPUS SUPPORT- After looking through his pages and contribs, while I am a little troubled by his edit summaries (or lack thereof), he is none the less a superb editor, who has done a crazy amount of work in the time he's been here. --Maru (talk) 04:36, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 9) Support plenty of edits.--Alhutch 04:58, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 10) Support. \-\3'5 50 1337! R  e  dwolf24  (talk) 06:08, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 11) Support...Without Question MONGO 06:55, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 12) SLIGHT VANDALISTIC BANANA SUPPORT Definitely.  Ral  315  07:40, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 13) DEAD ANGIOSERM SUPPORT - couldn't help myself, sorry. --Celestianpower hab 11:19, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Ok, you guys are coming up with some extremely weird phrazes!  Journalist C./ Holla @ me! 
 * 1) Support. Kirill Lokshin 15:14, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Support. I'm supporting even though my minimum standards are that the user be on Wikipedia at least 6 months, becuase Jaxl is a deserving user of admin powers and a great contributor. Thunderbrand 16:53, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 3) Support, anyone this dedicated to RC patrol is worthy of support. I also can't resist a good bandwagon. :) Rje 22:59, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 4) MY AUNTY BERYL TOLD ME TO SUPPORT. But what does she know - she has a pet ant. Grutness...  wha?  00:33, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 5) Support, that's a fair number of edits. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:48, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 6) PLAIN OLD NORMAL SUPPORT. --Alan Au 04:38, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 7) Admin material. -  Erwin 
 * 8) Support. A bit new, but has shown remarkable dedication to RC patrol.  TenOfAllTrades(talk) 16:44, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 9) Bicameral support. Ensuring things get deleted is a good thing; since I sure as heck ain't doing it! - RoyBoy 800 03:39, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 10) Support. Seems like a fine user. Sjakkalle (Check!)  09:06, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 11) El_C 11:51, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 12) Support. I am satisfied with his explanation on his alleged "deletionism". To be a deletionist, one must vote delete against the consensus more often than others do. Since 94% of the articles he voted to delete ended up being deleted, it means Jaxl has an excellent understanding of the general consensus and inclusion criteria. We need his help closing AfDs&mdash;give him the mop! Owen&times; &#9742;  15:56, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 13) Support in protest at Dragon flight's oppose vote. Ambi 16:24, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 14) Support excellent work on the RC patrol. Yes!. &asymp; jossi &asymp; 00:09, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 15) MUNoSMMS: Massive Underground Network Of Spies, Mimes, and Madmen Support   ALKIVAR &trade;[[Image:Radioactive.svg|18px|]] 07:16, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 16) Support.  I thought your response regarding AfD was very well thought out and sincere.  >:  Roby Wayne  Talk &bull;  Hist 21:55, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 17) Support. Jonathunder 01:47, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 18) Support. --Rschen7754 02:16, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 19) Support I cannot find any serious arguements "agin" him. So I concur with my friends Nufy and Kirill. Besides, over 7600 edits in just over 3 months?! Damn!--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 09:57, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 20) Support. Mop on! -- BD2412  talk 14:08, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 21) Support a lot of work done.  Rather short time but that'll right itself.  Good discussion on Afd.   Dl yo ns 493   Ta lk  16:26, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 22) Full Support.— enceph alon  19:43, 30 September 2005 (UTC) NB. Some comments on Jaxl's AfD voting patterns below— enceph  alon  02:13, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
 * 23) Support brilliant editor, certainly a most trustworthy candidate for adminship. The honesty shown by this user's response to the AfD query is most telling. I am sure that he will make a fair and balanced admin, looking at his communication and editing style, and I certainly have no reservations lending my support. --NicholasTurnbull 19:44, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 24) Support. Great to see him in action in the RC patrol. &asymp; jossi &asymp; 21:37, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Oppose

Neutral
 * 1) Oppose . Neutral.  In the course of 100 days, you voted on over 400 AFD's, casting keep votes less than 10% of the time.  I consider this level of interest in deletion and deletion processes to be unhealthy for an admin.  If you have an explanation for your unusual level of participation in AFD and voting patterns, I may reconsider.  Dragons flight 02:06, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * A majority of those AfD votes were made in my earlier days here (late June to early July, see contribs), before I became more interested in other work. I understand that I cast a lot of delete votes during that time, but many times I voted on articles that really had no chance of being kept (neologisms, extremely short vanity articles, etc).  After discovering WP:CDVF, Wikiproject stub sorting, and disambiguation link repair, I became less interested in AfD and more interested in RC patrol and maintence work; now I do not vote on as many AfD articles as I did earlier on.  I never really associated myself as being a deletionist, mergist, or whatever-ist, and I do realize that Wikipedia is not paper. Jaxl | talk 02:41, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * You may have become more involved in other things, but your claim to become less involved in AFD is not supported by your record. In the last 31 days you have cast 137 votes (still averaging more than 4 per day) and still 90% delete.  Take a gander at your own contribs list in Wikipedia space which is just swimming in deletes.  I'm sorry, but if someone is very active in AFD and wants to be an admin, I expect them to demonstrate a voting record that is not as strongly lopsided as yours is.  Dragons flight 04:17, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * I'm curious to know just how voting delete for articles clearly unworthy of inclusion in Wikipedia can be detrimental to the responsibility of adminship. I haven't closed a single AfD that ended in a keep since I assumed administrative access - does my lopsided closing record make me a deletionist? Nufy8 04:45, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * I would note that while he has cast an average of about four votes per day on on AfD, Jaxl has also made an average of more than eighty edits per day since he started here&mdash;only five percent of his edits were to AfD. Scrolling through the list of contributions so thoughtfully provided by Dragons Flight, I also note that the vast majority of articles for which Jaxl supported deletion were deleted; I believe that this implies his judgement is reasonably sound.  Further, AfD sees about 150 nominations per day&mdash;voting on four of them doesn't seem an outrageous level of involvement. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 16:44, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Sorry, what I meant before was that I had more average votes on AfD per day during my earlier days here than now (from July 2 to July 12, I had an average of approxmately 17 votes per day, as opposed to the now 4 votes per day). I have been manually going through all of the AfDs I voted delete on, and many were, in fact, deleted, as TenOfAllTrades stated. Also, a lot of the AfDs I voted delete on had unanimous delete votes from all users that voted on them (I will supply actual percentages as soon as I finish going through all of them). Jaxl | talk 17:20, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Alright, here are the numbers. From July 2 to September 17 (I left out Sep 18-present because those AfD's may still be up for debate), I voted delete (and stayed that way to closing) on 368 articles. 347, or roughly 94% of them, were deleted. 316, or roughly 86%, had only delete votes from all users who voted (discounting sockpuppets).
 * Now, say I was an average (and a little less "lopsided") voter, who votes 65% delete and 35% keep. Let's say I voted keep on the 6% that weren't deleted, as well as on the other 8% that didn't have unanimous delete votes. I still need 21%, or a little over 77 votes, to reach the 35%. If I voted keep on 77 articles that everyone else had voted delete on and were clearly material not suitable for an encyclopedia, I would not be labeled as an extreme deletionist; rather, I would be labeled as an extreme inclusionist. What I'm trying to say here is that most of the articles I did vote on were, in fact, articles that needed to be deleted. Jaxl | talk 00:21, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
 * While, I admire and appreciate the time and effort you put into answering my opposition, I am still left to wonder... What are you actually doing at AFD?  So apparently you vote "delete" far more often than average and do so on articles that end up being deleted the vast majority of the time.  So obviously you aren't voting on anything like a random sample of AFD.  If you had been choosing AFDs at random presumably you would have found considerably more (say another 10-20%) that warranted a keep vote.  Are you just piling on to votes that are obvious deletes?  That strikes me as pointless, but certainly not harmful.  Are you reluctant to cast keep votes for some reason, even for articles that look like they may deserve it?
 * I'm not going to vote oppose, cause you don't seem to be hurting anything, but I still don't claim to understand what it is you are doing. Dragons flight 16:47, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Well, I don't really "pile up" votes, so to speak (I usually avoid AfDs that have 4 or 5 consecutive delete votes already, though I'm probably guilty of piling up some maybe a few times), but looking at some of my AfDs again, my vote is quite a few times the second or third on the debate, and they usually just end up unanimous. I guess you could say that I don't choose purely at random, since when I see an article with a ridiculous title and only 1 or 2 delete votes, I get lured into reading it (and it's almost always pretty bad) and casting a delete vote on that debate in an effort to "solidify" the message that it really doesn't belong in Wikipedia. Some examples would be Music:theheroicdose, Digestif, Pindut, and Template monster (I just picked those out on short notice). I do admit, though, that I should probably vote in more debates over articles that are less ridiculous than ones I usually vote in. Jaxl | talk 22:10, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

A comment on AFD 100 days.

This discussion over the candidate's attitudes to AfDs, in the context of his RfA, is interesting. I appreciate Dragons flight's attempt to bring a certain quantitative rigor to estimates of Jaxl's "voting" behavior. However, I quite strongly disagree with the interpretations that have been made here. The script that was used to obtain these numbers captured emboldened words in AfDs between 2005 June 1 and 2005 September 8. It did away with modifiers, such that very weak delete was counted simply as delete. The "condensed voting pattern" which Dragons flight has used to critique Jaxl's record also takes redirects to be a form of deletion—a perfectly sensible interpretation, but one which will doubtless surprise many editors and administrators accustomed to a rather different view.

Each of these attributes of Dragons flight's script may result in a statistically significant difference between this estimate of his voting pattern, and his "true" voting pattern. Taken together I would be surprised if they didn't produce a significantly different count than one might expect to get if one tallied the vote by hand, and if it were possible to somehow quantify the shades of meaning inherent in modifications to a vote or the discussion that often follows.

However, I have greater concern for some of the premises that have been entertained. One is that an admin (as opposed to an editor) should have votes that are not "lopsided". This is a bit difficult to understand. The sample of articles that are nominated for deletion is not a random sample of WP articles, but a highly selected one. Specifically, they are typically articles that fairly experienced wikipedians (they need to be experienced enough to be able to process the nomination, anyway) think were so poor or unsuitable that they need to be deleted from Wikipedia. These are by no means Wikipedia's finest. I do not know if there are figures extant, but my impression is that a large majority do, indeed, get deleted. Certainly almost all nominations receive significant numbers of delete votes. Given this reality, I must wonder at the wisdom of suggesting that anyone whose apparent delete vote count falls well toward the delete side is demonstrating poor judgement of a kind—to the extent that their suitability for adminship is questioned. What is the "proper" number for Jaxl to have? 60% perhaps? Why? Who decides that it is only appropriate to vote to delete 60% of the articles Jaxl voted on?

If "lopsidedness" is a criterion for refusing adminship, a glance at AFD 100 days should give us great cause for concern. There are a large number of admins—among them many whom I have thus far considered WP's finest—who seem to have lopsided counts. Should we question the suitability of MacGyverMagic for adminship? What of the inimitable Tony Sidaway, whose lopsidedness proceeds in the opposite direction? Splash—surely one of the finest contributors among WP's ranks—is rather misshapen too. Scimitar, Fernando Rizo, Radiant, BD2412... it's a rather discouraging list, if we take lopsidedness to be a bad thing.

Which brings us to the next question: how do we know what AfDs Jaxl voted on? We don't—not with the use of the AFD 100 days script. And this is perhaps the most important point. AfDs are not homogenuous. There are boderline cases whose suitability for WP are a matter of some controversy (eg. schools). There are others which virtually all Wikipedians would vote to delete. How do we know what type generated most of Jaxl's votes? We don't, but from the counts Jaxl himself has provided, it appears that the overwhelming majority of the articles he voted to delete were deleted, which suggests his judgement on those articles was shared by a large majority of his colleagues—a sign of good judgement, if anything. To this, the question of "pile ups" was raised (you just can't win, can you Jaxl? :)). This is mistaken, I believe, for two reasons. Firstly, there are no data to suggest Jaxl always places his votes at the end of a long string of deletes. Secondly, the very idea of pile ups on AfD is suspect to me. Why should an editor with a sound opinion on a particular article not be encouraged to voice his opinion if others before him already have? AfDs are discussions, and if there is a subtle point you wish to make that you think others haven't, or an interesting observation, or just merely the thought that this should be kept per so-and-so who got it exactly right—by all means, you should go ahead.

Dragons flight has my complete respect, and his effort to quantify this has my support. I only urge caution in interpreting the numbers—this is the most treacherous part of analysis. But keep up the fine work—both of you! Cheers— enceph alon  02:15, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Comments

Questions for the candidate

A few generic questions to provide guidance for voters:
 * 1. What sysop chores, if any, would you anticipate helping with? (Please read the page about administrators and the administrators' reading list.)
 * A. As Nufy8 stated, I do a lot of work on RC patrol (and enjoy it very much). I would certainly like having a rollback button to revert vandalism quickly. I would also like to help out with the large backlog in WP:CP, as well as closing AfD debates (naturally I would start out with less controversial debates and build my way up from there).


 * 2. Of your articles or contributions to Wikipedia, are there any about which you are particularly pleased, and why?
 * A. I am pleased with all of my edits, especially the ones to album articles. One thing I am especially proud of is creating an article for every album produced by Steppenwolf, after being shocked that none had existed yet.


 * 3. 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?
 * A. I have not been involved in any major conflicts during the time I have been editing here. I respect the opinions of others and always try to remain civil in any kind of debate (AfD, etc.), and I believe that arguing over an article, as well as violating WP:3RR, are not ways to resolve a conflict.
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page. No further edits should be made to this page.