User talk:Xcentaur/Admin coaching

Any questions you have for me?

1. I've been blocked in the past, and I'm sure this would come up as a concern in RfA. I honestly wasn't trying to edit war, but got frustrated with the lack of communication on the talk page of the article and so reverted, ending up breaking 3RR. Would I be cut apart for this on RfA? They can be harsh sometimes...

   RfA can be a harsh process, but generally speaking, people are willing to forgive and hope that people have learned from their mistakes - it's the wiki way :) I can see that you have learned from your mistakes, and that your 3RR could be explained as a minor lapse in judgement or moment of frustration. Hopefully others will also see it this way, and not judge you merely on the basis of a single block - they should see what you have learned from the incident.

   Thank you for the kind words :)xC | ☎

2. During RC patrol I noticed VP has become very slow. Which vandal fighting program would you recommend? I've tried everything from popups to Lupin's. I was using WP:MWT for a while, but the recent release is prone to crashing. What do you use?

   I used Lupin's tool, which generally put the least strain on my laptop, I think. I downloaded VandalProof but either didn't understand it properly, or didn't install it properly, because it didn't make sense to me :) I like Lupin because you can just leave it running and do other stuff in the meantime, come back, do some reverting, remove old stuff and then go away and do something else. Nowadays I generally only revert vandalism to articles on my watchlist (which is not very hard, having racked up about 7000 pages on it *blush*) I have almost all the pages on WP:MVP on my watchlist, so I don't exactly have to go hunting for vandalism.

   Ah, VP gave me problems too, its only recently its started working alright and then too I think its a little bloated, but still full marks for all the options it gives! I had to remove Lupin's since it got weird with popups... I was trying some experiments with my monobook.js and they didn't work out all that well :P xC | ☎

3. I thought that under WP:NOT, all things such as details of food served, menu, etc of a restaurant would be excluded from WP. But here we have In-N-Out Burger secret menu, which is not just a menu, but also a secret menu. On the page then its written that its on the company site, for all to see. Interesting contradiction. Is such an article worthy of inclusion? Shall I try to merge any of its content into the main article? Or should I take this to AfD?

   Took it to AfD - Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/In-N-Out Burger secret menu xC | ☎ 08:00, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

   Good call. Let's see how it goes. I will do a little more research before making a comment at the AfD.

4. The current revision of Jonestown, Texas has a lot of unreferenced content and informal language. Should I cleanup these sections and then place a references notice? Should I shift these sections to the talk page and appeal for proof? Or should I just stub out whatever doesn't have a source attached to it and let the page be? I asked because I've come across several pages like this,and Sadiqabad, so I thought I'd clarify before attacking it.

   Anything that doesn't have a source but is encyclopedic, keep - anything unecyclopedic, remove. You'll only be doing the article good.

   Cleaned up a bit, rm potentially damaging claims. Will look for sources before making any further changesxC | ☎ 08:33, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

5. About half a dozen tags would be appropriate for Ahluwalia. I've been in revert wars over cleaning up articles before, and been blocked for it, so I'm not very keen on doing that. At the same time, discussion on such pages is generally fruitless. Shall I just dive in and hope for the best? Should I recommend this article to the Wikiproject for a cleanup? I'd appreciate your suggestions about this, I've come across several such articles and never figured what exactly to do.

   Wow, that article's a bit of a mess. Edit wars over Indian caste articles can get pretty messy tho! I would start by cleaning up the language and toning down the POV - nobody could argue about that. I don't like the idea of tagging articles - it has a ring of 'this sucks, but I don't care enough to do anything about it' (admittedly, I do so myself sometimes, but I usually go back and try to unstick what needs to be unstuck).

6. The page Chav is fairly comprehensive. Other pages, such as Hamallu, however all allude to the same meanings but are nowhere near as exhaustive. Since they all refer to essentially the same sub-culture, perhaps it would be might be better to add in whatever slight differences exist to Chav, and redirect the rest of the pages? I asked this, because several social terms, even things like Hairstyle have the same problem, of the same thing being called by a dozen names. Is there any precedent you could suggest I look up on this?

   Thinking over this, I realised that making any one page the main redirect runs counter to the WP spirit. We should give every article the chance to improve, and redirecting it won't allow that. While I doubt whether Hamallu or any other such term would be enlarged to the same content, simply because those are areas with far lesser internet access, still those pages should be allowed to remain. After all, little stubs the mighty FAs make. ;) -xC

7. List of African-American firsts - the page seems a little pro-bias. Ab initio it states African-Americans are a demographic minority in the United States. This demographic has historically faced social and legal obstacles to cultural equality, including racial segregation. African-Americans' initial achievements in various fields historically establish a foothold, providing a precedent for more widespread cultural change. The shorthand phrase for this is "breaking the color barrier".[citation needed]. Perhaps we should rename the page to African-American firsts in the United States of America? Is it neccessary for every list item to have the words 'African-American'? Isn't that redundant repetition? I don't want to create race issues here, so I'm not saying anything on that talk page, but I believe the way that page is going is a little misguided for the above two reasons. Any thoughts on this?

   Page needs more references, so I, for one would complain that some of the infor might be inaccurate, and that there's no way (for some) of proving that these are significant firsts, firsts that anyone's taken any notice of. Insist on more refs. And yes, the list does seem a little US-centric, though that's a projectwide fault.

   On the other hand, prepare to be accused of being an evil racist devil. Sigh. These things happen (IRL as well). Moreschi ^Talk 13:23, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

8. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Astoria - Mini Mart Bus Stop (Oregon Coachways) - As per the page of AfD precedents you'd pointed out to me, bus stops are non-notable. Since I couldn't find the exact AfD, I nom'd this for deletion, alongwith one other page. I'd like to ask you, are bus routes notable as well? Because I've found a dozen pages like Route 40 (Baltimore) - are these bus routes really notable? Wouldn't this apply to an extension of WP:NOT - something like Wikipedia is not a collection of bus routes and bus timings OR Wikipedia is not a travel guide?

   Probably, though some bus routes probably are notable, such as the number 9 in London (have been covered). AfD the ones that have no claim to encyclopedic notability whatsoever, the ones that really violate WP:NOT, and see what happens. Should be interesting. Have fun. Moreschi ^Talk 13:32, 1 June 2007 (UTC)