Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Candidates/NoobThreePointOh

Nomination

NoobThreePointOh (talk · contribs · he/him) – Hi, everybody. I'm NoobThreePointOh, and I joined Wikipedia in January 2021 after originally editing as an IP in 2020 and a short-lived account in the later portion of the year before moving on to this one. Initially, most of my edits involved making some tiny changes, such as typo fixing, sentence brushing, etc. Later on, I moved to vandalism fighting, which I still do a bit today, and eventually ended up trying to improve some articles by adding citations and lots of information. I've never edited or worked for pay, and outside of the account which I mentioned above (I don't use it anymore), I do not own any other accounts. Feel free to ask me questions below, and I'll try to answer them to the best of my ability. Fire away. NoobThreePointOh (talk) 15:47, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia as an administrator. Please answer these questions to provide guidance for participants:

1. Why are you interested in becoming an administrator?

A: I'm most interested in becoming an administrator so that I can help clear the backlogs of some admin-specific areas, such as AIV, UAA, and ANI. Sure, it's not too much work to do, but I feel that administrators are really needed to help complete cases of checking accounts in terms of suspiciousness, solving problems between editors, and figuring out if the usernames of these editors really violate Wikipedia's username policy. If I were to become an administrator, I'd be able to solve these issues somewhat quickly. Also, I'm pretty good at spotting vandalism edits and reverting them.

2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?

A: While I don't necessarily have any good articles, I did help improve the Interstate 85 in North Carolina article from what was originally looking almost like a low-quality C-class article to a somewhat decent article that seems like it is within grounds for becoming a good article. In fact, this article was originally a good article from May to July of this year, but it eventually got delisted because the citations didn't conform to the statements of the article. After having learnt my lesson on that, I got to work to try and fix the issues mentioned in the reassessment page by modifying certain sentences and removing citations that seemed like self-published sources. At present, the article looks like it could use a bit more improvement, but overall I think it's quite pleasant to read.

My other contributions include creating 4 other articles, which are U.S. Route 30 in Wyoming, U.S. Route 83 in South Dakota, Interstate 59 in Louisiana, and Interstate 59 in Mississippi. These don't have as much polish as the article I mentioned above, but I tried my best to help bring these articles up to standards to try and comply with the GNG for the site. They're not my best contributions, but it's not easy trying to bring an article so that it can fit readers' needs. It did take me a few days to try and carefully craft the route description and history sections for these articles. In future, I may go back to fix up the history section for all of these articles. There's still more to do.

3. Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or have other users caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?

A: When I think about it, the chances of a candidate going through a successful RFA without having at least one conflict in their reign of editing Wikipedia are almost nil. And I'm certainly no exception to that. When I first edited on the aforementioned older account, Death Brushing (which I once again no longer use) in late 2020, I was edit-warring by adding redundant information to the infobox on the Pac-Man Championship Edition and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX pages. Another user, Namcokid47 (who also isn't active on Wikipedia), reverted my edits and told me to stop adding the things back. Eventually, it got out of hand to the point where the pages actually had to be semi-protected due to edit-warring. I expected to actually be blocked for doing so, but to my surprise, I wasn't. This was unusual too, because I thought that people get blocked for edit-warring. But I was genuinely glad I didn't get blocked. From that point on, I never wanted to edit war (even though I partially did later on below).

In February, though, I did make a lot of mistakes which did indeed lead to me almost getting blocked for them, but I will be listing the most egregious ones here. In early February, I reported a user to ANI for edit-warring on the Sydney Sweeney page for adding another image. Granted, the image that the other user added was copyrighted, but I should have never done that, and Bbb23 said that I should also be blocked in addition to that user. He's not wrong, either. Even if 3RRNO applied to me, really, edit-warring wasn't the right thing to do. Instead, I should have just taken the issue to the talk page for consensus. I admitted fault for it and this time, I have not had a single edit war so far (hope I don't jinx it). So in the future, if I tend to get close to an edit war with someone else, I need to sort this out on the talk page of that article that we are edit-warring on and come to a consensus.

In late February, right before the beginning of March, when I was reverting vandalism through AntiVandal, I noticed an IP remove information on the Wendy Zukerman article, and without thinking, I reverted it, as seen here. And you might be asking, "Why is that a wrong edit? It seems legitimate." Well, that was not the problem. The problem was when I wrote a comment on the IP's talk page saying that the information removed should not be because it was "vital" for us to understand the person's early years and what family they have. Man, that was truly the wrong thing to say on my part. I ended up getting a talk page message from Daniel, who said it was a violation of WP:BLP. I really felt bad about it because editors are usually supposed to treat each other with respect, even if someone is an IP. So I immediately went back to the IP's talk page and wrote a comment of apology to them and now, I've understood that I need to be more careful when reverting certain types of edits. In future, I may try to go slower and steadier as per the famous saying.

So these are some pretty severe mistakes I made. I understand being an administrator has a lot of responsibility, and from these mistakes, I hope that I can learn from them and not be hindered.

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You may ask optional questions below. There is a limit of two questions per editor. Multi-part questions are disallowed, but you are allowed to ask follow-up questions related to previous questions.

Optional question from Thryduulf

4. Why did you choose to seek adminship via election rather than via a standard RFA?

A: Thanks for your question. I typically get stressed every time I see the RFAs going on, where the community votes to either support or oppose on the board itself instead of SecurePoll. Now to be fair, yes, I could have just requested adminship with the standard RFA still, but the threshold is usually about 75% consensus to become administrator and I might get nervous if I were to see the community vote right on this discussion. However, I feel that the election could be a great alternative to the RFA, and I hope it can be implemented in the future. I also generally have the "don't spoil it" feeling in my mind whenever an RFA or election happens, as when it does, I usually don't want to see the results until it ends. Elections seem to be a good place to start for me in that case.

Optional question from Ganesha811

5. Are there any areas of adminship you do not plan to participate in, due to unfamiliarity or lack of technical knowledge? If you later decided you wanted to help in these areas, what would be your plan to become an effective admin in those areas?

A: Yes, of course. One of the areas I'd stay out of would be AfDs, since I haven't participated a lot in them. Another is new page reviewing, as I would need to first get more experience in it. Now, if I were to help in these parts later on, for AfDs and deletions, I need to first carefully review the nomination. Does it pass WP:GNG? Is it fitted with reliable sources? Are there any paragraphs or sentences where it reads like an advertisement? Do the citations verify what the sentences say? These are all things I would do if I jumped into AfDs. On the other hand, for new page reviewing, pretty much, if not slightly different from the same thing. Does it pass WP:GNG? Is the page curation tool flagging any issues? If I find any of these issues, this is where I can slowly start pulling my interest into new page reviewing. Of course, I'm not completely ready to touch these areas yet, since yes, as you said, I might have a bit of unfamiliarity. Because of this, I'd first like to carefully learn to use the tools before venturing out.

Optional question from GreenLipstickLesbian

6. Hey, NoobThreePointOh. This past February, when you were doing anti-vandal work, you appear to have mistakenly warned and reverted an IP user's fully explained removal of vandalism. (They had provided a "rvv" vandalism edit summary, you used rollback on them, and then you gave them the uw-delete1 warning). Whey they and an experienced user called you out on this, you apologised, and explained you'd made your revert because "thought it was wrong to remove content like that". (The content being vandalism). This happened approximately a week before the incident you explained in question three, where you reverted an IP user's removal of poorly-sourced content. Then, when pressed on your talk page by an experienced user, explained that you had "just assumed that it would be some normal IP editor trying to vandalize"[1]. I'm interested in this philosophy- could you expand a bit more on how your beliefs concerning unregistered users impact your anti-vandal work, especially if you had the ability to block them/protect pages from them?

A: Ah, yes, I should have mentioned this incident in my answer to Q3 as well. It seems that my beliefs have largely changed over time. Yeah, during February, I didn't realize that the IP you mentioned with the rvv summary was one of the more helpful IPs (it turns out that not every IP has the intent to vandalize Wikipedia). I was using AntiVandal, which when I think about it, seems to sometimes inaccurately detect a helpful IP's edit as "vandalism". Since March, though, I've become a lot more careful when performing anti-vandalism work, only looking to see if an IP does vandalize (like literal gibberish or removing a paragraph without actually explaining). It seems that in February I was really careless with the tool and now I usually patrol the edit filter log, which I feel is more accurate. But anyway, going back to your question. After this incident, I've seemed to understand that IPs with the true intention to vandalize are the ones that need to be reverted. And if I were an administrator, I wouldn't immediately try to block them unless I get the green light from another administrator that the IP is indeed a vandal. Also, while I shouldn't jump the gun, I know that pages are a lot more likely to get vandalized by IPs than registered accounts. The only time when I should block the IP or protect the page is in a last resort. As my beliefs have mostly changed over time, I believe now that Wikipedia should be accessible to all users, both registered and IP. And protecting a page should only be for a short time in most cases since doing so can sometimes hinder certain constructive users, both registered and IP again, from contributing to the page and making it a readable experience for everyone. Next time, if I'm ever doing anti-vandal work, even as an administrator, I should carefully examine the edit to see if it is constructive or not, and issue a warning to the user who does vandalize. Otherwise, blocking should be the next step I take.

Optional question from Trainsandotherthings

7. As a self-professed roadgeek, you must be familiar with the recent exodus of some roads editors to AARoads. While I'm glad we still have you here, why did you choose to remain on Wikipedia? Did you ever consider leaving?

A: This question makes me feel sad about the editors who have recently migrated to the AARoads Wiki and mostly retired, like Dough4872 and Rschen7754. I was initially hesitant about leaving Wikipedia after seeing an RfC about some non-road editors arguing that maps shouldn't be used as a source. Going back to your question, I chose to stay on Wikipedia because I knew that there are still some faithful road editors on here who refuse to go to that wiki. And I also know that road articles on Wikipedia are not a bad thing for people to read. Again, Wikipedia is all about providing valuable information for editors and readers alike to indulge themselves in and improve on. Because of this, I still don't understand why road articles don't meet notability, despite the abundance of sources not only from official DOT sites, but also literal clippings from Newspapers.com. I don't think I'm going to be leaving anytime soon, because I want to be one of the few road editors still helping to keep the content thriving on Wikipedia. It would genuinely be a shame to see all of the articles go to waste.

Discussion

• Links for NoobThreePointOh: NoobThreePointOh (talk · contribs · deleted · count · AfD · logs · block log · lu · rfar · spi)
• Edit summary usage for NoobThreePointOh can be found here.

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Please keep discussion constructive and civil. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review his contributions before commenting.

AfD record: 84.20% match rate, n of 13. 3 keep !votes to 10 delete !votes. Mildly subjective comment: these numbers are all from the past year, but there's not much to go on here. In any case this candidate has not expressed an interest in deletion processes. -- asilvering (talk) 01:22, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

• Not especially impressed by the pseudo-U5 tag on Draft:Shajidul Hoque's Blog - specifically, {{db-reason|1=This page is a "blog" as it mentions, and the writings are not related to Wikipedia's goals, so I assume this should be deleted due to U5.}} - when the only thing bloggish about it was the draft's title. (It wasn't a G11, like it was deleted for, either.) Disappointed that neither the candidate nor deleting admin seems to have noticed that it was LLM output, despite the "From : Open AI" statement, too. —Cryptic 01:51, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

  I was actually going a little bit too fast while patrolling the edit filter log, forgot to mention that. That was actually my first time doing that, so I should have slowed down and reviewed it thoroughly. NoobThreePointOh (talk) 02:05, 22 October 2024 (UTC)