User:Addshore/Adoption/Banaticus/Test

Question Set 1

What bike do you have?
1. Some no name brand. I powder coated it myself a bit ago, so I have no idea what the actual name is. It's an ordinary bike, pretty light frame, the rims are where most of the bike is. I usually keep mountain bike tires for when I get tired of the roads and start taking shortcuts through the orange groves or down the railroad tracks.
What was the last book you read or are currently reading?
1. Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman
Why did you pick the user name you are using?
1. When I first wanted to start a website, Bart.everything was taken, mostly by the San Francisco BART, but also by some guy in Germany. I wanted a website that was open in most domains and one where people could figure out the spelling phonetically, so I didn't want something like Katch, which could be confused with Catch. Then I thought, hey, years ago I'd asked my Dad how I got my name and he gave me some made up somewhat humorous story about how he'd wanted to name me Banaticus and call me Banny for short but my mom had vetoed it. Strangely enough, banaticus.com wasn't taken yet. So I took it. Later on, there was this domain transfering SNAFU and some other people took it over. I told them there was no way I was going to buy back my domain off of them and I ended up moving to Google Pages then Google Sites and now I don't even have a website. ;)
What celebrity do you think would be the best spokesperson for Wikipedia? Why?
1. Anyone, really, i guess. I have no comment on this at this time -- I'd have to think about it.
Do you think Wikipedia should introduce adverts? Why?
1. Sure, everyone ignores them anyway and those that don't ignore them usually have something like the adblock extension or something and it might bring the Wikimedia Foundation some money.

Question Set 2

What areas of Wikipedia do you like the most and why?
1. Vandal preventing/fighting.
Of your articles or contributions to Wikipedia, are there any with which you are particularly pleased, and why?
1. I'm pretty happy with about everything that I've done. At times, I wish there was a faster, freeer way to mine old newspapers. ;) The things that most stick in my memory, though, are the failed edits. i typically don't edit, edit, edit a page. If a page has a lot of problems, usually I'll go through it and try to fix just about everything in one go. I'll take notes in Notepad, I'll preview things, I'll get it to where it looks good, then publish it. I spent over 10 solid hours rewriting the story from the Book of Daniel in the Bible about the Fiery furnace and the other few pages related to it and when I went to publish everything, there was a SQL error and my huge Fiery Furnace edit was lost. That's not the first time that's happened, either. I don't think Wikpedia should become like Google Docs or Gmail and constantly save all edits while we're working on them, that would be a huge load increase on the servers. But I do think I should start writing my edits in Google Docs before publishing them.
What is your aim of contributing to Wikipedia?
1. To improve the collection of human knowledge and its relative ease of access. Here's a snippet of what I had to say regarding the Lord of the Rings Online Lorebook and why it should be more wikified.
  For instance, go search for Barack Obama on the Knol site. At this time, there's 277 different results. Which ones are concise? Which ones give more detail? Which ones deal with his early life or his later life or what he's doing now or where he's traveled to or anything else on him? Nobody knows, unless they go read all 277 Barack Obama articles. Now go to Wikipedia and search for Barack Obama. The page that comes up summarizes his life in a concise manner and is fairly short, but it's written in an intuitive easy-to-navigate pyramidal interface with links to every individual topic in as much depth as you'd like and which lets you delve into any situation in as much detail as you'd like, all with in-context hyperlinked references. Want to learn more about his early life? No problem, go learn about it. Want to learn about what he's doing now? No problem. You can learn as much or as little as you'd like and, more importantly, you can learn about the specific facets that you're actually interested in without having to read all 277 different redundant articles in hopes of gleaning some nugget of information on the specific facet of Barack Obama that you're actually interested in.
2. Vandalizing the Wikipedia hurts our credibility and dampens our ability to actually build a free compendium of the worlds knowledge that's organized in such an incredibly free flowing in context (CamelCase) manner and this is why my main Wikipedia focus has always been fighting vandalism, ever since I learned that I could help do that.
Your user page says you have basic knowledge of other languages. Have you ever thought of contributing to Wikipedia in different languages? Do you plan on contributing to other projects in the same language?
1. No. Google's translating tools would likely do a better job than I could in translating Wikipedia pages. I'm ashamed to say that although I can hold conversations with my fellow coworkers in Spanish, I'm almost functionally illiterate. Also, I don't really understand how to speak in past tense, which does make some conversations difficult. However, we can usually communicate enough to talk about work, medical problems, our relatives, our hopes, our fears, etc. I scored a 34 on the ACT in non math areas and the Nelson Denny says that I'm 17th/18th grade (graduate level) in my English proficiency. I'm embarrassed to display my "little-child" like method of communicating in other languages. It's better in Norwegian, because I started out reading the scriptures in that language before I started learning to speak it, but like French (three years in high school) there just aren't really people around that I can practice it with on a regular basis. I've formed relationships with some Norwegian speakers online and am once again becoming proficient with that and I'm looking at taking an official Spanish class and forming some French relationships, but... there are only so many hours in the day and they aren't my number one priorities. I think I'm going to make Norwegian a goal, though, I'd really like to be able to really conribute to the wikipedia over there and perhaps next year I can take that class and learn how to spell Spanish words. ;)
You are a member of WikiProject Cycling, have you ever helped to make an article that is in that field a GA or FA?
1. No, but I did subscribe to the wikimedia tech newsletter so that I could learn more about wikimedia extensions. I'd like to bring in more Google Maps extensions and things like that to the Wikipedia. Cycling is such a visual sport. Merely writing a description of a given trail or route doesn't do nearly as much justice as being able to show a map of where the trail starts and stops, what the elevation changes are, etc.

Question Set 3

What was the last AFD you can recall taking part in? (link please) Please explain why you voted in the way you did.
1. Unless the article is patent nonsense (in my opinion), I really don't like participating in AfD's or even nominating an article for deletion. I did recently, because I was working on that option class in this adoption program, but I'd prefer to help someone build an article up. The last AfD that I really remember being a participant in was that German theory that 300 years had been added to our timeline since the Romans -- it was sort of, in my hazy recollections, related to Time Cube and my stance was that it was patent nonsense. Other people were saying that, since he'd had some published books, it was verifiable and somewhat notable and should be kept. I maintained that his books had only been published in German and because it was nonsense although it might be notable and verifiable for the German Wikipedia, it shouldn't even be on the English Wikipedia. Consensus seemed against me, I seemed to be the lone person who wanted the article deleted, though, so after a while I just let it go and walked away from it. I don't even remember the name of the article now or know whether it's still around or has since been deleted.
Have you ever made a mistake when using a program such as huggle? How did you rectify your mistake or what actions did you take?
1. Yes I have. When I notice it, I try to hit the "Whoops, reverse my recent action" button. Once, a person reverted some vandalism by a second party but didn't revert some vandalism by a third person and when I glanced at it I thought the first person had added the words that had actually been added by the third person but deleted by the second person prior to the second person adding further vandalism, anyway, it was a mess and afterwards I apologized on his talk page and my own talk page, since he'd contacted me in the middle of my reverting my reversion of the first person's edits and taking the article back to a clean state before any of the vandalism had occurred.
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?
1. Yes I have. Well, of course, some edit conflicts can be frustrating. Sometimes I'll passionately discuss something, even argue something. Ultimately, though, I typically just let it go. I'm one person and important things are decided by consensus. If nobody else wants to chime in and agree with me, then no matter how passionate I might personally be, it's just not that important in the wide scheme of things and I should just let it go. And, usually, I do, I just let it go.
What article and dispute resolution work have you done, if any?
1. Jerry Seinfeld and whether he should be listed as an American Jew or a Jewish American was the most recent one, I believe.
Have you ever had to report a user to an administrator before for something unusual (not you ordinary vandalism spamming e.t.c) If so how did you? If not how would you?
1. Yes, there's this person who has a dynamic IP and is involved in Indian/Pakistan/other related disputes and who's been banned several times. Because of this person, whole IP ranges have been blocked. I've reported the person at Wikipedia:Abuse reports, submitting his case to have someone attempt to personally contact the person's ISP and see what can be done. I've since started to get involved with such contacting in other similar cases.

Question Set 4

Please give me three reasons a users report to WP:AIV could be rejected by an admin.
1. If the edits aren't really vandalism. I.e, an edit war (e.g. a point of view difference) is not vandalism and although it could break the three revert rule or otherwise cause a person to get into trouble, it isn't enough in and of itself to cause a person to be banned by an admin.
2. If the user has never been warned, then probably nobody's really going to come down hard on the user. To use a religious analogy, sinning in ignorance isn't really a sin (at least in my point of view). We typically assume good faith on Wikipedia edits and even when blatant bad faith is initially demonstrated, although we may revert a series of edits, we typically warn before doing anything else.
3. It has to be recent and you have to make sure you're getting the right person. No admin should ban for any length of time for some vandalism that was just discovered if the user hasn't edited in the last three months. Similarly, for an IP user without a username, if it's been a few days, then it's entirely possible that the IP is now in use by some other person.
More will be added soon
1. Similarly, more answers will be added soon. ;) Yeah, there are some run on sentences up above. I'll fix them later after I've had a good nights sleep. :)