User talk:Buster7/Sandbox-Civility Administrator

Trying too Hard

• Not sure where this came from or when it was lifted

I've noticed that you receive quite a few messages and notices about mistakes you've made or telling you that you've done something wrong. I'm sure that can be frustrating, but don't be disheartened by it! I would try to take notice of every bit of advice someone gives you on your talkpage, even if it seems annoying. Learn from what people say and try not to repeat the same mistakes again. Regularly look over your contributions to see if you're being reverted. Where it says "top" after your edit, it means that you're the last person to edit that page. If you're not, then check who has edited since and why they made a change or commented. If you've made a mistake: again, learn from it! If people come to your talkpage and link to policies and guidelines; read them. They may seem boring, but they will help you become a quality editor. I've noticed that you add maintenance tags to articles. This is a helpful thing to do as it alerts the person who wrote the article that there might be problems, and it helps other editors who might be looking for articles to clean up. So, I don't think you should stop, but there are a few things to bear in mind to be even more helpful:

Firstly, be aware that some editors don't like maintenance tags at all. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use them. After all, they are available for a reason. But it's a good editor that is aware of the larger context of their use.

Secondly, some tags have an obvious meaning. For example, you might add an tag to an article that clearly has no references at all. That doesn't need an explanation because we can all see why it's been added. Other tags are not as obvious and should be explained on the talkpage. For example, you might think an article is written in a biased way and decide to add ; this should be explained on the talkpage so that other editors coming along know why you added it.

Thirdly, try not to add too many tags all at the same time. Adding a whole big list of tags can be very annoying to other editors (not just the article creator). It can also make the tags a bit less effective. Imagine you've just written an article. Someone adds a single tag asking for some references. You know what to do - add references. Imagine someone adds six different tags, each asking for different things. Chances are, you won't want to read them (not saying you wouldn't, but say you're a brand new Wikipedia editor...). You might carry on, ignoring the tags, or you might think "forget this..." and go and do something more fun. Or...You might leave Wikipedia all together and never look back! Try to think which problems the article has that are really important. Major problems include having nor references (especially for BLPs), copyright infringement, being promotional or like an advert etc. Less important problems would be things like needing to be wikified, or have sections added. Try to stick to the most important problems. Other issues can be sorted later.

Fourthly, and this follows on from the previous point, try not to add tags that duplicate each other or don't really mean much in the context they're added. For example, here you added both a {{Wikify|date=January 2012}} tag and a tag. They do pretty much the same thing. You've also added , which isn't really necessary. There isn't a lead yet, it's just a stub. You've also added which to be honest, is not a very useful tag. There is rarely (if ever) a problem with an article that a more specific tag does not cover. Asking a new editor to "clean up" their article does not help them very much. In the example above, I would have stuck to adding and either {{Wikify|date=January 2012}} or .

Fifthly (!) sometimes it's nearly as quick (and much more helpful) to actually fix the problem rather than adding a tag. It would have taken you about 10 seconds to add some relevant wikilinks to that article, and would have saved someone else having to come along to do the job. Here you added . It would have been very quick for you to add a few relevant categories. I don't know if you're familiar with categories yet, but if you work in this area for a little while, you'll quickly learn some general categories that are used often. Without checking, I would be able to add to that article Category:Living people and Category:1985 births. I could have a good guess and be 90% sure that the following categories would also exist: Category:Canadian writers, Category:Canadian magazine editors and Category:People from Ontario. Some articles I wouldn't have a clue about, but biographies are quite easy.

To learn more about tagging articles and what other editors think of it, you can read these essays (please do!): Wikipedia:Tag bombing

• Wikipedia:Responsible tagging
• Wikipedia:Tagging pages for problems

It is painfully obvious that you are desperate to become an administrator. To be honest, that's not a great sign. It is great that you want to help more on Wikipedia, but I'm not sure why you want to be an administrator so badly. Becoming an admin shouldn't be a goal in and of itself. Really it's just a few extra tools for helping out with the tedious backlogs on the project, and there are loads of backlogs you can work on without the extra tools. If you're wanting to be an admin so that you're more important on Wikipedia, or get taken more seriously, that's won't really be seen as a good reason at RFA. Although working behind the scenes with admins by eg. reporting vandals or tagging pages for deletion is great, you're probably best leaving actual admin tasks to the admins, or at least more experienced editors. I can't imagine any reason why you'd need to comment on an unblock request, for example. It's just not necessary. Let the admins deal with that sort of thing. Maybe, occasionally, you might know a blocked editor well, or have been involved in them getting blocked, and might want to give your opinion, but if you're just finding editors in Category:Requests for unblock, then seriously, you're best just staying out of it.

If/when you have an RFA, people will look at your edits, in detail and also at the bigger picture. You say on your userpage that you want to work with protecting articles. People at your RFA will expect you to have quite a lot of experience with content work. At the moment, you have 995 edits in the article space. That's not very much by RFA standards. Try to engage with articles a bit more. Pick a few that you are interested in and work on improving them. Work on actually making a difference to the content rather than just adding tags to get other people to change the content. Maybe join some wikiprojects and collaborate with other editors writing articles. Some editors at RFA will want to see that you've been involved in a content process such as WP:DYK or WP:GAN. This doesn't mean you have to be an amazing writer. You can work with others and make contributions by looking for reliable sources and adding them, or deciding what should be included in an article. Or you could take part in reviewing articles at peer review or Requests for feedback. Again, it's not about being brilliant at writing, but being able to show that you're committed to the project, and that you have a good understanding of a larger range of policies and guidelines. If you can't show that, people won't want you to be making decisions about protecting or unprotecting articles. The bottom line is that people judging your suitability to be an admin will be much more impressed, and take you more seriously, if it looks like you're here because you enjoy editing here, and care about building an encyclopedia, not just to get an admin badge.

You also seem to be trying quite a few new things and not succeeding. Perhaps you should stick to what you know so far, and build up a good track record with very few mistakes (e.g.. in new page patrol). People will forgive mistakes at RFA, but only if you can show that you've learned from them! Another thing you could do to get more experience is help out at the help desk or the new contributors' help page, which are excellent at helping other editors and learning stuff yourself at the same time!