Final (112/3/2). Closed as successful by WJBscribe @ 12:02, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
Salvio giuliano (talk · contribs) – Salvio giuliano has been editing here since the end of 2009. He has contributed a number of articles related to Italian law and made a number of measured contributions to a talkpage where anyone explaining the Italian legal system could expect a certain amount of flak. I've checked his deletion tagging which I consider to be very accurate. I like the combination of building the wiki and cleaning it up. He has the tenure, contributions and temperament that makes for a good admin and I commend him to the community. ϢereSpielChequers 21:49, 24 March 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia as an administrator. Please answer these questions to provide guidance for participants:
That said, I must admit I'm prouder of my gnomish contributions, that is to say fighting vandalism and patrolling new pages, as I like to think that I'm helping to keep Wikipedia clean, so that the people who write much better than I do can concentrate on creating new articles and improving the ones we already have.
To be honest, this entire affair did not really cause me stress; rather, it caused me a bit of frustration, because there came a point when I thought that we had moved well beyond a normal content dispute, that could be solved using WP:DR, and started thinking that the other user had become disruptive in their attempt at clearing Knox's name. This wasn't because I didn't concur with them, but because they were adamant in not trying to hammer out a compromise, an agreement, but started considering the article as a battlefield, instead.
That said, if I were to find myself in such a situation again, I think I'd either walk away or behave much in the same way: first, I'd try to talk things through on the talk page, then try mediation (or another dispute resolution method) and then, if I thought the user was being disruptive, I'd report them to WP:AN or WP:ANI.
As far as further protective measures are concerned, I think that the current policy does a fairly good job at protecting living people, although I admit that I would like it better if pending-changes protection was applied to all BLPs as the default option as a way to at least diminish the potential for harm. I know, however, that the community disagree with me on this point, so rest assured that, if my RfA is successful, I will definitely not go on a protection spree.
First of all, i think it could achieve much more than it presently does: often, today, an article either gets tagged for deletion or, when it does not meet the criteria, just tagged for maintenance and left as it is. For instance, to add a couple of categories using WP:HOTCAT, insted of dropping a ((uncategorised)), or to move the article to the correctly capitalised title or to fix an evident grammar or spelling mistake and so on would not take too long. I know that there are many patrollers who already do that and that when they do not — I am sometimes guilty of this too —, often this is due to the fact that there are way too many articles compared to the number of active patrollers... To tackle this issue, the first thing that should be done, in my opinion, would be to try and get more experienced users involved in new page patrolling, so as to spread more evenly the workload, in order to allow single patrollers to do more on the pages they encounter.
Another perennial problem of new page patrolling is that it is often the first contact a newbie has with Wikipedia and it can be very bitey, especially when a mistake is made – errors happen, sometimes because the patroller is still inexperienced and trying to learn the various nuances of the criteria (particularly A7), other times because he thinks the article would be a WP:SNOW at WP:AFD and, so, applies the wrong criterion, to quickly get rid of the page – or when the patroller does not answer the questions of the article's creator... To avoid that, I would first try to make sure that the various templates are reworded in a friendlier way, so as not to bite newbies, then I would encourage users to be more helpful towards good-faith newcomers and, finally, I would try to improve the feedback a patroller receives from the reviewing admin: when a speedy nomination is declined, the person who tagged the article could use a note from the admin, explaining why the article does not meet a given criterion – many sysops already do that and tools like WP:CSDH make this really easy –.
Furthermore, I would support restricting the ability to create new articles to autoconfirmed users only, so as to diminish the workload on new page patrollers and to decrease the possibility that newcomers get bitten, since they already have had a first contact with Wikipedia and the first thing they see no longer is a cold machine-like template, informing them that we do not want their contributions. If non-autoconfirmed users still wanted to create articles, they could go through WP:AFC, where the climate is a bit more personal...
Moreover, I think that the new project that has been recently started, could be very helpful in finding new ways to improve this process, which is quite necessary and yet sensitive.
I believe that, in general, Wikipedia supports the addition of suitable content – for instance, the addition of material regarding a kid's totally unremarkable ten-year-old best friend will, and probably should, be reverted on sight –. This is primarily a matter of commonsense, in my opinion: Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia and to spread knowledge is its ultimate goal. We need addition of content, to keep our articles up to date, to always provide more insightful bits of info and to keep creating new articles. However, there is a policy, namely WP:Editing policy, which explicitly encourages people to boldly add information to Wikipedia, and there is, then, a guideline, WP:BOLD, that invites users to be bold and make changes, to improve Wikipedia and another one – although it only tangentially involves the addition of content –, WP:BITE, which reminds experienced users to help newbies who are trying in good faith to improve Wikipedia. And I believe that in the vast majority of cases, we are successful in upholding this philosophy, but when something goes right nobody tends to notice; instead, we immediately notice in the rarer cases when something does not go as it should, such as when an overly enthusiastic patroller reverts good-faith edits as vandalism, or when an editor removes bits of info that do not fit his opinion on a given matter, often only using three-letter acronyms, or when there is a clique of editors who tag team to keep information out of an article and so on. All in all, in my opinion, barring the occasional situation of pathology, Wikipedia does support the addition of content.
At the same, there is no point in repeating three times the same thing, as with ((advert)), ((pov)) and ((inappropriate tone)) or in using a generic tag, such as ((cleanup-rewrite))...
So, to summarise, I believe that new articles should only be clearly tagged with the most pressing issues, to allow their creator to work on them without overwhelming him.
Please keep discussion constructive and civil. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review his contributions before commenting.
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As far as giudizio direttissimo is concerned, you're right too, but that's a technical expression which has no direct English counterpart. That's why I didn't provide a translation. It's just like when you find in the header of an article a latin expression or the English word "trust" — when the article is written in a foreign language —. Direttissimo, literally, means extremely fast, so it could be translated as very fast trial, but I chose not to do it, because I felt it could be perceived as somewhat macaronic. Salvio Let's talk about it! 10:34, 28 March 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]
And all this aside, a couple words of Italian was not my main beef. It's the lack of real content creation here. That piece is all from one source (like the people who summarize a website, you have summarized a trial procedure manual). Where are the references to law review or books talking about the subject? What we do here, generally, is to assemble articles from multiple sources. If you can't or won't do that, then you're not showing editorial ability. For that matter, within that topic, why is there no discussion of the evolution (over time) of the practice, or a comparison to major other practices in other countries? All we have is this summary of one procedural source with no real context for the topic.
You have NOT demonstrated content creation ability in English. That's my minimum bar for a support. If you are a thoughtful person, show me article creation, here on en-Wiki. I want to see it from native-speakers, I DEFINITELY want to see it from a non-native speaker. If you are a smart lawyer or whatever, this should be easy. TCO (talk) 14:07, 28 March 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]