User talk:Dreaded Walrus/Archives/November 2007

Once Again

Once again, thank you for correcting me, though 3bulletproof16 seems to have a knack for annoying people with his pseudo-moral high ground (see his Invasion edits from September 2006 and his lack of discussing any of his edits). He ought to be put in his place for his ridiculous intellectual dishonesty or ignorance to what "trolling" is.

Why is that a rule? How is one allowed to give me a warning about "edit wars," but if I return the warning as he was part of the war, he can delete it due to "trolling?" Unbelievable rules at Wikipedia. --Frightwolf —Preceding comment was added at 18:51, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Oops, I left a message on your talk page regarding this at around the same time as your message here. The idea behind the rule is that no user has an obligation to respond to a message, and that when a user has deleted a comment, it is taken as an indication that he has read that comment. I have no real opinion on the conflict here (I have not been following it, personally), but you may be interested in dispute resolution. --Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 18:56, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

My Liege

Greetings respected user. If you would find the time to look at my talk page I would be most grateful. Thankyou. You see the large expanse of space next to my user boxes? How would I make to gap disappear? Kaeso Dio 19:43, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Kind person (random acts of kindness barnstar), do you know how to remove the wasted space? Kaeso Dio 20:04, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

The slow, beautiful plague claims another

Labongo (talk · contribs) Acroterion _(talk) 13:38, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Haha, excellent. Congrats on the RfA by the way. It's nowhere near over yet, but it doesn't look like failing. You're one of my most respected users on here. :) --Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 14:38, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Argh, don't jinx it! :0 Acroterion _(talk) 14:49, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, it's all over, and there was no opposition. Many thanks for the eloquent endorsement, it really means a lot to me. It's strange to be on the other side - I begin to understand the reluctance of admins to do some of the things users request of them. On the other hand, it was frustrating to be unable to take action. The most alarming thing is that the "block" button is on the right after every username, as in Dreaded Walrus (Talk|contribs|block), so that option jumps out, regardless of who you're looking at.

You should consider an RfA yourself one of these days. Acroterion _(talk) 13:28, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Now that you're officially an admin, I'll have to be careful to stay on your good side, eh? ;)

And thanks very much for the compliment (you're the first person on here to suggest I should consider adminship, or alluded to it at all), but for now at least, I'm not certain it would be right for me. I'm not great at handling pressure, confrontation, stress and the like, and an admin necessarily has to be good at those things. If an admin just ignores messages, for example asking for clarification, then the admin is not really doing his job. And while I respond to pretty much every message here, most of my work so far has been relatively stress-free, so it hasn't been an issue.

I also feel that my wording leaves a hell of a lot to be desired at times. It isn't all that conventional, and online especially, the wrong tone often comes across (see the section below this one, for example). For an admin, this again would probably be an issue.

But most of all, I feel that if I was to run, there would probably be quite a lot of objections, and very valid ones. I'm not great at predictions, but one of the things that could be brought up is that I haven't really made that many Wikipedia: namespace edit. On the 12th of November you had 559 Wikipedia space edits, according to your AfD nom talkpage, whereas I currently only have 175.

On top of this, I make no bones about the fact that I'm not a great content writer. I have not created a single article so far that wasn't a redirect, and I can't see myself doing so in the near future. I have only made major contributions to one or two articles, and of these the only one that I remember was quite disheartening. In July of this year, I saw that our article on Overlord (2007 video game) was in bad shape, so I spent quite a few hours trying to fix the article, and was quite proud of myself, so I logged off for the day, made a few phone calls, and went to sleep. I came back ~15 hours later, and the article had became quite messy again. I just didn't have the energy to do everything again, or to bother with reverting again. I took the article off my shortlist, and left it at that. Since then, the article seems to have undergone much more drastic changes than mine, and is currently quite a good article, looks nice and stuff.

But I'm rambling. Bottom line is, I'm not 100% sure I'm suitable for being an admin. There are a few tools I would love to have that would aid me immensely, such as rollback (the amount of times I've seen someone spam links across 50+ articles, meaning I've taken a year off my RSI-avoidance expectancy reverting it all manually...), but aside from that, I can't really think of any good !support arguments, as "is not a bad user" probably isn't good enough, or else there'd be hundreds of thousands of admins. :P

Still, I'd like to congratulate you once more on becoming an admin... How long ago this seems now, in retrospect. ;) --Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 15:19, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree with some of your reasons - you wouldn't get far doing it right now, but with time, and a concerted effort to gain experience in different areas, you could do it. You have a good sense of policy and can explain it well. It's not necessary to create new articles - improving them is equally good, especially if they're GA or FA status. I don't have any GA/FA credits for example, and thought it might come up. I did do a lot of commenting on AfD's, which are frequently entertaining little bits of debate. I've spent no time at all creating, modifying or debating Wiki-policy. As for the section below, I'd have done (hell, I've done) the same thing. How were you to know? It seems to me that RfAs value avoidance of controversy (which means that it's hard to learn how to manage controversy), policy-wonkery (memorizing CSD codes?) and content creation/improvement over much else. I think you're being too self-critical. Acroterion _(talk) 15:58, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Stop

I appreciate that you are only trying to help, but had I have wanted the edits to my user page to be reverted, I would have done it myself. D'ragos Morgul is a close friend of mine, and I would appreciate it if you would treat his edits to my page as you would my own. I thank you for this small compromise, kindest regards, Magnus (talk) 12:56, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I take it you're talking about these edits, which I reverted here, and this edit, which I reverted here? I had not known he was a friend of yours, so I just took the blanking as exactly that. Blanking of another user's talk page, and addition of nonsense to their userpage. Anyway, now I know that you welcome his edits, I'll leave you to it. Sorry for the inconvenience. --Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 13:02, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry if it sounded like I was having a go. Thanks. Magnus (talk) 13:05, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

No probs. :) --Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 13:10, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Interesting

Use IP numbers to prove that Laurence Boyce is not a sock-puppet of Richard Dawkins. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.158.207.0 (talk) 14:01, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

You're asking for negative proof? And besides, I don't have checkuser access, and likely any checkuser request would be denied. --Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 14:04, 27 November 2007 (UTC) ^{For future record, additional information on this claim can currently be found here.}

Hi Walrus - in case you are not aware, this anon user (presumably the same person) has been at this game for a few weeks, making this strange allegation from various IP addresses, never signed - mostly at Talk:Richard Dawkins, but also elsewhere - e.g. User talk:Laurence Boyce and User talk:Snalwibma. He or she is also concerned that the article on Dawkins says he left Kenya at the age of eight, when in fact (apparently!) he did so at the age of two. Or is it the other way round? I don't care. These days my policy is to delete and ignore most of these contributions. Snalwibma (talk) 14:18, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Indeed... I saw the dynamic IP thing when I went to Laurence's talk page, and the IP of the other edit was similar to this one, and their contributions were similar. To be fair, I was originally going to just revert this like the edit to Dawkins' userpage, but the the whole "negative proof" thing popped into my head, and I couldn't be expected pass up an opportunity to appear clever now, could I? ;) --Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 14:22, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

RE: See

No worries, mate! Cheers gaillimh^{Conas tá tú?} 13:14, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Quick thanks

Just wanted to say, thanks for the extra revert at Profanity; takes an extra effort to double-check for missed vandalism, I appreciate the diligence. – Luna Santin (talk) 20:57, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

No probs, I was looking on my watchlist and saw an edit summary with the vandal's name on both "sides" of the summary, so knew there was something up there, and it's an easy mistake to make. :) --Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 20:59, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Adminship

I would be willing to nominate you. Nothing but constructive edits for how long? Obviously it is up to you whether or not being an admin appeals to you. Kaeso Dio (talk) 11:40, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the sentiment, which is greatly received, but for now at least, I am not quite ready for the responsibility of adminship. On top of this, I have some pretty big events coming up around March/April, and would probably want to wait until after that before applying, so that I wouldn't have to abandon my post or anything like that. I'm also currently not too sure if being an admin is for me. On top of the responsibility, which I've never been the hugest of fans of, I currently like the way I can go around doing minor edits to things. I may have been registered since July 2006 (my first registered edit there), and edited anonymously for a few months before that, but I think I would need a bit longer before I am ready for adminship.

Hence, we'll see how I feel about it in May/June. :) --Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 11:49, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Links to lorryspotting.com

I noticed that you've been fighting some spam where someone's been adding links to lorryspotting.com in Eddie Stobart Ltd.. If the problem is continuing despite your warnings, you can have the page semiprotected by an admin, or you can have lorryspotting.com added to Wikipedia's spam blacklist. You can ask at WP:RFPP for a page protection, or WP:AN/I for the spam blacklist.

I'd be willing to help out with the page protection, but I'm not sure how to use the spam blacklist. I'm also rather busy working with a consultant this afternoon, so I haven't had much time to work on Wikipedia. I'll help if I have time, though.

By the way, did you ever get your bucket back? --Elkman ^(Elkspeak) 20:09, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I attempted to get the page protected two days ago, but it was declined (it is still on the page currently, see WP:RfP. My first ever declined request, too, if I remember rightly. I almost shed a tear :P). As for the blacklist, I keep forgetting we have a blacklist just for en. At the moment though, as it's just that one article, I doubt it would be added. The page asks "Can protection solve the problem?" (What problem can't protection solve?), which it could, but if protection is being declined, then Blacklist probably would, too. We'll see what happens, and if they try spamming it across other articles.

Also, looking for a suitable new bucket takes up 95% of my time off-wiki. :) --Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 21:52, 29 November 2007 (UTC)