Misplaced Pages

Oppose

1. Oppose. Pushes page moves to non-English titles with non-English letters. Has too much of an agenda to have article names conform to ancient, non-English spellings. Not willing to give him admin powers to move pages. CDThieme 17:19, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

   Thanks for commenting, CDThieme. As I note below I have no intention of abusing admin options to force my way in naming disputes. And even if I tried such an attempt would be doomed to fail. Misplaced Pages has enough checks and balances to ensure that an admin violating consensus cannot have his way in the long run. I appreciate that people feel differently (and often strongly) on the representation of non-English names. I think we need to move away from a winner-takes-all mentality in those disputes. Listing all possible anglicizations and providing pronunciation information is my current strategy for trying to please as many people as possible in the field of Norse mythology names. See the Höðr article for an example. We've also been developing a template called "foreignchar" to provide information on Latin alphabet characters not used in English. I hope you'll be able to work on projects like that with us to develop broadly acceptable solutions. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 18:02, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

   This is not Haukurth's policy, but a general agreement among those users who actually contribute to articles on Norse mythology. I find it very disconcerting when people POV-push against non-English characters when the English language uses the Latin alphabet, an alphabet enriched with additional letters for different languages. It speaks for itself that when you or anyone else has wanted to purge an article title of non-English characters it has failed miserably in the votes.--Wiglaf 17:25, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

   Just to comment, I fully support his position on this matter. --Sn0wflake 22:49, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

   Well, in some (I even think, most) of the cases, the correct spelling of the name uses non-English characters. I'm not sure if Anglosaxons know this, but in Nordic languages, non-accented and accented letters are different letters and substituting one for the other changes the meaning. I wouldn't be writing Kuinka monta näistä haluat (how many of these do you want) as Kuinka monta naista haluat (how many women do you want) just because 99.999% of Wikipedians are Anglosaxons. — JIP | Talk 09:58, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

2. Strong Oppose on account of the Amalekite/Stormfront issue - I cannot support a user for adminship who does not seem to see the need for Misplaced Pages to be proactive in protecting editors against off-Misplaced Pages threats based on their Misplaced Pages activities. Off-Misplaced Pages actions which could amount to physical harm being done to editors is grounds for perma-blocking. If you can't see that a neo-nazi posting a "hit list" of Jewish Wikipedians to a neo-nazi board as deserving of sanction, I don't think you have the judgement to be an admin. Guettarda 04:29, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
3. Strong Oppose. I was not going to vote at all, but I concur with Guettarda who insightfuly brought to my attention that I should voice my protest against Haukurth's actions during that affair here, and that it does, in fact, important wrt to his compotence as a prospective admin (though I do trust him to not violate policy in a procedural sense, is what I mistakingly had in mind as per my hitherto position). El_C 05:14, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Neutral

Comments

• >95% of the user's contributions have been in this calendar year. Recommend that people considering this RfA not hold number of edits vs. time on the project as against the July, 2003 inception of this nominee's presence here, but rather vs. January, 2005. Average number of edits per day over last 30 days is 19.6. Uses edit summaries 81% of the time, 87% over last 500 edits. --Durin 20:38, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

No offense, Durin, but you have a terminal case of Editcountitis. If you can't shoot someone down for having too few edits, you go after the types of pages they edit and when all else fails, the timing of their contributions. Here we have an outstanding contributor and candidate, and the best arguement you can come up with is basically "Yeah but what has he done lately?" Besides seeming petty and arbitrary, this is no real reason to oppose at all. C'mon, you can do better than that!..can't you?--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 06:01, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for supporting me, R.D.H.! I don't think Durin was trying to shoot me down with his data. He's pointing out that while I don't have a lot of edits for someone with such an old username the fact is that almost all of those edits happened this year so my recent edits-per-day stats aren't so low. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 07:53, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

• Thank you Haukurth, that was precisely my point. RDH, I wasn't trying to shoot him down. I was trying to shoot down the typical objections we see such as "too few edits for so long on Misplaced Pages". So, I was working towards an end exactly opposite of what you surmised from my above comment. Please note that I did not vote, I commented. My work on stats and charts has been an extensive effort to cure people of editcountitis. I've been doing this since August. Prelimary results of this effort seem to indicate a very signicant shift away from editcountitis. This is good, in my opinion. --Durin 14:36, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

In that case my sincere apologies to you, Durin. I withdraw my ill-considered, knee jerks comments.--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 04:32, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

• Kolokol's comment above refers to the long dark tea-time of the soul that is Úbeda. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 17:47, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Questions for the candidate
A few generic questions to provide guidance for voters:

1. What sysop chores, if any, would you anticipate helping with? (Please read the page about administrators and the administrators' reading list.)

A. I'd like to be able to speedy delete pages when doing RC-patrol. I'd also like to be able to move pages to locations with edit histories to sort out redirect jungles (of course discussing anything controversial before moving). A rollback button would be really nice since I monitor a bunch of pages for vandalism. If the community trusts me with adminship I would also do my share of work in clearing out backlogs in copyright violations, requested moves etc. I don't think I'll use the blocking option for a while. I feel I'd need more experience first and I don't want to block anyone unless I'm absolutely sure I know what I'm doing.

2. Of your articles or contributions to Misplaced Pages, are there any about which you are particularly pleased, and why?

A. I'm happy with Hrafnkels saga, which I wrote and shepherded through the FAC process. I have some other favorites enumerated on my userpage but what I'm really proudest of is the Images from Norse mythology category, which I've contributed a lot to. I like adding images and tidying up their categories and licensing information.

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

A. The first I remember is a disagreement with User:Reddi on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction over how to classify vials of botulinum in the context of weapons of mass destruction. I think we managed to resolve that amiably in the end. I've participated in some debates on the Wikien mailing list, the hottest one was on the ban of User:Amalekite. The debate can be found in the mailing list archives and on Wikipedia_talk:Blocking_policy. That was certainly stressful to me and in the end I had to defer to a majority opinion I did not fully agree with. Most recently I've participated in debates, votes and revert wars (see the history of Úbeda) on the representation of German, Spanish and Old Norse names on Misplaced Pages.

I think the most important thing in any conflict is to try and avoid being sucked in completely and keep going back to what really makes Misplaced Pages fun - writing articles. Over 90% of the edits made by a typical contributor are noncontroversial and unambiguously improve the encyclopedia. It's easy to fall into the trap of spending disproportionate amounts of energy debating the remaining <10%.