User:Horologium/Sandbox2

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4. In order to illustrate that you have at least a passing knowledge/understanding of the tools and responsibilities that go along with adminship, could you describe/summarise:
  • 4a. Generally, why and when should someone be blocked?
  • A: Users should be blocked when they have failed to comply with Wikipedia's policies. Edit-warring, vandalism, hostility towards other users, spamming and copyright violations should be dealt with through a series of escalating warnings, with a block issued after a final warning. Legal threats, disclosure of another user's personal information, threats of violence, gross BLP violations and illegal activities (such as the upload of child pornography) are grounds for an immediate block.
  • A: During an edit war among multiple registered users, full protection may be required. Persistent attacks from multiple sources, users or even a single user IP-hopping may be combated through semi-protection. Certain high-risk templates and pages should be fully protected indefinitely to prevent widespread disruption by a vandal familiar with template syntax.
  • 4c. When would it be appropriate to speedily delete a page?
  • A: Any page that fails Speedy deletion criteria may be deleted. Tagged articles should be read through, and their history viewed, before deletion. I personally will not tag or delete any article under CSD categories A1, A3, or A7 that was created less than 15 minutes ago or has been edited multiple times by the article creator in the last 30 minutes, because often article creation is done through sequential edits, and waiting allows the creator time to build up the article to assert notability and establish context. Tagging such as [1], less than one minute after the article was created, is absurd.
  • 4d. How does one determine consensus? And how may it be determined differently on a talk page discussion, an WP:XFD discussion, a WP:DRV discussion, and an WP:RM discussion.
  • A: Consensus is highly dependent on context. On article talk pages, content discussions are ordinarily based on numbers, unless there is a policy which contravenes the majority. (Consensus does not trump policy.) XFD discussions are different, as the closing admin must weigh the relative merits of the issues before deciding, and five users who cite valid policies may often provide more weight than 20 users whose arguments consist of "I like it/I don't like it" or "It's useful/It's not useful" or the like. (Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions is an essay which provides a lengthy list of examples.) DRV is based on weight of arguments, and should not be a redebate of the original XfD, but rather a determination of whether the closure was correct according to policy and the will of the community. Page move discussions are handled similar to article talk pages.
  • 4e. User:JohnQ leaves you a message on your talk page that User:JohnDoe and User:JaneRoe have been reverting an article back and forth, each to their own preferred version. What steps would you take?
  • A: First, go to the page in question and view the edit history to determine if there is an edit war in progress. If only one or two people are edit warring, warn the participants and block as appropriate for 3RR violations. If multiple editors are involved, protect the page as appropriate (full protection if one or more of the editors are established editors, otherwise semi-protection), and urge the involved parties to solve their dispute on the article talk page. Before locking an article with full protection, ensure that there are no BLP violations or other policy violations. If the dispute between JohnDoe and JaneRoe is a protracted reversion tussle rather than an edit war, urge both parties to discuss before reverting, and inform them of the various dispute resolution procedures available.