I was just wondering how you all feel about adoption, does it work or not, how many adoptees turn out to be good, how many 'evil' and so on. Anything you can recall about dramas surrounding adoption/ adoptees / adopters basically.

My experience so far as an adopter is that the adoptees want very different things, so sometimes I have to find out things I don't already know myself. There are problems with some adoptees creating arguably mistaken pages and articles.

Is adoption a new thing, as when I joined in 2005 or started to contribute to wiki in a big way I would never have known about the adoption scheme, or maybe I just didn't consider it. How many of the adoptees do you think are very young indeed? Does adoption to help those labelled as 'problem' users often succeed?

For a minute I thought you were talking about actual adoption of kids. What's wiki-adoption?

The adoption program started like a year and a half ago, I think. It's a program that allows newer users to be guided by experienced users.

Neil was my wiki-daddy. You can judge for yourself if I turned out good or evil, but he seemed pleased when I made admin.

Uhm, most of my adoptees have been young, and they usually are very enthusiastic and all ready to learn at first, then stop editing altogether. I had one that was 55+, but he too got occupied in real life and stopped editing. Now I've got Shapiros10 and SynergeticMaggot. They're like 12 and 28, respectively. Shapiros is turning out to be a bit of a task, I have high hopes for Syn, tho.

It wasn't needed, mostly, since Esperanza was quite active back then.

Oh, good God, the most famous ill-ending wiki-adoption had to be when Durova took Jehochman under her wing, because he was a search-engine marketer, and she knows so abundantly well how to coach people in the public relations and marketing industry!

They went "on tour" with each other in the real-world trade show circuit, and a few weeks later, she refused to speak to him, and a few days after that, she relinquished the admin bit.

Highly entertaining, and I hope that someone else has the patience and the diffs to reconstruct the story better than I just did.

SynergeticMaggot is doing very well. I think technically I'm his wiki-grandfather. I should start telling him stories about the old days.

I never realised you were his adopter... You might want to explain to him why the move to delete this particular piece of drivel didn't warrant the "snowball keep" he tried to close it as, especially in light of some of the names arguing to delete it. I don't think he understands the difference between Wikipedia and Facebook yet, or why telling some of the best writers on Wikipedia that they're "obviously bad faith users" is not a good idea. (Certainly, given the warnings he's had, if I ever see him close a deletion discussion on a controversial BLP again with a summary like "speedy non-admin keep, subject clearly exists", I'll happily block him for disruption.)

I think some of those names are scapegoating AWC for being the cause of the problems at GA, which it is not IMHO.

'Names' might be important, or they might not, or a balance between the two. Of course it takes an editor quite a while on wiki to even know of and recognise all the 'names'. People do make mistakes And calling something other people are involved in 'drivel' is not very polite (even if it's true- I don't know much about the awards center to comment). I know one of my adoptees is constantly involved in WP:MYSPACE though (I've only recently adopted him and have tried to gently steer him away from it.) when I see another 'wikistory' or guestbook or whatever, my heart sinks.

But in the end there's only a certain way an adopter can advise an adoptee, if they are rude, tactless or unfriendly the adoptee could opt out of what is a voluntary process.



Aaaah, bless

Fairly representative challenges from the AWC (I'm not cherry-picking the worst here):

"Brighten up Somebody's Day by giving out 100 wiki-cookies to any active user (which means they have edited in the past two months). I will give a "Random Acts of Kindness" barnstar to anybody who does this."

Get Marge Simpson to GA Status!

Make 5 edits to the page on "The beatings will continue until morale improves"

Trust me, AWC was drivel by any stretch of the imagination. But still not as bad as its big brother.

Payment for editing Wikipedia articles?!? ZOMG!)!!""!!"

"Spot on" Cobalt. The problem is that most kids struggle to break away from their parents, and most kids don't want to be adopted either! It'd be all so boring.

Here's the link,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adopt_a_user
For those who still believe! For those who dont!

The adoption program was started by that revered editor Flameviper.

Simmer down. I just adopted him last week. I checked his talk page history... I need to talk to him about that archive bot, which doesn't appear to be working well. Other than that, he's already been spoken to about his closures. If you have some constructive criticism to give him on closing, or how to distinguish Wikipedia from Facebook, whatever the hell that means, feel free to drop a line on this talk page. Otherwise, move along. Insulting him here is just pathetic.

And I thought it was when Durova mentored Mercury, who mentored so well he became an admin and decided, after a night of inspired dreams, to finally once and for all delete the hated Angela Beesley BLP. Following which came a meltdown and termination much like you see for the mercurial T1000 in the steelworks, in Terminator 2 (oh, I love that film).

It was very, er, nonvocal for a while. But that didn't last.

And funnily enough Durova just nominated another budding sleuth for adminship. Who wants to bet on how that one's going to end? If it follows the current pattern it should be pretty funny I actually thought she was a Durova sock at first, but contribs seem to say otherwise.

Everything looks better with... where are those images from?

GDFL sucks.