[mb-automods] Automod Election: fred576

[Chad Wilson]

Dave Smey wrote:
> I'm actually a little "meh" on this guy.
>
> Quantity of edits is huge (8234) in a short period of time (6 months).  He
> enters discs and just ARs the hell out of them.
>
> Things I'm not crazy about - simply guessing that certain spellings are
> typos, and editing all instances without more evidence. (He says in some
> of his voting comments that he is "obsessed" with typos.)
>
> Paging through a few hundred edits, I don't see any major troubleshooting
> edits (though there are a lot of capitalization cleanups.)  No merges or
> "this doesn't exist" finds.  (Anybody want to point to some particularly
> impressive ones?)  Paging through votes, I'm also not finding any
> interesting troubleshooting.
>
> Obviously the enthusiasm is there but I wonder if he could stand to be a
> little more seasoned.  I don't think it would be unreasonable to make him
> wait a little.  But, maybe the substance is there, and I'm just not
> finding it?
>
> - Dave Smey (bklynd)
> irritating n00b
>   
http://musicbrainz.org/mod/search/results.html?automod=&mod_type=6&mod_type=58&mod_type=23&mod_type=25&mod_type=19&mod_type=14&mod_type=20&mod_type=56&mod_type=62&mod_type=46&mod_type=35&mod_type=43&mod_type=38&mod_type=12&mod_type=51&mod_type=24&mod_type=22&mod_type=11&moderator_type=3&moderator_id=372321&voter_type=0&voter_id=137798&artist_type=0&orderby=desc&minid=&maxid=&isreset=0

He's got quite a few artist merges, a few release merges (enough to show 
that he knows how to do it). Worth noting that exception in the VA 
abyss, there are a lot fewer releases these days ready to be merged due 
to tools like Faux's dupscan.

His removal edits demonstrate an understanding of a variety of 
conventions and guidelines (ASINs matching releases). He knows what he's 
doing, he puts notes on almost every edit and he asks for guidance. I 
like that behaviour.

Sure, his voting may not be in depth yet, but he's been doing so of his 
own volition as far as I know (rather than being prompted for a 
pre-auto-editor nomination surge), and I think that's pretty good. He's 
finding his place and he seems to have the commitment to grow in this 
area - anyone who cares about data quality to the level of typos Fred 
does needs to be voting and fixing add release edits! :-)

This may be sacrilege to the wider MB community, but although I have 
questioned a couple of the typo fixes and wasn't overly impressed with 
the "not sure" response, I'm ready to accept that the net benefit of his 
typo fixes, far outweighs the cost/risk a few false positives. That work 
is time consuming and hard and seemingly not very rewarding to most, but 
it does a lot to improve the image of MB data. Most users don't give a 
shit about the release events and composers we wax lyrical about, but 
they do care about typos in their tracks. :)

In any case, remember that Fred can turn off AutoEdit for any of his 
typo fixing edits he's not "sure" about. It's not ideal, but I'll be 
more than happy to vote on them and leave those ones in the queue.

Chad / voice