My Standards for Supporting Adminship Candidates edit
- Candidate must have been actively participating for at least six months. You just need that long to get a feel for Wikipedia, really. Experience should be recent enough to be relevant, although breaks are not disqualifiers. There is no firm edit count requirement; candidates who're doing all the things listed below will have made thousands of edits.
- Candidate must have a demonstrated pattern of content creation. Usually, that means at least one GA. GAs are not hard to get (although DYKs are too trivial to independently demonstrate content creation) and demonstrate willingness to work with others. Featured content (lists, topics, etc.) is better, and Featured Articles are best of all. I don't even have one.
- Candidate must demonstrate thoughtful participation in AfD's. Rabid inclusionists or deletionists won't be supported, but a person who takes the time to look for sources and consider the improvement, potential future improvement, and encyclopedic value of a topic before stating their opinion are ideal.
- Candidate must have a clean block log for the past year. Forever is better, but we all make mistakes.
- Candidate must have a yearlong history of WP:NPA. We all get into disputes, and the ability to be in a dispute and make policy-based points rather than ad hominem arguments is necessary. (Mind you, pointing out how another editor is violating policy is NOT an ad hominem attack.)
- Candidate must have a demonstrated track record in at least one area which demonstrates that he or she is ready for adminship. These areas include, but are not limited to:
- WP:3O is a great place to demonstrate policy understanding and mediation abilities outside of canned AfD questions.
- Anti-vandalism work. Some people don't like Huggle/Twinkle. I'm all in favor of admin candidates having used them and demonstrated their ability to make appropriate judgments.
- WP:ARS as someone who actually improves articles, rather than partisan keep !voter.
- Dispute resolution like MEDCAB and WQA.
- Contributions to other Wikimedia projects are a plus.
- Candidates with "wants to be an admin someday" userboxes will receive extra levels of scrutiny. Candidates may be opposed solely on the basis of userboxes which call into question whether the candidate is here to build an encyclopedia and/or conduct himself or herself in an appropriately professional and neutral manner.
- Under no circumstances will I support a 4th or subsequent RfA. That demonstrates either a trophy collector (adminiship is not a level-up) or a candidate who has repeatedly failed to judge consensus appropriately.
- Candidate must be of an age of legal responsibility in his or her own jurisdiction. Administrators may be called upon to deal with child pornography, obscenity, libel, legal threats and other material inappropriate for children to deal with. I will never support the exposure of any child to such a position of responsibility.
The successful Administrator candidate will already be an administrator before the bit is flipped.
Administrators must demonstrate that they are here to build an encyclopedia. That doesn't mean you have to be the best content creator in the world, but the activities listed above are signs of encyclopedia-building, while there are plenty of other areas that are not. I specifically do not require or expect AN/ANI participation, because there are plenty of other good places where experience can be earned while actually contributing to the encyclopedia.
I take a relatively low view of administrator coaching. It seems to be very good at taking marginal candidates through box-checking and how to answer policy questions via rote. Most canned AfD questions are useless, if not outright counterproductive, because they encourage groupthink and enforced orthodoxy on the part of admin candidates and RfA voters. I'd much rather see questions asked that challenge candidates to apply conflicting policies and guidelines in hypothetical situations, because how a candidate thinks (and that they do, in fact, think) is much more important to me than their ability to copy and paraphrase from previous successful RfA's.