User:Sjakkalle/Admin criterion

Criterion I base my vote on

Sjakkalle's admin criterion of whether he will support or oppose a candidate is:

1. Promoting the candidate to administrator status must be a Good Thing.

Some of the criteria Sjakkalle does not apply include:

1. The candidate must be an inclusionist.
2. The candidate must be a deletionist.
3. The candidate must not be an inclusionist.
4. The candidate must not be a deletionist.
   • Reason: Candidates should be judged solely on their merits. Since admins are not imbued with any special privelege to have their opinions weigh any more heavily than others, it does not hurt either the inclusionist or the deletionist camp to have a deletionist or inclusionist candidate become an admin. Voting oppose or support because someone is inclusionist is silly, this is not a Wiki-political election. Another point is that people should be able to vote in line with their convictions on VFD, VFU, TFD, CFD and RFD, and not out of fear of receiving oppose votes on a possible future adminship request. Examples of the kind of vote which disturbs me is this vote in the "correct column" and this vote in the "wrong" column.
5. A user which I dislike must have opposed the candidate.
6. No users which I dislike can have supported the candidate.
7. None of the other votes must be troubling to me.
   • Reason: Such criteria have nothing to do with the candidate. Judge a candidacy based on the candidate, not on the people supporting or opposing. It disturbs me to see votes like "I'm opposing because I'm put off by xxx's support vote" or "yyy's oppose vote convinced me that I should support" or "Anyone that zzz hates must be a good guy". For instance [1] is spurious reasoning, even though it was in the correct column. Another reason I dislike this kind of vote is that it damages the environment at Wikipedia, voting opposite of another user just for the sake of it seems to violate the WP:WIN#Wikipedia_is_not_a_battleground philosophy.
8. The user must have at least 100 edits in the Wikipedia namespace
   • Actually I did follow this criterion once, and I opposed User:Khaosworks' adminship because of it. The reason I discarded this criterion is User:Khaosworks. He has done a good job.

Some clarifications

OK, my criterion says little, so here is some clarification (or perhaps it is more fog).

Objective criteria

Number of edits

Edit count is a very objective criterion, and it is true that more edits usually mean more experience. But while it can be an OK place to get a first impression, it is a poor place to stop. In particular

1. An editor who sometimes gets a bit sloppy and doesn't use the "show preview" button can easily have double the number of edits (or more) than a careful contributor.
2. Wikipedians are not Dungeons and Dragons characters who suddenly go up one experience level upon reaching 1000 (or 2000) edits and become imbued with twice the power at that point.

Now with that said, an "average" nominee would need something around 1500 edits, which means that a person with less than 500 almost certainly has too little, while one with over 3000 almost always has enough. But there is no barrier between 1499 and 1500.

Time

Again, time spent is an objective criterion, and again it is a mistake to use a D&D like absolute guideline on it. In general, I would expect an admin nominee to have something around 2 months or 3 months.

Subjective criteria

Experience

Experience with the project is important, but as I said above, is a function of more things than just number of edits and time spent. Has the contributor made some very good contributions to articles? Has the contributor been an active participant in debates and discussions (Village Pump, Deletion, and so on). Maybe the contributor has been active in fighting vandalism at RecentChanges. I set no real demand on participation in any, but it should be demonstrated that they know what Wikipedia is about. There should be some variation in the contributions, specialization is fine, but some contributions outside the field of specialization is also needed.

Conflict

How a candidate handles conflicts is more important. Some candidates can honestly say that they have been able to avoid conflict. That's good, I will not hold that against them. I don't demand a battle scar. In most cases, such a user is one which I have had very little interaction with or have seen very little however, so that would mean I wouldn't vote in the RFA anyway. (Typically such RFAs for contributors with great contributions to articles but with little participation in the Wikipedia namespace where most of the conflicts take place are successful, but have very few votes, around 20, sometimes less.)

But having demonstrated good conduct in times of conflict is definitely a plus. An admin who is fairly active will run into conflicts, and it will be good to know that the users equipped with block-buttons can keep their head cool under fire. Also, it is not a really good thing to always dodge conflict, because when faced with trolls and vandals, a firm administrator is needed to put a stop to it. (This does not mean that an admin who shies away from conflict is unfit for the job, it just means that they aren't very active on the front lines.)

A candidate who is prone to making angry remarks at people who disagree with him or her is not such a good candidate. Some angry remarks or misplaced criticism are OK, everyone loses their cool occasionally, but such incidents should be the exception, not the rule.

Candidates who aggressively challenge every oppose vote, rather than politely responding to them, are doing themselves a disservice. An admin must be able to take criticism.

Worse are cases of candidates who have made trolling comments, personal attacks, or used foul language at anybody, including people who have made trolling comments, personal attacks and foul language against them. An administrator will run into trolls, vandals and rude people, and has to be able to tackle this, without decending to such a level. Wikipedia:Civility is important, and admins must follow it. Now, these bad things go over, having a history of foul language in the past, and then having improved the behavior is possible. That means a delay to the adminship, not eternal banishment from it.

Vandalism and other nonsense

Some admin candidates have foolishly vandalized something, or inserted some other nonsense due to boredome most likely, and when that happens, the RFA usually fails. I cut a little bit of slack because I don't want to make a too big distinguishment between those who get caught and those who don't. One "harmless" incident (e.g. nominating April Fools Day for deletion on April 1) in the past month won't knock my support vote away, a few "harmless" ones might however. A "harmful" incident (e.g. vandalizing a page with foul language to make an attack on someone) in the past month is more serious.

The bottom line

The candidate must have demonstrated that it's a good thing to make them an administrator.