In Requests for Adminship, one of the attributes of candidates that is taken into consideration is their edit count. I was recently reading an RfA where one of the contributors whas critical of the candidate for having made 80% of his edits using Huggle.
I believe that reverting vandalism is important, and that any would-be administrator should have experience of it, and I am grateful to the Recent Changes partrolors who contribute a lot of time to the task. Having spent a lot of time at Huggle is by no means sufficient for an RfA to be viable, and so a user which lacks regular edits, or one who has not otherwise contributed much to the project should not yet be made an admin, but there was a specific problem with this case. The Candidate had made over 25,000 edits, considerably above average for a new Sysop, and so 5,000 of these were non-huggle edits. I believe that you can certainly gain enough experience to be a Sysop with this number of regular edits, although again, a high volume of edits is not sufficient.
In my opinion, for one to become a Sysop, they must
- Be experienced in identifying and reverting vandalism. An admin has the power to block people for vandalism, protect pages etc, and so a track record of anti-vandalism is necessary to show that they are aware of the content rules and guidelines and to allow RfA contributors to inspect their track-record in this respect
- Have expeience of creating and maintaining articles (classic editing). This is of course what Wikipedia is about, and an admin should not just be the teccie who performs admin tasks, they should be aware of what most editors are doing here, and this comes with creating and editing normal articles
- Have experience in Deletion. As an admin can delete pages, they must have a track record of nominating pages for deletion and participating in deletion discussions. Again, this is necessary to show knowledge of wikipedia rules and guidelines and to allow RfA contributors to inspect their record. I would not support a Sysop candidate who frivilously nominates articles for deletion, or whose contributions to deletion discussions either violate guidelines or are clearly at odds with consensus as this suggests they would be a poor Sysop
There are of course other admin qualities (such as civil behaviour etc), but these are the ones that I think justify use of edit counts in RfAs.
Coming back to the original point, about whether too much use of Huggle in building up an edit count should count against a Sysop candidate, believe that the three criteria above can certainly be satisfied with less than the 5,000 edits that this particular candidate had. I think that if a candidate has made a couple of thousand creative edits to the mainspace, they can satisfy me that they know how to edit articles and they can understand the way tricky things like edit wars etc come about. As for deletion discussions, once you've participated in several hundred discussions, nominated a few hundred articles etc, I'd be satisfied that you know the rules, or rather the extent to which your judgement is reflected by the consensus and guidelines can be apparent to someone who is going to !vote on your RfA.
The crux of what I'm trying to say is that while an edit count is a proxy for experience to some extent, once the experience of an RfA candidate has been established (positive or negative), it is no longer necessary to use the edit count as a tool.
If a candidate comes up for RfA with only 200 edits, I think it's clear that their participation in wikipedia is not sufficient for them to have gained verifiable knowledge and experience to make them an admin, but I think that for the majority of candidates their edit count is somewhat irrelevant.
In particular, I find it totally illogical that a candidate's participation in anti-vandalism activities should count against them.