Wikipedia:Content awareness, not content creation
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Admins don't need to be be able turn 32 painted cans of soup into a work of art. But they do need to know not to stuff it in the trash when they see it. |
You do not have to be an artist to work at an art museum. In fact, few artists work at museums displaying art. What you need is to know what is art and what's not, so your first day at the new job does not start with you stuffing a picture of a lot of soup cans into the trash because you think someone tried to plaster the walls of the museum with advertising. The same applies to editing Wikipedia.
When judging the viability of a candidate at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship, many !voters will consider content work a key aspect and correctly so. Unfortunately, some !voters equate content work with content creation or getting a sizeable number of articles to GA/FA/DYK status. They often do not consider that not everyone is capable of doing such feats and/or will not accept this when pointed out to them.
But adminship is not about creating content... edit
Sure, Wikipedia, by the very definition of being an encyclopedia that requires users to create the content, needs people to constantly add new and improve existing content. But admins are not selected to do this. Creating content is something that those who are interested and who are capable in doing should and will do, no matter which "status" they have on Wikipedia. Admins on the other hand are, as already made clear by their symbol, chosen to do menial cleaning tasks, like deleting things that do not belong on Wikipedia, blocking people who for various reasons believe they should disrupt the project or violate the rules consistently, or protecting pages against the latest 4chan or OpIndia craziness.
That does not mean content is not important... edit
... - it is. And admins need to know that. Unfortunately, it's a common misconception that the only way to prove this is for a candidate to create content themselves. It's not. Admins need to be aware of just how important content is. Without it, there would be nothing. Almost all new editors will start on Wikipedia by adding, editing or deleting content in some form or another. It might be a badly-formatted new article about someone semi-notable; it might be a short article about how awesome their MySpace/Facebook/YouTube/etc. band is; it might be a typo-correction that no one spotted for three years; it might be the removal of a bit of nonsense some vandal inserted which was not picked up sooner. But they edit content. And if they soon meet some overzealous admin who believes in the "shoot first and ask questions later" approach, that might be their last edit. And most of the admins who act this way do not do so because they think it's great to misuse the tools to hassle some newbie. They do so because they don't appreciate that the user probably wanted to make the project a better place, even if their edit was misguided. And from this lack of appreciation for content work stems an attitude that will sooner or later scare new users off.
So yes, admins who are like that are bad for the project, and editors who are like that who want to become admins should be opposed. But when someone demonstrates that they are not acting like this, even if they themselves have not created much content themselves, then they should be an admin. The world needs people with weird hair and glasses, but it also needs people who guard works of art, make them available to others, or keep away those who want to trash anything they don't like or understand.