Here is some information about my criteria for adminship and a list of the adminship candidacies that I have supported. I became an administrator on 6 January 2006 and have been voting at Requests for adminship since several months prior.
If you have any questions about what I've written here, the talk page is always open, as is my main talk page.
Adminship criteria
editI have also listed some criteria at RfA's standards for adminship page.
- The candidate has to have been here at least several months. An edit count over 1000 is necessary. (I had 1000 edits in about 6 months here, and there are certainly users who are more active here than I am. It's easily attainable as long as you're staying out of trouble.)
- Furthermore, the candidate needs to have a good grasp of policy, especially policies pertaining to the area of the site in which they do most of their work. WP:NPOV and WP:NPOVD should be mandatory, especially if they're active in the article space. WP:NOT and WP:CSD should be required reading for those interested in deletion. WP:-(, WP:3RR, and WP:BAN should likely be studied by those who are interested in reverting vandalism. Generally, all adminship candidates should know and follow WP:NPA, WP:CIVIL, and WP:POINT; and all adminship candidates should have a consistent use of informative edit summaries, in particular when they are reverting edits by other users.
- Tying into the above, if the candidate has had any conflicts (as most people who spend a lot of time making substantial edits in Article/Talk spaces have), I will not support them if they have been engaging in POV-pushing, revert warring, or uncivil behavior on talk pages or in edit summaries.
- Wikipedia namespace experience is also good. I'd recommend at least 500 edits in the WP: namespace, trying out several different areas of it. WP:AfD and WP:RfA are some of my favorites, though WP:RfD, WP:TfD, Wikipedia:Deletion reform, and many other [[WP:]] pages are worth a visit.
- The candidate needs to be trustworthy, and not overly inclusionist or deletionist. I do not consider inclusionism or deletionism as a valid reason to support or oppose a candidate; however, I am more likely to support candidates that are in the middle or who are slightly deletionist. We shouldn't be giving easy access to speedy deletion tools to a user who wants to delete half the articles here. On the other hand, the deletionist saying that "Wikipedia is not toilet paper" also applies in some cases.
- I have to have seen them around the site. I should be familiar with how they interact with other editors, outside the RfA vote. Otherwise, it's hard for me to make an intelligent decision.
- They should not delete discussions from their talk page; I instead offer the alternative of archiving it into a subpage. Blanking a user talk page is a common mistake.
- I usually oppose self-nominations, particularly if somebody self-nominates multiple times. Nomination by somebody who is already an administrator is a good thing. In addition, if a candidate has had a prior RfA that failed, then s/he should wait several months before accepting another nomination, and should address the concerns brought up by oppose voters in their prior nominations. (However, if I supported a candidate before, or voted oppose or neutral due to a minor technicality, then I might still support them on the new nomination.)
- Furthermore, with regards to multiple nominations, I believe in a "no double jeopardy" approach. If a candidate has been accused of bad-faith edits, vandalism, etc., in the past, but have kept their record clean since their prior RfA, I will be more likely to support them. There have been several admin candidates here who I have opposed on one RfA, and then supported on their next one. It's ridiculous to tell a candidate with several thousand edits to go register a new account and make several thousand more edits before you support them, just because they committed some vandalism as a newbie (see also Wikipedia:Avoiding common mistakes and WP:BITE, which I consider when interacting with newer users here). However, how long it takes for me to support them also depends on the frequency and severity of the bad-faith edits that they made, and how much time (and edits) has passed since the candidate last had those things on their record.
- How much a candidate will use their admin tools is not a huge concern to me. I've read oppose votes on RfA that said things to the effect of, "Oppose. We need more active admins," or "Oppose. S/he spends too much of his/her time writing articles. We need more admins that will do RC Patrol." While I'm not trying to attack the editors who cast such votes, and I do see these as valid concerns, I do think that we need admins of all types. We need the approachable admins who welcome a lot of new users, the admins that spend a lot of time finding and blocking vandals, the admins that do janitorial tasks, etc. And it's fine for admins to spend most of their time writing new articles, if that's what they want to do; the articles are why Wikipedia is here!
- I usually will support a candidate with more than 10,000 edits merely for their edit count, provided that they do not have any other major problems (such as revert warring / 3RR violations, POV-pushing, etc.); staying here that long shows a lot of dedication to the project.
- I don't agree with opposing candidates who have not written featured articles, also known as WP:1FA. We have over a million articles on this site, and only a small percentage of them are featured. 1FA places undue importance on writing articles that are merely popular for people to edit, rather than writing articles on encyclopedic topics with very little coverage here. If people were using 1FA during my candidacy, I would not have become an administrator, because I haven't written any featured articles. But as far as I know, no one's seemed to have any problems with how I've been using the admin tools. (Sean Black has his comments about this at User:Sean Black/No featured articles; I encourage reading them. I also recommend Digitalme's essay on this, which is at User:Digitalme/Any Featured Article.)
RfA support votes
editThe following is a list of admins and admin candidates whose requests for adminship I supported.
Current candidates!
editNone currently.
Administrators whose candidacies I supported
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