Wikipedia:WikiProject on Adminship/Goals of the adminship process

The adminship process serves a variety of goals, many of them non-obvious. These can be grouped into several key areas:

• Discernment
• Motivation
• Fair process
• Ease of process
• Enculturation

Discernment

The goal of discernment is the most obvious goal of the adminship process. Simply stated, discernment means granting adminship to those who will use it most effectively to further the project's goals while withholding it from those who would use it in a counterproductive fashion. Key aspects of discernment for admins include:

• Ability to keep cool. Self-control is probably the most vital capability for a Wikipedia administrator. Administrators are expected to work with editors with widely varying personalities. They are expected to endure verbal abuse and personal attacks without retaliating in kind. They must respect differences of opinion with their peers, particularly by refraining from edit warring or "wheel warring" -- that is, repeatedly reversing the actions of other administrators without building consensus. They must build consensus and foster teamwork even when working with those they dislike.

• Respect for the Wikipedia way of doing things. Administrators have to understand and must have experienced firsthand the nature of the project. Part of this is understanding and respecting written policy, but a great deal of it has to do with respecting the encyclopedic goals of the project and the means by which they are achieved.

• A degree of literacy consistent with the project's editorial goals. One of the core values of Wikipedia as a community is that writing ability is held up as a positive character trait. Administrators must be able to further the project goals through their own contributions of prose.

• Trust. Wikipedia administrators must be trustworthy. While most editorial actions taken by administrators are reversible by other administrators, the social consequences of these actions are not. Blocks, applied indiscriminately, may lead contributors away from the project even if removed after the fact. Inappropriate dissemination of deleted page history may lead to real-world repercussions for the foundation or innocent third parties. The project must satisfy itself that administrators have the project's goals first rather than quietly serving the goals of another organization at Wikipedia's expense.

• Judgment. Any project that maintains Ignore All Rules as one of its core principles necessarily requires thought, care, and judgement in the application of policy in day-to-day matters.

Fair process

The adminship process should be open, transparent, and fair, and should be widely perceived as such.

Motivation

Whether we like it or not, adminship has become one of the major ways in which Wikipedia recognizes contributors. Other recognition mechanisms at Wikipedia include barnstars, which are given out by individuals rather than the project as a whole, and featured articles, which recognize the efforts of all editors involved in a particular article rather than an individual editor. Aside from invitation to participate in various working groups (Arbitration committee, Bureaucrats, Board) for which adminship is generally a prerequisite, adminship is the only form of recognition bestowed by the project as a whole upon individual editors.

As such, many contributors have adminship as a personal goal, and focus their editing energies in ways that they believe will make that goal a reality.

Ease of process

The ideal adminship process would detract minimally if at all from the vital work of building an encyclopedia:

• Minimal candidate effort. The amount of time and effort the candidate puts into the adminship process itself would, ideally, be minimal (but we still want to motivate the candidates to put forth a great deal of effort that improves the encyclopedia in anticipation of being rewarded with adminship, see above).

• Minimal community effort. Ideally, the adminship process should not intrude excessively upon the work of Wikipedians other than the candidate.

• Minimal ill will. The process should be predictable. Candidates should know what to expect and be reasonably able to anticipate how the process will unfold. The adminship process should not serve as a means to rehash disputes over policy or article content (though obviously proper discernment will require a degree of review of past incidents). The relationship between the candidate and the community should not become more adversarial as a result of the adminship process.

Enculturation

The use of admin-specific capabilities is an area rife with unwritten rules. For example, an administrator encountering a badly-written page has many choices: (a) fix it, (b) redirect it, (c) stub it, (d) delete it, (e) tag it with a speedy tag, (f) list it on AFD, (g) list it on PROD, (h) mark it for cleanup, (i) etc. Some cases are obvious, and others may become so upon reading applicable policy (e.g. WP:CSD). Many are not, and it is not until the administrator develops a sense for the community that the best choices can be made. The situation is not limited to deletion: in dealing with vandalism, an administrator can after reverting (a) do nothing, (b) leave any of a legion of messages on the vandal's talk page, (c) block, (d) protect, (e) list the matter on AN/I or other pages. Similar choices are made in other areas in the routine course of an administrator's usual daily activities.

Further, appreciation of the very nature and core values of the project is important in its own right. Unlike other contributors, most administrators remain with the project for an extended period of time. Many become active in policy discussions, and some will ultimately become successors in leadership roles in the project or the foundation. While new contributors (and by extension new admins) will form their own views, it is vital to the project that they do so in a fashion informed by the history of the project and experiences of others, lest the institutional memory of Wikipedia as a community become compromised.