Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in adminship discussions
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This is an essay. It is not a policy or guideline, it simply reflects some opinions of its authors. Please update the page as needed, or discuss it on the talk page. |
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This page in a nutshell: Users contribute to Wikipedia in different ways. Don't deny Wikipedia a valuable administrator simply because a user contributes in a different way than you do. |
It is often said that "adminship is no big deal" and that the main criterion for adminship is whether a candidate can be trusted not to abuse the admin tools, bearing in mind that admin actions can be undone by another admin. A recurring issue on Requests for Adminship is that the participants in the process come upon a candidate they are unfamiliar with, and feel the need to decide whether or not they trust this person.
Since such a decision can be difficult to make about a person you don't know, these people sometimes decide upon a metric to judge people by, such as suggesting that the person must have been active for X months and have made Y edits. It is important to realize that all such metrics are arbitrary, and in effect really don't say particularly much about the candidate.
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[edit] Being an "inclusionist" or a "deletionist"
Occasionally, people are opposed or supported purely for their opinions on inclusionism and deletionism. It should be understood that just because someone has an opinion on this topic do not mean they will use, much less abuse, the admin tools to further their philosophy. Many administrators have very strong opinions in one direction or the other, but simply don't close deletion discussions or otherwise make deletions, except in the most obvious and uncontroversial of cases.
The question should be whether you think they will actually misuse the tools, or whether they can be trusted to not let their personal opinions cause them to go against consensus and policy.
[edit] Lack of experience with a particular Wikipedia process
Editors who work with a certain process (e.g. WP:AFD) might decide that any admin candidate must be experienced with that process. However, note that a substantial number of existing admins do not in fact deal with that process. In other words, since that process isn't part of most admins' workload, knowing how to work that process should not actually be a prerequisite for adminship. In addition, admin hopefuls tend to specialize in a certain process and do a good deal less with the others. Overall, there are few, if any, processes (besides editing) that a potential admin MUST know.
[edit] Editcountitis
Some of the oldest "arguments to avoid" are ones based purely on the number of edits (usually as determined by looking at an edit counter). While it might seem at first that a lot of edits means someone really knows their Wikipedia, and that's true a lot of the time, it's hardly universally true. There are editors with tens of thousands of edits... and hundreds of entries in their block logs, for example. Arguments purely based on how many edits someone has made are sometimes not taken very seriously, as the quality of those edits needs to be taken into account too. If you do not have time to look at an editor's contributions in detail, do not oppose or support simply based on edit count.
Sometimes people will even say things like "Well, 2000 edits is good, but look, they were spread out over a whole year. This editor doesn't contribute frequently enough." Since we're all volunteers, we should not demand a certain level of contribution from anyone. If someone can benefit the project by using their admin tools for only 10 minutes a week, that's 10 minutes of useful work we would not have otherwise had.
For example, a high amount of user talk edits may be a sign of chattiness. It may also be a sign that the user correctly tags many pages for speedy deletion and always warns the page creators. Similarly, a high amount of Talk edits may be an indication of mediation experience or of automated tagging for WikiProjects. A low amount of User talk edits does not need to mean that the candidate does not cooperate and discuss with others; it might simply indicate that he prefers to do so on article talk pages or project pages. A low amount of article talk edits may mean that the user discusses directly with other editors on their talk pages. It is also possible to display significant policy experience without a high Wikipedia namespace count: think of a user who makes good arguments about replaceability of fair use images on image talk pages. Therefore, if you look only at the numbers, you will most probably get a wrong impression of the candidate's contributions; if you want to say something meaningful about the user, be sure to look at the contributions themselves, not just their number or distribution. Of course, spending a significant amount of much time examining individual edits can become very tedious and unproductive. Overall, avoid making a decision solely based on edit count.
[edit] Namespace balance
A similar argument is based on the balance of edits between the various namespaces. This is not a very helpful statistic because different tasks may generate different numbers of edits. For example, someone who spends a lot of time reverting vandalism or tagging unused non-free images will have a disproportionately high number of user talk edits because each of these actions should entail adding a warning template to a user's page.
Users may contribute to Wikipedia in different ways and opposing a user simply because they do not contribute in the same way that you do is counterproductive and can potentially deprive Wikipedia of a good administrator.
There is often a logical explanation for an apparent disparity, such as an editor who had thousands of user namespace edits, and might be accused of being overly concerned with his userpage's design just because of the high number of edits. Perhaps that editor reverts vandalism from the user pages of others, or prepares articles in progress in their user space, making dozens of small edits, before moving them to the article space.
