| Revision as of 18:45, 9 February 2007 editB (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Administrators63,958 editsm →Being an "inclusionist" or a "deletionist← Previous edit | Revision as of 18:46, 9 February 2007 edit undoB (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Administrators63,958 edits →Failure to use edit summaries: Edit summaries are actually very important in Misplaced Pages and explaining your actions in a deletion summary/block summary is essential for an adminNext edit → | ||
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Revision as of 18:46, 9 February 2007
Essay on editing Misplaced Pages | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Misplaced Pages contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Misplaced Pages'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: Users contribute to Misplaced Pages in different ways. Don't deny Misplaced Pages 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.
Lack of "time in grade"
Being an "inclusionist" or a "deletionist"
Lack of experience with a particular Misplaced Pages 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.
Editcountitis
Some of the oldest "arguments to avoid" are ones based purely on the number of edits (usually as deteremined by looking at an edit counter). While it might seem at first that a lot of edits means someone really knows their Misplaced Pages, 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 based 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 Misplaced Pages 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 their number or distribution.
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